Jeffrey Zide
Honors English 313
October 14, 2009
Response Paper: Street Car Named Desire and Its Relation to Rules of Attraction
Although The Rules of Attractions and A Street Car Named Desire are two separate animals they do share many similar themes. One of the major themes throughout these two texts is the characters’ attempt to fill voids in their souls with objects and quasi-romantic relationships from a far which seek to satisfy their psychological need for satisfaction. To this point let us start out with the main points from The Rules of Attraction.
In rules of attraction upper-middle class students at a small liberal arts college pleasure themselves by getting drunk half the time and having sex and drugs during the other half all while having no plans for their future or morals for that matter. Paul, Sean and Lauren all fanaticize about a person that they think they love when in fact they are an object of their imagination to fulfill their need for self-satisfaction. Similarly, when they get to hooking up with them they find that the objects of their fantasies are human and have some major character flaws and they move on as if these people never really mattered but to themselves as a way to protect themselves from real relationships with people that might not satisfy them. These voids in Paul, Lauren and Sean’s life comes from having everything and never having to struggle during the height of the era of deregulation. They have everything they need but yet they are unsatisfied because they conform to society needs to categorize happiness into a consumption of material wealth while deemphasizing mutual relationships with people as unimportant compared to the fulfillment of self-satisfaction that comes when consumption is equated with a need to fulfill one’s needs.
In A Street Car Named Desire, Blanche Dubois moves in with her sister Stella as she goes through a crisis her life when her need for affluence and relationships with her students is taken away after she is kicked out of the school she taught at because of a sexual affair with one of her male students. Her character is defined her inner turmoil caused by living a life of excess and conspicuous consumption and her fantasies of relationships with men half her age. Her narcissism is evident in her neurosis and her need to be spoiled with wealth and affection by men half her age.
To begin with, The Rules of Attractions characters’ have an excess of everything yet have empty souls full of voids which they fill with partying, drugs and alcohol, and fantasizing about relationships. In the very beginning of the book, Lauren is drunk and gets raped, yet does nothing about. “Her bra was still on. And she said to no one, though she wanted to say it to Daniel Miller, “I always knew it would be like this.””(Pg. 16) This exemplifies that although she fantasizes about Daniel Miller she really does not love him but uses him as a fantasizing tool to fill her void while she gets drunk at a party and just lets other people have sex with her and rape her and she accepts it. Similarly, on page 18 Sean thinks this: “I’m not into her all that much, but the hot looking left with Mitchell and I don’t have any classes tomorrow and it’s late and it looks like the keg’s running out and asks, “What’s going on?” and I’m thinking Why Not?” The capital letters of those last two words some up the attitudes of these main characters which is they will do anything because they can and the treat everything as if it is an object. As for fantasizing on page 23, Lauren is obsessed with Victor: “Why don’t U tell him that my boyfriend, the person I love, the person I miss, the person who is misses me, is in Europe and that I should not any under any circumstances be doing this.”(23) It is clear that on the very next page Victor practically does not know who Lauren is as she receives no message throughout his entire passage. Yet she is having sex with someone else. “It feels good but I’m not turned on. I just think about Victor and lay there.”(24) The confusion and voids in their lives is clear evident buy these behaviors and images they build up seem to objectify the person they “love”. Similarly, this is highlighted by Blanche and Stanley in a Street Car Named Desire.
Blanche in A Street Car Named Desire cannot believe that Stella and Stanley live in a two room flat. On page 6 after a character called Eunice says: “You don’t have to look no further” Blanche’s name appears in the script with the words in uncomprehendingly in brackets and she says: “I’m looking for my sister, Stella Dubois, I mean- Mrs. Stanley Kowalski.” This seems to show that she cannot accept that her sister has little money and is no longer her younger sister who she thinks she knows. She builds up an image that reflects her values on money and when she sees that her sister lives in a Two Room flat in
It is clear that throughout many different texts including Street Car Named Desire and Rules of Attraction that people are treated as objects while objects are personified. Jean Baudriallard text gives a context to why these hedonistic values of consumption have replaced morality and have permeated society for a very long time. Throughout these two texts the characters do not compete for goods but rather self-actualize themselves as consumers in which they fill these voids in unanimous consumption of objects as well as people. Baudrillard speaks to this on page 409 when he says in his book: “The ultimate goal of consumption… is the functionalization of the consumer and the psychological monopolization of all needs, a unanimity in consumption which at last would harmoniously conform to the complete consolidation and control of production.” This speaks to Blanche Dubois and Lauren Hyde in both Rules of Attraction and Streetcar Named Desire fantasizing about both money and people as if both were objects that were perfected and actualized in their imagination. This is obvious when Blanche cannot believe that her sister Stella and Stanley Kowalski live in a two-room flat and insists that she has to move away because they are by no means rich. She cannot understand people living modestly. Similarly, Lauren in Rules of Attraction fantasizes about Victor while she has sex with other men, drinks and takes drugs as if all of them were equal objects that were personified as people. This leads to a very distant relationship with others and a detached sense of self or relation to the outside world. Within the society of middle class America in both Rules of Attraction and Street Car Named Desire there is an expectation given by the consumer society of Post World War II and the Regan 80’s to buy things to satisfy all needs as one. Both Blanche Dubois and the characters in Rules of Attraction accept this access of affluence and when it is taken away it becomes their end of the world. Their lives are a mess because of the moral vacuums which they take as a reason to fulfill their psychological needs with personal relationships with objects and objectifying relationships with people.
In conclusion, morality in middle class society is replaced with a bombardment of advertisement that causes people to equate objects with people and people as a means to gain self-satisfaction and no longer as someone who has feelings and a soul in which they would like to share. When the language of consumption is defined in all these texts it is clear that consumer society and affluence has a huge effect on the behavior of people and shows the hypocrisy of morality in that in reality all that society enforces is a capitalism idealism that reinforces a belief that everything is a system of objects to be consumed for self-satisfaction as a manner of true success.
Works Cited
Williams,
Ellis, Bret Easton. The Rules Of Attraction.
Baudrillard, Jean. The System of Objects. N/A: N/A, N/A.
