Response Paper

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 New Orleans, it seems she cannot believe her eyes. All throughout the next few pages when Stella comes home she berates her about the fact that she lives modestly: “What are you doing in a place like this?” is on of the lines she first says to Stella thinking she owns or posses her sister. She could not accept any thing other than Rich. Similarly, she looks down on Mitch and uses him as her fantasy for men as she as a thing for younger men. A character named young man comes along to sell things to Blanche and exclaims as he is in the middle of leaving: “Well…..I want to kiss you, just once, softly and sweetly on your mouth!”(99) In the brackets rite after these lines it says she does not wait for the boy and crosses to kiss him. The next passage she says: “Now run along…..It would be nice to keep you, but I’ve got to be good and keep my hands off children”. Then at the bottom of page 99 as Mitch appears, Blanche says this: “Look who’s coming! My Rosenkavalier! Bow to me first… now present them! Ahhh-Merci.” This scene shows how Blanche uses both the boy and Mitch to fill her obsession with lust for boys and shows she does not love Mitch but likes to be spoiled. She views love very narcissistically. Throughout these scenes in both books, it is obvious that these characters treat other people as a system of objects. For that I will incorporate Jean Baudrillard text: System of Objects.

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, Tennessee. A Street Car Named Desire. New York: New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1980.

Ellis, Bret Easton. The Rules Of Attraction. New York: Vintage Books, 1998.

Baudrillard, Jean. The System of Objects. N/A: N/A, N/A.

Ethnography

Jeffrey Zide

English 313

S. Wexler

Ethnography of the West Valley Regional Branch of the Los Angeles Public Library

Today, September 20, 2009 I went to the West Valley Regional Library. My purpose was to compose ethnography on the behavior, social interactions and the demographics of the population of the library. I would do this my making observations, writing them down and then analyzing these three components to determine the meaning of these small actions.

Observation of the library proved very simple and natural in that it was very easy to observe a multitude of signals of behavior of which can be taken as polite, honest or dishonest behavior, but mostly in fact, behavior is a product of context of peoples’ histories and within the context of the area: the library. First, dealing with the demographics the library had people off all races. However, there were considerably more people of college age than adults. Most of the people were of average wealth, though many were poor as a product of the economy. As for social interactions, there were a few and many of these seemed friendly without force. One interesting thing was that most of the librarians were older women though that should not come as a surprise. These interactions tended to make place among the people of college age (twenties plus or minus a few) and people who were younger than that. However, the relationships between the librarians, workers and the library customers seemed to be of the average tension. Many of the people working at the information desk seemed very tired and had a very strained but annoyed tone of voice. Their smiles when greeting library patrons seemed very strained. Many of the women workers had a very pleading tone of voice when saying next person in line and they were very impatient because they would start repeating that line in a more annoyed tone of voice about a second later. However, the front desk was a bit friendlier, if only gradually. This was where many of the friendlier interactions took place. Once I stepped into the library the interactions stopped as everyone knows you have to be quiet in a library. This is where I observed most of the small behaviors that didn’t involve dyadic communication.

Many people coughed and sighed, ironically this seemed only to apply to the older patrons. One older woman had a very persistent cough that would not go away.

As for the most popular items in the library, the computer ranked number one. Many people brought their own lab tops but the most visible excitement (which isn’t much considering the setting) was when people got on the computers. The only people who expressed their excitement with their voices were the young children who were extremely excited about the computer games. In all honesty most people were not reading or checking out books our even their for academic purposes but there were obvious exceptions

As for where I was, I was in the teen section which is the lounge area for the library. There were more non-teens than teens. Many of the older people which was about three compared to two seemed tired and were rubbing there faces or making long sighs. The girl who came up to sit next to me seemed in bliss reading something and looked extremely comfortable in that setting. A couple people moved out but she made absolutely no notice considering I practically knocked over the chair as I was getting out because I’m a total klutz. Many of the people my age were listening to music and seemed generally relaxed. One of the exceptions to the rule of grumpy adults was the man sitting behind me who had no book or anything and seemed very peaceful to do nothing but be at his thoughts.

As for everyone else, some people were studying and a lot people were looking for movies at the library and generally went to the information desk first. Most people my age seemed relax. As for the adults, their facial gestures and hand signs seemed tense and nervous with adults especially parents with their children. But for students and people the age of 25, there was quite a bit of small smiling and small laughs and giggles.

The only people talking on their cell phone was one man who seemed to be a little light on money as his clothes were rather faded and tattered was talking extremely politely to someone who seemed to be yelling at him and a Young women talking loudly and shall I say with colorful language as with tons of gestures was outside the library which goes to show that there are certain rules that apply by context of the area. You don’t curse or yell in libraries. However, for many people, libraries are sanctuaries of silence where they feel at home.

In general, analyzing why people are quiet and polite in library is extremely obvious but some things were a little odd to me like why people of older age seemed less comfortable than people who were younger. The most obvious explanation is that students tend to hang around libraries more often than not because they are quiet place to study. For a lot of students they do all the work in the library and go home after. For this reason many students and young people are comfortable at this library. For many adults, they only go to the library when they have to research for work or they are taking their children to check out books or other types of media. This is obviously because most adults have to work at other jobs and have the busiest schedules of the population of the library (excluding the retired and the elderly). As far as I could tell many of the adults seemed genuinely grumpy with long sighs, ticking noises coming from their mouths, sarcastic smiles and even when watching movies or listening to music, they tended to be in a foul mood. However, as mentioned before the man sitting behind me seemed very content where he was and really wasn’t doing anything which shows a high comfort level. I believe I actually had seen him before at this library. People liked computers is because digital technology as a rule is more exciting than older types of media like books. This is because it is much easier to get enjoyment out of something that gives the world at your fingertips without exerting much effort, as effort to read books whether or not you like them. As said, they were main attraction at the library and most of the people seemed playing computer games or on Facebook or MySpace. However, there were notable exceptions with people who were researching on the computer and the girl next to me who seemed perfectly happy to read her book. The library workers were tired simply because they had been working since the library had been open and the library was to close in one hour because it was 2’o clock and the library closes at three on Sundays. The explanation for the librarians being older women is that simply tradition that has how ii always has been.) I have never seen many male librarians mainly because society reading and learning as a feminine thing especially during football season and unfortunately that is a fact of life that I don’t think will change. The men were in general not reading, they were all on the computer, playing games or watching presentations or what have you. However, I will note that among the children the young girls tended to hog the computer games. From what I could tell the game did appear to be gender neutral and have bright colors but I always believe that bright colors is something children like as a rule and not a gender thing but I could be wrong about that. The workers tone of voice strained was obvious in that they were tired but were trying to avoid being rude and be friendly despite their discomfort so that the library patrons will have a good experience and will keep coming back.. For a final note, the person who was talking the loudest with tons of hand gestures was outside because she did not have to be constrained by the rules of the library. Similarly, the person man in tattered clothing was in the lobby. To be sure context is everything whether the place or the circumstances.

In conclusion, the library was pretty calm with only a little a bit tension etched on the faces of the patrons. This was all just a product of context of different peoples’ lives and situations. There were some people who were itching to get out, but in general most people were content with the quiet and were enjoying their book or movie in quiet. Most of us, especially young college students live such loud and hectic lives with people constantly jabbering one with us taking part, and with the invention of the internet it is much easier to make clear what we all feel and sometimes that can be a bad thing and just like the need to vent, humans just need a little piece and quiet to get away from it all and curl up with a good book.

Hi. My name is Jeffrey Zide. I'm posting a blog because required to for my Honors English/Pop Culture class at Cal State University Northridge. I'm kinda nervous because I've never blogged about anything in my life. I have a lot of strong feelings about a lot of things but I've always found the blog wars as I call them(especially Politics) like Sarah Palin vs. the world to be kind of lame. However, since this is a new topic to me I have a fresh start and don't have to clear any lurking secrets. I hope you have fun and I hope I have fun to.