Monday, January 27, 2014

Streetcar Named Desire

A Streetcar Named Desire

Type of Work and First Performance: A Streetcar Named Desire is a stage play with elements of tragedy and pathos. After tryout productions performed in Boston, Philadelphia, and New Haven, Conn., the play opened at the Ethel Barrymore Theater in New York City on December 3, 1947, and closed on December 17, 1949, after 855 performances.

Setting:The action takes place between May and September in a shabby apartment building in the working-class district of New Orleans in the 1940s, shortly after the Second World War. The protagonist, Blanche Dubois, comes to New Orleans from Laurel, Miss., the site of the family homestead. Although no scenes are set in Laurel, the effect of the town and its Old South culture on DuBois is important.

Laurel is a real town in southeastern Mississippi. It has a present population of about 18,000 and is the seat of Jones County. Laurel, which was named after the laurel shrubs growing abundantly in nearby forests, prospered early in the 20th Century as a lumbering center. Tennessee Williams, the author of A Streetcar Named Desire, was born in eastern Mississippi in the town of Columbus and was well aware of Mississippi customs and traditions.

Characters

Blanche DuBois: Neurotic central character from Laurel, Mississippi, who travels to New Orleans to visit her sister and her husband. She lives in a fantasy world of Old South chivalry but cannot control her carnal desires.

Stella Kowalski: Blanche’s down-to-earth sister who seems satisfied with her life as the wife of a New Orleans factory worker.

Stanley Kowalski: Stella’s churlish and outspoken husband and the bane of Blanche’s existence.

Mitch: Harold Mitchell, Stanley's poker partner and best friend. He woos Blanche until he finds out about her seamy past.

Eunice Hubbell: Stanley and Blanche’s upstairs neighbor and landlady.

Steve Hubbell: Poker partner of Stanley and husband of Eunice.

Pablo Gonzales: Hispanic Poker partner of Stanley.

Allen Grey: Deceased husband of Blanche. His homosexual affair and suicide deeply scarred Blanche.

Teenage Newsboy: Collector for The Evening Star newspaper.

Negro Woman

Mexican Woman

Shep Huntleigh: Imaginary beau of Blanche.

Doctor, Matron: Physician and nurse from a mental hospital.

Background: A Streetcar Named Desire centers on a desolated woman named Blanche DuBois. Reared in Old South aristocratic traditions, she lived elegantly in the family homestead, married a man she adored, and pursued a career as an English teacher. But her life fell apart when she discovered that her husband, Allen Grey, was having a homosexual affair. Disgraced, he killed himself. Blanche sought comfort in the arms of other men, many men. After she had relations with one of her students, a 17-year-old, authorities learned of the encounter and fired her. Meanwhile, relatives died and she could not keep up the family home. Eventually, creditors seized it. The play begins when Blanche arrives in New Orleans to stay with her sister, Stella, and her crude, outspoken husband, Stanley Kowalski. Though scarred by her past, Blanche still tries to lead the life of an elegant lady and does her best, even lying when necessary, to keep up appearances.

It is just after dusk in New Orleans on an evening early in May after World War II. In front of a shabby apartment building on a street named Elysian Fields, a white and a black woman are sitting on the steps while piano music plays in a nearby tavern. The white woman, Eunice, lives in the building’s upstairs apartment. The black woman lives nearby. Two white men in work clothes—Stanley Kowalski and his friend Mitch, both no more than 30—round the corner.

Stanley and his wife, Stella, about 25, occupy the first-floor apartment. After Stanley shouts for her, she steps out on the landing and he throws her a package of meat. He and Mitch then reverse direction to go bowling at an alley around the corner. Stella decides to follow and watch them.

A moment later, Stella’s sister, Blanche DuBois, rounds the corner with a valise after arriving from Laurel, Mississippi. She checks an address on a slip of paper, then looks in disbelief at the apartment building. Could Stella really live in such a run-down dwelling? Blanche, about 30, is elegantly attractive but somewhat fragile and vulnerable. In her white suit, complemented by pearl earrings and white gloves, she is out of place in this working-class neighborhood. When Eunice asks whether she is lost, Blanche says, “They told me to take a street-car named Desire, and then transfer to one called Cemeteries and ride six blocks and get off at—Elysian Fields.” Eunice confirms that Blanche has come to the right street and right address, 632. The black woman goes to the bowling alley to fetch Stella.

After the sisters reunite and exchange pleasantries, Blanche looks for liquor and finds it, and Stella does the pouring because Blanche is shaking. Blanche assures her sister that she is not a drunkard but “just all shaken up and hot and tired and dirty.”

Blanche says she is on leave from her job teaching English at a high school in Laurel. In fact, she was fired for promiscuous behavior with a teenager. Pretentiously aristocratic, Blanche bemoans her sister’s plebeian surroundings. The apartment is run-down and spare, with only a kitchen and a bedroom—separated by a curtain—and a small bathroom. Blanche fishes for compliments about her appearance, asks for another drink, and wonders whether it will be proper for her to stay in such close quarters with Stella’s husband roaming about. Stella tells her that everything will be fine, although she cautions Blanche that Stanley’s friends are common and unrefined.

Blanche then informs Stella that creditors back in Laurel have seized their family homestead, Belle Reve, even though Blanche “fought for it, bled for it, almost died for it.” She scolds Stella for not staying behind in Mississippi to help manage the property.

“You just came home in time for funerals, Stella,” she says.

The upshot is that Stella will never inherit a single cent from her share in the property, because there is no property. After Stanley arrives home and hears the news, he demands evidence of the property loss. He is crude and mouthy, not at all afraid to speak his mind, and suspicious. Blanche allows him to see the appropriate legal documents, which she has brought with her, that confirm the loss. Stanley says he will have a lawyer examine the papers, adding, “You see . . . a man has to take an interest in his wife’s affairs—especially now that she’s going to have a baby.” It is the first time Stella has heard of her sister’s pregnancy, and she congratulates Stella.

Stanley’s friends—Mitch, Steve, and Pablo—arrive for a poker game on the kitchen table. Hours later, at 2:30 in the morning, while the boys are still playing cards, Stella introduces Blanche to Mitch—Harold Mitchell—who works in the spare-parts department at the plant employing Stanley. Blanche seems interested in Mitch. Unmarried, he lives with and watches over his ailing mother. After he asks Stanley to deal him out, he talks with Blanche. She tells him that she’s younger than Stella (although she’s five years older) and that she is in New Orleans to look after Stella—“She hasn’t been well, lately”—even though she is there because she has nowhere else to go. She also says she is an old maid schoolteacher (although she was married once to a homosexual who committed suicide), and that she teaches high school English (although she was forced out of her job for having an affair with a student).

When Blanche plays a radio and dances suggestively, Mitch imitates her movements. Irritated by the noise, Stanley—now full of drink—throws the radio out the window. Stella scolds him and Stanley moves menacingly toward her. She runs. He follows and strikes her. After the other men restrain Stanley, Mitch says, “Poker should not be played in a house with women.” Stella goes upstairs with Blanche to Eunice’s.

After the card game, Stanley enters the hallway and calls upstairs repeatedly for “my baby.” Eventually, Stella comes down and they embrace tenderly on the steps, and Stanley carries her to bed. When Blanche later comes downstairs, she glances in at Stanley and Stella in carnal passion and runs outside. Mitch materializes from around the corner, and he and Blanche have a cigarette, sit down, and talk. Romance blossoms.

The next day, while Stanley is out getting the car greased, Blanche tells Stella that she’s married to a “madman” and urges her to abandon Stanley. Stella, however, shrugs off Stanley’s violent behavior of the night before and assures Blanche that he is really gentle and loving. Blanche says she “trembles” for Stella. A train rumbles by while the sisters continue their conversation in the bedroom. Stanley returns, unheard and unseen by the sisters, and overhears Blanche criticizing him: “He acts like an animal, has an animal’s habits. Eats like one, moves like one, talks like one!”

Over the next several months, Stanley and Blanche become mortal enemies, and Stanley dedicates himself to her destruction while she keeps company with Mitch. Opening up to Mitch, she tells him about her deceased husband, Allen Grey, who killed himself after she found out he was a homosexual and told him he disgusted her while they were out dancing a polka called the Varsouviana. Meanwhile, Stanley probes Blanche’s past and gets “the dope” on her from a supply man at his plant who regularly travels through Laurel and stays at the Flamingo Hotel there. He has told Stanley that Blanche carried on affairs with many men while living at the Flamingo, a second-rate hotel, and was evicted because of her promiscuous behavior.

“Did you know,” he says to Stella, “that there was an army camp near Laurel and your sister’s was one of the places called ‘Out-of-Bounds’?”

While Stanley is laying out the dirty details, Blanche is bathing in the bathroom, singing the lyrics of "Paper Moon": "It's only a paper moon, Just as phony as it can be— / But it wouldn't be make-believe If you believe in me."

Stanley also tells Stella that Blanche is not on a “leave of absence” from her teaching job but was “kicked out” of the high school before the end of the spring semester as the result of an affair with a 17-year-old. Stella says she doesn’t believe the stories but admits that Blanche did “cause sorrow” at home and was always “flighty.” While defending her sister, Stella says Blanche suffered a devastating blow when she was young and married to a young man (Allen Grey) who wrote poetry. She worshipped him but found out he was a “degenerate.”

While talking, Stella pokes candles into a cake, saying it is Blanche's birthday and Mitch has been invited. However, Stanley says Mitch won’t be attending. It seems Stanley has revealed the truth about Blanche to Mitch and, Stanley says, Mitch has “wised up.”

“He’s not going to jump in a tank with a school of sharks,” Stanley says.

Later, Stanley gives Blanche a birthday gift: a bus ticket back to Laurel. His behaviour upsets Blanche. Suddenly ill, she retreats to the bathroom. While Stella rebukes Stanley for his cruelty, she goes into labour pains, and Stanley takes her to a hospital.

Hours pass. Blanche drinks and packs her clothes. In the giddiness of her drunken state, she dresses in a white evening gown, a pair of silver slippers, and a rhinestone tiara. While she is in the bedroom admiring her-self, Stanley returns after stopping at a bar for a few drinks and two quarts of beer. He tells Blanche that Stella is still in labour and that the baby will not come until morning. Stanley removes his shirt and opens a quart of beer, then enters the bedroom to remove pajamas from a bureau drawer. He asks Blanche why she is wearing “those fine feathers.” She fabricates a story, saying she has received a telegram from an old beau, Shep Huntleigh, inviting her on a Caribbean cruise. She says Huntleigh is a millionaire who lives in Dallas, “where gold spouts from the ground.”

“Well, it’s a red-letter night for us both,” Stanley says. “You having an oil-millionaire and me having a baby.”

After Stanley returns to the kitchen, Blanche tells him that Huntleigh respects her and that she, as an intelligent and cultivated woman, has much to offer him. Then she insults Stanley, saying, “I have been foolish—casting my pearls before swine. . . . I’m thinking not only of you but of your friend, Mr. Mitchell [who] came back [and] implored my forgiveness.” But, she says, she bid farewell to him.

Stanley asks, “Was this before or after the telegram came from the Texas oil millionaire?”

“What telegram?”

Her response gives her away. Stanley says was she lying not only about the Caribbean cruise but also about Mitch’s return visit because “I know where he is.” Then he says, “Take a look at yourself in that worn-out Mardi Gras outfit, rented for fifty cents from some rag-picker. And with that crazy crown on! What queen do you think you are?” He answers his own question, saying, “The queen of the Nile! Sitting on your throne and swilling down my liquor!”

Stanley reenters the bedroom and goes into the bathroom. Frightened, Blanche picks up the phone receiver and requests the number of “Shep Huntleigh of Dallas,” who she says is so well known that she need not provide the operator an address. Moments later, she cancels the call and asks for Western Union to send a message that she is in “desperate circumstances.” Stanley emerges from the bathroom in his pajamas. He leers at her. She smashes the top of a bottle and threatens him with the jagged edge. He subdues and rapes her.

Weeks later, Stella packs Blanche’s belongings while Stanley plays poker with Mitch, Steve, and Pablo. Eunice comes down and asks about Blanche, who is bathing. Blanche is now deeply disturbed—in fact, insane. Stella answers that she told Blanche arrangements were made for her to rest in the country. Stella also says, “I couldn’t believe her story [about the rape] and go on living with Stanley.”

When a doctor and a matron (nurse) arrive for Blanche, Blanche struggles against them. Stella says, “Oh, God, what have I done to my sister?” Stanley soothes Stella as the doctor and matron take custody of Blanche for treatment in an institution. The poker game continues as Steve says, “This game is seven-card stud.”

Sunday, January 26, 2014

Realism in Drama

REALISM -- THE FIRST PHASE

The theoretical, technological, and social changes that affected the nineteenth-century theatre led to an unprecedented outpouring of dramatic creativity across the continent of Europe. Henrik Ibsen, generally considered the first modern playwright, wrote in Norwegian; August Strindberg, Ibsen's rival and contemporary, wrote in Swedish. Anton Chekhov, perhaps the most influential of early modern playwrights, wrote in Russian. Despite the linguistic and cultural diversity of this disparate group of writers, in the aggregate they forged a new theatrical world.

The Father of the Modern Drama: Henrik Ibsen

Henrik Ibsen was born in Norway in 1828. During his early childhood, his family lived well, but when he was eight years old, his father was disgraced in a business scandal and went bankrupt. Embittered by their loss of status, the young Ibsen felt estranged from his distraught parents and isolated himself. By the time he reached the age of twenty, he left home, never to return. As a child, Ibsen withdrew from these domestic tensions by playing with his toy theatre; thus the theatre may first have attracted him because it offered an escape from "real life." Yet his mature work may be read as an effort to come to terms with reality, the reality of his early life and the reality of society as a whole.

When the adult Ibsen began to write, his first performed play won him a contract to write for the theatre company of Bergen, a Norwegian town. Before beginning this job, however, he was sent abroad to Denmark and Germany, to gain some practical theatrical experience. In the l850s and '60s, he was responsible for producing plays, many of them by the popular French playwright Eugène Scribe, for several provincial Norwegian companies. Since these well-made plays of modern life seemed shallow, Ibsen persisted in writing historical and romantic verse drama,(1) thinking that only such heroic subjects would allow him to address serious subjects. However, the work that made his name demonstrates that he had absorbed thoroughly the technical methods of the Boulevard drama he deplored.

Ibsen is perhaps best known for eight plays he wrote in Italy and Germany between 1877 and 1890. By separating himself physically from his homeland, he gained the freedom and perspective to criticize it. Dissatisfied with the heroic and mythic poetic dramas he had been writing, Ibsen embarked on a series of realistic prose plays exposing contemporary problems in contemporary Norwegian settings. Concentrating directly on bourgeois Norwegian society, he nevertheless addressed universal concerns, for the social problems that provide the context for these plays -- among them the question of women's rights in A Doll House (1879), hereditary syphilis inGhosts (1881), and municipal corruption in An Enemy of the People (1882) -- were instantly recognizable to audiences throughout Western Europe and America.

Realism in the Modern Theatre

The early modern dramatists, including Strindberg, Chekhov, and George Bernard Shaw, knew Ibsen's work intimately and acknowledged its significance in their own development. One of the great practitioners of psychological realism, the American-born novelist Henry James, commented on the first London production of Hedda Gabler in 1891, scarcely one year after its original Norwegian production. James explains the power of Ibsen's theatrical realism by pointing out that "the ugly interior on which his curtain inexorably rises" provides a visual equivalent of "the pervasive air of small interests and standards, the signs of limited local life." (2) In Ibsen's realistic drama, detailed and specific props and scenery were not devices to sweep the audience away to exotic foreign locations or distant historical eras; instead, they encouraged viewers to contemplate the petty possessions, the furniture and bric-a-brac, which an acquisitive middle class accumulated in order to stake its claim in the modern world.

Ibsen's realistic plays take place in three-dimensional rooms, rather than against flat painted or architectural backdrops. What James (whose own practice as a novelist in some ways resembled Ibsen's in drama) and others perceived was how Ibsen manipulated this realistic stagecraft to create a new species of poetic symbolism. The French plays that Ibsen studied in his apprenticeship used decor as window dressing; in the intricately written stage directions of Ibsen's texts, however, decor becomes symbol. When a second-act curtain rises on an altered stage picture -- a piano has been removed in Hedda Gabler, for example, and a Christmas tree stripped of its ornaments in A Doll House -- the audience must read the significance of such alterations, for the Heddas and the Noras of the modern world reveal through their belongings the motives and passions which they have been taught to repress in their speech and actions. The genius of realism, in the novel as well as on the stage, is not merely to mirror faithfully the "real world," but also to demand that we scrutinize and judge the details that we often ignore because of their surface familiarity.

The great plays of the past tend toward generalized settings, although the psychological implications of place were not unimportant. In a Shakespearean play, for instance, a change in scene often reflects a change in mood; the forest typically creates a special mental freedom that is not available in the court. But Ibsen and his colleagues rarely set their characters free in any undefined territory. On the contrary, their modern insight told them that human beings are never free. Indeed, it is significant that most early modern drama is played out in domestic sets. The smaller size to which the modern world seems to reduce its inhabitants dictates that crucial actions occur in enclosed architectural limits. In Strindberg's Preface to Miss Julie, written in 1888, he complained of flimsy old-fashioned canvas-painted sets still in use that prevented audience involvement. A one-act play of searing intensity, daringly staged not in the drawing room but the kitchen of an aristocratic home, Miss Julie demanded authentic production. Strindberg insisted that "there is nothing so hard to find on the stage as an interior set that comes close to looking as a room should look. . . . There are so many other conventions on the stage that strain our imagination; certainly we might be freed from overexerting ourselves in an effort to believe that pots and pans painted on the scenery are real."(3)

Yet modern dramatists knew that realism in the theatre transcends set design and involves more than real pots and pans. Ibsen's mid-career decision to abandon poetry for prose signals his conviction that the key to characterization lay in authentic speech. By replacing brilliant soliloquies with the conversational rhythms of everyday expression, Ibsen began to write in a way that audiences accept as "true to life." Although dramatic dialogue is always artificial, nevertheless, every important playwright and every theatrical era must find a strategy for tailoring that artifice to seem as real as possible. Early modern drama, it should be remembered, was written while Sigmund Freud was developing a psychoanalytic treatment that asked patients to speak in their own everyday voices until unwittingly they revealed their unconscious feelings. Ibsen and his contemporaries exploited a similar insight. They created dramatic characters whose routine-sounding dialogue divulged the truth about themselves as surely as and more "realistically" than an explicitly self-revealing soliloquy. Every hesitation, every slip of the tongue, every euphemism, for Ibsen and for Chekhov, as for Freud, has profound meaning. Moreover, the modern writer saw that the prose of daily life can be as shrewdly manipulated as the verse of Aeschylus or Shakespeare to yield a consistent structure of imagery. In A Doll House, for example, every apparently random reference to an audit contributes to a tightly structured plot and builds a convincing poetry from the commonplace. If where we choose to place a desk in a sitting room may betray our unconscious desires, how much more may the words we choose reveal about our character.

Thus ordinary speech and mundane settings, originally manipulated by the likes of Scribe and Sardou to serve a facile melodrama, provide realistic instruments to probe psychological and social truths in the work of the early modern dramatists.

Similarly, the underlying structure of "Sardoodledom," as George Bernard Shaw called the well-made play, was transformed by Ibsen into an almost Sophoclean device. As Oedipus interviews messengers who possess pieces of an old puzzle that he painstakingly fits together, so the hidden secrets of Ibsen's realistic drama gradually come to light through coincidences, lost letters found, and old love affairs unveiled.

All of these devices, finally, rest on a belief that the past predetermines the present. In the late nineteenth century, as narrative artists already had, dramatists trained the lens of realism on human behavior, viewing it under the influence of the materialist legacies of Darwin and of Marx as the sum of genetic and financial inheritances. Most important, perhaps, the early modern drama provides intellectual satisfaction, as does Freudian analysis, by promising that once the crucial genetic, financial, and emotional clues are unearthed, the process of understanding human experience can begin.

Modern Drama after Ibsen: Shaw, Strindberg, and Chekhov

Oddly enough, the biographical circumstances of all these early modern dramatists inclined them to criticize and challenge society. The plots of Ibsen's best known plays revolve around buried shame that must be uncovered to release the true self. It may be more than coincidental that Ibsen struggled to separate himself from his own parents' shame. Not only Ibsen, but also Strindberg, Chekhov, and Shaw in early childhood experienced the humiliation of watching their fathers sink into financial failure. Ibsen and Shaw wanted so much to distance themselves from paternal disgrace that each entertained fantasies of illegitimacy, refusing to believe themselves the sons of their nominal fathers. Perhaps we may fairly conclude that their childhood disillusion with authority contributed to the force of the dramas they publicly displayed when they became adults, exposés of collapsing social structures undermined by false pretense.

Shaw, Strindberg, and Chekhov each found a different dramatic model potential in the realistic mode evolved by Ibsen. Of the three, the Irish-born George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) most fully acknowledged his debt to Ibsen. The author of one of the earliest appreciations of Ibsen, The Quintessence of Ibsenism (1891), Shaw believed that Ibsen fundamentally had transformed the theatrical formula drawn from the French Boulevard plays by incorporating a new intellectual vigor in them. "Now the serious playwright recognizes in the discussion . . . the real centre of his play's interest," Shaw observed. Shaw's own witty plays explore the possibilities ofdiscussion, as he calls it, and today seem a bit dated because the social problems that he attacked often have less significance for us than for his own audience.

For August Strindberg (1849-1912), the social questions raised in plays like A Doll House were only of superficial interest. A neurotic and troubled person, Strindberg responded more to the emotional tangles in which Ibsen's characters struggle, and in his own drama, probed the disfigurations of family life even more scathingly than did the man he regarded as his rival. In his domestic plots, a category that includes Miss Julie and The Dance of Death (1901), the thrice-married Strindberg, son of a debased aristocrat and a servant woman, showed men and women trapped in cruel and all-consuming sexual relationships. These plays, more naturalistic than realistic in their depiction of the unrelenting pressure of heredity and physical impulse, leave little room for the possibility of remaking the self to which Ibsen's characters at least could aspire. In other works, like A Dream Play (1902) and The Road To Damascus (1898, 1904), Strindberg experimented with a phantasmagoric style that may have influenced Ibsen in his final, less realistic plays, a style that pointed to the theatrical expressionism that the next generation of modern dramatists was to explore.

Despite his early death, Anton Chekhov (1860-1904) left a major body of short stories and plays, and in both forms continued to examine the minutiae of everyday experience. Less schooled than Ibsen in the conventions of nineteenth-century French theatre and less morbid than Strindberg, Chekhov used realism more delicately than they did. The characters in his four great plays -- The Seagull (1896), Uncle Vanya (1897), The Three Sisters (1900), and The Cherry Orchard (1904) -- rarely experience definitive revelations of truth. However dreadful the events encompassed in his plays, including lovers separated and families dispossessed, and death by duel and by suicide, Chekhov maintains so fine an emotional balance that his characters are simultaneously tragic and comic, pathetic and ridiculous.

In a way, Chekhov's achievement brought the early modern drama to an impasse. Like Ibsen, Shaw, and Strindberg, he identified a series of social and personal problems that defined a seemingly worldwide collapse of central authority as the twentieth century evolved. His work, however, proposes neither a rationale nor a resolution for that collapse. In fact, the short stories and plays of Chekhov convince us that, no matter how intimately we may probe character, the human condition remains mysterious. To that sense of mystery, lovingly and realistically examined yet unexplained, only one word can be assigned: "Chekhovian."

The Stage Director Par Excellence--Stanislavsky

Chekhov's plays, scrupulously observed depictions of ineffectual lives endured in dreary provincial towns, were produced in extraordinarily detailed sets by one of the most important acting ensembles of modern times, The Moscow Art Theatre. Under the direction of Konstantin Stanislavsky (1863-1938), this group introduced a new acting method(4) that confirmed the real source of energy in nineteenth-century realism. Although Stanislavsky did not stint on stage reproductions of reality, he knew that external realistic portrayal in and of itself lacked value. The true subject of the great realists was the human soul. Convinced that the brilliantly artificial acting styles required by high poetic drama did not fit the differently scaled speeches of unheroic dramatic characters, Stanislavsky resolved to re-train his company. Stanislavsky-influenced rehearsals require that cast members focus on emotional exercises designed to arouse within them personal feelings that replicate the characters'. The goal of theatre was no longer, as Aristotle had described it long ago, to imitate an action but literally to enact it. Ultimately, the development of theatre in the twentieth century reveals that in the very success of Stanislavsky's method lay the seeds of its rejection. As with every art form, once theatrical realism totally fulfilled its mission, the genre began to seem obsolete, and gradually gave way to a new phase of modern theatre.

Footnotes

(1) Notable among Ibsen's early poetic dramas are Brand (1865) and Peer Gynt (1867), and almost cinematic fantasy very highly regarded today, proved difficult to stage when new. Dissatisfied, Ibsen gave up this mode of playwriting as a dead end; in his final plays, however, he muted the realistic detail of his middle style n favor of more overtly symbolic textures.

(2) "On the Occasion of Hedda Gabler (1891)," The Scenic Art: Notes on Acting and the Drama: 1872-1901 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1948), p. 249.

(3) Trans. Arvid Paulson, Seven Plays by August Strindberg (New York: Bantam Books, 1960), p.73.

(4) In the United States, a "method actor" owes some debt to this Stanislavskian creed.

Reference:

http://www.baruch.cuny.edu/library/alumni/online_exhibits/digital/2000/c_n_c/c_09_modern_drama/realism_txt.htm

Paper 2 Rubric

RUBRIC PAPER 2 EXAM Groups of Works ASSESSMENT and Marking Scheme

PAPER 2 EXAM HL Death of a Salesman Streetcar Named Desire (Hamlet) PLUS 2 MORE PLAYS

Paper 2 EXAM SL Death of a Salesman (Streetcar Named Desire and Hamlet)

Total possible marks for assignment: 25

Criterion A: Knowledge and understanding

Total possible marks: 5

Criterion B: Response to the question

Total possible marks: 5

Criterion C: Appreciation of the literary conventions of the genre

Total possible marks: 5

Criterion D: Organization and development

Total possible marks: 5

Criterion E: Language

Total possible marks: 5
Exam Paper 2: Essay
The Exam Paper 2: Essay is worth 25% of the IB mark.

The essay is a comparative essay based on two or more works studied in part 3 of the course.
The essay is written under examination conditions and is externally assessed by the IB.

Goal:
To deliver a coherent and structured comparative essay that evaluates the similarities and differences between two or more works studied in part 3. The essay must focus on how the authors of the works under consideration use the conventions of the selected genre to create meaning.

Assessment:
A combined mark out of 25 to be awarded for the essay, based on five assessment criteria.

Process:
The length of the HL exam is two hours/SL 1is 1/2 hours
Paper 2 contains three essay questions for each literary genre represented on the PLA.
Students need to know the 3/4 plays really well for the final exam to be able to score highly in this paper.

Students answer one essay question only.
Handwriting and presentation is important. It should be at least legible.
Students need to answer the question asked and not bend a pre-prepared essay to the exam question.
Rather you must draw on your study to answer the question on the paper.

Each question directs students to explore the ways in which content is delivered through the conventions of the selected genre.

Students are required to compare and contrast the similarities and differences between at least two of the works studied in part 3 of the course.

Students should explore and discuss the heart of the question.
The essay must go beyond a compare and contrast type question.

It must include an argument about the similarities and differences and some evaluation of their significance.

Friday, January 3, 2014

Death of a Salesman and Death of a Salesman: The Swollen Legacy of Arthur Miller BERT CARDULLO

Death of a Salesman and Death of a Salesman: The Swollen Legacy of Arthur MillerBERT CARDULLO

Introduction: Death in Two Senses

The immense international success of Death of a Salesman comes from the intellectual force of the play’s central idea prevailing over the glaring defects of Arthur Miller’s execution. But the relevance of this central idea, connected with door-to-door salesmen and the Darwinian nature of rampant capitalism, has withered with time and changing technology, and even if it hadn't, Miller still failed to craft a play befitting Salesman's exalted reputation.

While it's impossible to know his psychology enough to be sure, the shape of Salesman's flaws seem to suggest that Miller's artistic trouble stemmed from a divided personal impulse between making his play and his protagonist Jewish, and making them universal or representatively American. But whatever the case, the legacy questions inevitably following the playwright's recent death, make it time to take another look at his vaunted reputation, and pare it down to its rightful size: medium.

Section I: Compliments

Let's begin, however, with some of the reasons why the play continues to occupy the place it does in American drama and our national imagination. The very title Death of a Salesman both declares the significance of a salesman’s death and finds value in its ordinary anonymity. This evocation is amplified by the opening sight of Willy Loman coming in the door. It’s a superb image, an entrance as unforgettable and instantly iconic as Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage and her wagon (another traveling salesman!). The salesman Willy is home. He is “tired to the death,” lugging his two heavy sample cases, after having been rejected by the milk-filled bosom of the nation from which he had expected so much nourishment. The commodity he expected to sell is never identified because Willy is in a sense selling himself. He’s a survivor of the early tradition of drummers in this country: men who viewed not their product but their personality as their chief ware, and still claimed they could sell anything.

Beyond the title and the entrance sequence, Miller’s organizing idea keeps a fitful hold. It’s the idea of the mid-century man, who has sold things without making them and paid for things without owning them. He exists as an insulted extrusion of commercial society battling for some sliver of authenticity before he slips into the great dark. And remarkably, he is battling without a real villain.

To his credit, Miller was one of the first writers to comprehend a seismic change in the American economy of the late 1940s that saw corporations expand into large, confusing bureaucracies. He depicts late capitalism in his play as having become impersonal and hierarchical; instead of class struggle, there is simple anomie.

Section II: Detriments

But to read or see Death of a Salesman again is to perceive how Arthur Miller lacked the control and vision to fulfill his own idea. First, consider the play’s diction. The dialogue often slips away from a true first-generation Brooklyn Jewish and into a fanciness that is slightly ludicrous in context.

For example, to hear older son Biff say, “I’ve been remiss,” or wife Linda say, “You’re too accommodating, dear,” or Willy himself declare that “There’s such an undercurrent in him,” is like watching a car run momentarily off the road and onto the shoulder.

The same goes for Miller’s grammatical use of the nominative and accusative cases, as well as the subjunctive mood. The less-than-educated Lomans incongruously use the subjunctive “were” correctly, and unabashedly utter “I and Biff,” “You and I,” and “Biff and I” as if they were reading out of a school book. If the explanation is the Lomans merely aspire to speak in an educated manner—pretending, in keeping with their essential character, to be more book—learned than they are—Miller could have helped his cause by having his characters make the mistakes that almost all such strivers make, like using “I” when “me” is the grammatically correct form, as in the phrase “between you and me.”

Thematically, too, Death of a Salesman is cloudy. The salesman figure that comes through is not of a typical grunt brought down by financial failure but of an exceptional invalid, in whom the stress of business only increased existing psychological imbalances.

Willy is shown to be at least as much a victim of psychopathy as of the bitch-goddess Success.

Evidence of Willy’s psychopathy is so plentiful that it has led to his being diagnosed as manic-depressive, before the age of mood-leveling drugs, by Ben Brantley of the New York Times in a 1998 review of a Chicago-born, Broadway-bound revival of Death of a Salesman. Willy was subsequently diagnosed as “other-directed”—or possessing a value system entirely determined by external norms—from a sociological point of view by Walter Goodman in a 1999 Timescolumn.

Indeed, Willy’s self-contradictions go beyond normal human inconsistency into the realm of severe internal division. He yells at Biff: “Not finding yourself at the age of thirty-four is a disgrace!” But later adds: “Greatest thing in the world for him was to bum around.”

And again: “Biff is a lazy bum!” says Willy. Then almost immediately thereafter: “And such a hard worker. There’s one thing about Biff—he’s not lazy.”

Willy’s memories of past conversations produce similar inconsistencies. One minute “Chevrolet . . . is the greatest car ever built;” the next, “That goddamn Chevrolet, they ought to prohibit the manufacture of that car.” And, in consecutive sentences, Willy can declare the following without blinking: “I’m very well liked in Hartford. You know, the trouble is, people don’t seem to take to me.”

Naturally, for someone like Willy, the past and the present duel with each other as well as with themselves. For example, he remembers saying that “the man who makes an appearance in the business world, the man who creates personal interest, is the man who gets ahead;” yet he perceives no inconsistency between that statement and this one in the present action of the play: “A man who can’t handle tools is not a man.”

He remembers telling Linda that “[People] seem to laugh at me.” But he can tell his grown sons, “They laugh at me, huh? Go to Filene’s, go to the Hub, go to Slattery’s, Boston. Call out the name Willy Loman and see what happens!” And all of this from a man who has the unwitting nerve to wonder aloud, “Why am I always being contradicted?”

Section III: Psychology and Drama

But putting this mountain of Miller-provided evidence aside, let’s assume for the sake of argument that Willy is not a psychopath. Instead, he was a relatively whole or normal man crushed by the American juggernaut. If we also consider Salesman from that angle, what is it’s attitude toward that juggernaut and its business ideals? Such a question is crucial because there is no anagnorisis for Willy, nothing that suggests the play’s attitude. There is no moment of recognition for him, let alone a great downfall: he dies believing in money.

In fact, he kills himself for money. Because he confuses materialistic success with a worthiness for love, he commits suicide to give his son Biff the insurance benefit as a stake for more business.

Willy’s other son, Happy, is himself wedded to money values and says over his father’s coffin that he’s going to stick to them for his father’s sake. Similarly, Biff was so aggrandized by his father that he became kleptomaniacal as a boy and even now, after his father-as-idol has collapsed, he can’t resist stealing a successful businessman’s fountain pen as a niggling revenge against that man’s success and his own lack of it.

The only alternatives to the business ethos ever produced in Salesman are Willy’s love of tools and seeds, building and planting, and Biff’s love of the outdoor life. Miller confuses thematic matters even further by highlighting the successes of not only Dave Singleman, the gentlemanly eighty-four-year-old salesman who was Willy’s inspiration (and who, according to Willy, died the regal “death of a salesman”), but also of young Bernard next door, a lawyer in the Establishment world with a wife and two sons. Bernard’s is a deserved success for which Willy feels envy, as he does for the success of Bernard’s father, Charley, who is also a good businessman with his own office and secretary.

Charley himself contributes to the confusion in Death of a Salesman. He can be heard endorsing Willy’s view of himself when, during the play’s Requiem, he says to Biff:

You don’t understand: Willy was a salesman. And . . . a salesman . . . don’t put a bolt to a nut, he don’t tell you the law or give you medicine. He’s a man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine. And when they start not smiling back—that’s an earthquake. . . . A salesman is got to dream, boy. It comes with the territory.

However, in an Act II an attempt to puncture Willy’s losing self-image, Charley had said almost the exact opposite to his next-door neighbor:

CHARLEY: . . . The only thing you got in this world is what you can sell. And the funny thing is that you’re a salesman, and you don’t know that.
WILLY: I’ve always tried to think otherwise, I guess. I always felt that if a man was impressive, and well liked, that nothing—
CHARLEY: Why must everybody like you? . . .

What is left in this play is neither a critique of the business world nor an adult vision of something different and better. Rather, it’s the story of a man (granting he was sane) who failed as a salesman and father, and made things worse by refusing to admit those failures, which he knew to be true.

Section IV: Pathos, Tragedy, and Verism

That last sentence in the previous section certainly contains a play, and possibly a good one; but it is a quite a different play from Death of a Salesman, a work that implies in its atmosphere and mannerisms a radical perception of deep American ills.

The difference between Salesman as it is, and as it could have been, is the difference between pedestrian pathos and exalted tragedy. It’s the difference between the destruction of a decent but unknowing man, and a great man, who simultaneously deserves, and does not deserve, his fate.

Ironically, Miller himself understood this distinction. His famous essay, “Tragedy and the Common Man,” published in the New York Times in 1949 was a not-so-veiled argument for the tragic status of Salesman, in which he unwittingly described Willy Loman when he wrote,

Where pathos rules, where pathos is finally derived, a character has fought a battle he could not possibly have won. The pathetic is achieved when the protagonist is, by virtue of his witless- ness, his insensitivity, or the very air he gives off, incapable of grappling with a much superior force.

Miller makes clear by the very title of his Times essay that he considers the common man to be as appropriate a subject for high tragedy as the royal leader. Yet modern writers have found it difficult to create powerful tragedies with workaday salesmen, let alone corporate executives, as protagonists.

There are at least two reasons for this:

First, for an audience to feel the full impact of the fate that the tragic hero brings on himself, the hero must have nearly complete freedom of action. In other words, the more the audience feels that the hero has been able to choose his course of action without restriction, the more emotionally moving his injurious choices.

Second, it is vital that the tragic hero’s actions have some deep moral, spiritual, political, or philosophical significance for the whole of his society. This is why the classic dramatists generally dealt with protagonists whose lives were spent in a public arena—so much so that their every act or decision would have a direct effect on everyone around them.

By contrast, the unique pathos of the salesman lies in the fact that he has neither sufficient freedom of action nor demonstrable public significance. He is one of many just like himself, and unlike classical or neoclassical tragic protagonists, appears to have been conditioned passively and even gladly to accept the very conditions of life that will lead to his own annihilation.This is perhaps sad in the end, but it does not arouse the same kind of feeling as the classic tragedies.

A few additional points about the play, connected more with its verism than with its attempt at tragedy:

When I saw the 1952 film of Death of a Salesman, which made the play’s environment more vivid, I couldn’t help wondering why Willy had money worries. He had almost closed out the mortgage on his house, which to judge by the community development all around it was a piece of real estate in an increasingly valuable and desirable section of town. This is more than a petty literal point in a realistic play whose lexicon is bill-paying.

Finally, a point that is strangely more apparent now than it was likely to have been whenSalesman first appeared in 1949: the drama is set in the late 1940s and reaches back some fifteen years to the early 1930s, yet there is scarcely a mention of the Great Depression—or of World War II? How did the Loman sons escape the war, and if they did, were they criticized or attacked for not serving in the military? If they didn’t escape military service, wouldn’t the reunited brothers have had something to say about it? About the Holocaust? And wouldn’t the postwar economic boom itself have had some effect in the present on Willy’s view of a promise-crammed America, not to speak of the Depression’s effect in the past on Willy’s view of that same America and his decreased earning power in it?

Section V: Flashbacks, Family, Judaism, and Christianity

The flashback structure of Death of a Salesman suggests something ominous about the play’s quality as well, something connected with Miller’s observed division between composing a Jewish domestic drama and writing a representative play on the American experience. Miller seems to have split the play twice: first, structurally, between a climactic frame of the last hours of Willy’s life up, and an episodic form that enacts his past in a series of flashback scenes, and then psychologically, as a provisional equivalent for his own divided consciousness on the subject of a Jewish protagonist versus a Christian one.

With regard to the first cleave, who is to say that Willy’s flashbacks are objectively true, as they are always assumed to be? Might they be the subjective or expressionistic visions of a feverish mind on the verge of collapse, instead of a mere device for explicating past events that the Lomans otherwise do not talk about? After all, this is a kind of memory play, and memory, even in a mentally healthy person, is notoriously fallible as well as selectively creative.

Furthermore, Willy’s flashbacks could be his attempt to remember a pivotal year in his family’s history—1931 or 1932, football star Biff’s senior year of high school, during which he discovers his father’s adulterous relationship with the woman in Boston, and when Willy purportedly turns down a job in Alaska working for his brother Ben—while also fictionalizing portions of his past. How else to explain why only Willy uses Ben’s name or refers to the elder brother’s South African business ventures, and only Willy refers to his boyhood wagon-travels West with his flute-carving father?

With regard to the second cleave, could the character Ben and the wagon-travels be Arthur Miller’s inventive attempt to use Willy as a proxy for himself, Christianizing or universalizing his own past? It seems no coincidence that Miller was a real-life Jew whose three marriages were all to Christian women, and who never took the stance of a public Jewish intellectual during his long career.

In any case, a good portion of the material in Salesman is on Miller’s favorite theme: the love-hate of a father and son. This material alone is still touching to read or watch.

Section VI: Looking Back in Bemusement

But, as in the case of the earlier compliments I paid the play, these are sound moments in a flabby, occasionally false, even schizoid work. Miller had gift enough to get the idea for Death of a Salesman, but then—in the face of his divided dramatic impulse—he settled for the dynamics of the idea itself to write his play. Miller’s ongoing popularity depends on many viewers' and readers' taking the intent for the deed. But some never did, and others have stopped.

Looking ahead, I believe the latter two groups will ultimately prevail in determining the value ofDeath of a Salesman and Miller’s career generally. It won’t be the first time an artist’s reputation has posthumously tanked. Several American playwrights, including Elmer Rice, Robert Sherwood, and Maxwell Anderson, had similarly large followings in the United States and abroad during their lives. Now those legacies are past the point of diminishment.

Miller has the largest international reputation of any American dramatist in our history, with the exception of Eugene O’Neill and Tennessee Williams. But now that he has passed away, and is no longer present to "sell" himself, as it were, the small group of dissenters he had during his lifetime should begin to multiply. In their mind, there have always been two Millers: the great dramatist of popular opinion, and the much lesser, mostly middling one of their personal perspective. (The charter members of this minority, incidentally, were Eric Bentley, Robert Brustein, Richard Gilman, and Stanley Kauffmann.)

So what made for Miller’s undeserved glory in the first place?

Well, in foreign countries his language improves in translation—which, at its best, is a kind of rewriting—and in America his work has an uncanny ability to makes people feel they have undergone daring intellectual and spiritual expeditions when they have stayed cozily at home. In other words, Miller supplies the illusion of depth, endangerment, and enlightenment. He gives his audience a painlessly acquired feeling of superiority for having been present at his plays.

This is not to accuse Miller of cunning. He certainly always did his sincere best. After the Fall(1964) is tainted with a wriggly feeling of self-defense on account of some matters in his private life connected with his marriage to Marilyn Monroe and his appearance before the House Un-American Activities Committee investigating communist infiltration of the arts. But usually the falseness that crops up in his work is of another sort. It’s the peculiar falseness of honest writers who are not talented enough to keep free of contrived or misguided artistic means.

This is so much the case that going back to Salesman, Miller’s most highly regarded work yet a relatively early one in his career, has been for me like going to the funeral of a man you wish you could have liked more. The occasion seals your opinion because you know there is no hope of change. Perhaps now that he is no longer around to sell and guard his own reputation, the “double” Miller will die away and only the mediocrity will remain.

Bert Cardullo is the film critic for The Hudson Review and the author of a number of articles and books on drama, including the forthcoming American Drama/Critics: Writings And Readings. He is spending the academic year 2005-2006 in Istanbul, Turkey, where he is a visiting professor of American studies.

Review of Death of A Salesman

Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman: A Celebration

by Joyce Carol Oates

Originally published in Michigan Quarterly Review, Fall 1998, and reprinted in Where I've Been, And Where I'm Going

“He’s a man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine. And when they start not smiling back—that’s an earthquake. and then you get yourself a couple of spots on your hat, and you’re finished. Nobody dast blame this man. A salesman is got to dream, boy. It comes with the territory.”
—Death of a Salesman

Was it our comforting belief that Willy Loman was “only” a salesman? That Death of a Salesman was about—well, an American salesman? And not about all of us?

When I first read this play at the age of fourteen or fifteen, I may have thought that Willy Loman was sufficiently “other”—”old.” He hardly resembled the men in my family, my father or grandfathers, for he was “in sales” and not a factory worker or small-time farmer, he wasn’t a manual laborer but a man of words, speech—what his son Biff bluntly calls “hot air.” His occupation, for all its adversities, was “white collar,” and his class not the one into which I’d been born; I could not recognize anyone I knew intimately in him, and certainly I could not have recognized myself, nor foreseen a time decades later when it would strike me forcibly that, for all his delusions and intellectual limitations, about which Arthur Miller is unromantically clear-eyed, Willy Loman is all of us. Or, rather, we are Willy Loman, particularly those of us who are writers, poets, dreamers; the yearning soul “way out there in the blue.” Dreaming is required of us, even if our dreams are very possibly self-willed delusions. And we recognize our desperate child’s voice assuring us, like Willy Loman pep-talking himself at the edge of a lighted stage as at the edge of eternity—”God Almighty, [I’ll] be great yet! A star like that, magnificent, can never really fade away!”

Except of course, it can.

* * *

It would have been in the early 1950s that I first read Death of a Salesman, a few years after its Broadway premiere and enormous critical and popular success. I would have read it in an anthology of Best Plays of the Year. As a young teenager I’d begun avidly devouring drama; apart from Shakespeare, no plays were taught in the schools I attended in upstate New York (in the small city of Lockport and the Village of Williamsville, a suburb of Buffalo), and so I read plays with no sense of chronology, in no historic context, no doubt often without much comprehension. Reading late at night when the rest of the household was asleep was an intense activity for me, imbued with mystery, and reading drama was far more enigmatic than reading prose fiction. It seemed to me a challenge that so little was explained in the stage directions; there was no helpful narrative voice; you were obliged to visualize, to “see” the stage in your imagination, the play’s characters always in present tense, vividly alive. In drama, people presented themselves primarily in speech, as they do in life. Yet there was an eerie, dreamlike melding of past and present in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, Willy Loman’s “present-action” dialogue and his conversations with the ghosts of his past like his revered brother Ben; there was a melting of the barriers between inner and outer worlds that gave to the play its disturbing, poetic quality. (Years later I would learn that Arthur Miller had originally conceived of the play as a monodrama with the title The Inside of His Head).

In the intervening years, Willy Loman has become our quintessential American tragic hero, our domestic Lear, spiraling toward suicide as toward an act of selfless grace, his mad scene on the heath a frantic seed-planting episode by flashlight in the midst of which the once-proud, now disintegrating man confesses, “I’ve got nobody to talk to.” His salesmanship, his family relations, his very life—all have been talk, optimistic and inflated sales rhetoric; yet, suddenly, in this powerful scene, Willy Loman realizes he has nobody to talk to; nobody to listen. Perhaps the most memorable single remark in the play is the quiet observation that Willy Loman is “liked . . . but not well-liked.” In America, this is not enough.

* * *

Nearly fifty years after its composition, Death of a Salesman strikes us as the most achingly contemporary of our classic American plays. It has proved to have been a brilliant strategy on the part of the thirty-four-year-old playwright to temper his gifts for social realism with the Expressionistic techniques of experimental drama like Eugene O’Neill’s Strange Interlude and The Hairy Ape, Elmer Rice’s The Adding Machine, Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, work by Chekhov, the later Ibsen, Strindberg, and Pirandello, for by these methods Willy Loman is raised from the parameters of regionalism and ethnic specificity to the level of the more purely, symbolically “American.” Even the claustrophobia of his private familial and sexual obsessions has a universal quality, in the plaintive-poetic language Miller has chosen for him. As we near the twenty-first century, it seems evident that America has become an ever more frantic, self-mesmerized world of salesmanship, image without substance, empty advertising rhetoric, and that peculiar product of our consumer culture “public relations”—a synonym for hypocrisy, deceit, fraud. Where Willy Loman is a salesman, his son Biff is a thief. Yet these are fellow Americans to whom “attention must be paid.” Arthur Miller has written the tragedy that Illuminates the dark side of American success—which is to say, the dark side of us.

Death of a Salesman Gradesaver

http://www.gradesaver.com/death-of-a-salesman/

The Sentry Commentary by Sonali Gil

“The Sentry” by Wilfred Owen (Class Presentation Essay)

Like his other poetry, the central themes explored in Wilfred Owen’s “The Sentry” are those of loss of innocence and disillusionment. The latter is frequently used by Owen as it reflects his own bitter disillusionment with the First World War and marks the departure of his love for Romantic poetry. “The Sentry” was written by Owen when he was recovering from “shell shock” at Craiglockhart Hospital, Edinburgh and is loosely based on an encounter he had with a sentry during his time in the trenches.

The poem is structured into three stanzas; the first describes the external environment, the second explains the encounter with the sentry and the third sees the poet grieving for the sentry while introspecting. Thus it progresses from external to internal conflict. As suggested by its concluding lines “"I see your lights!" But ours had long died out” the poem has an initially grim, dark tone which transforms into one of hopeless despair. A reference is made to loss of hope in the line “ours (light) had long died out”. The poet strives to create a distraught, violent mood which reflects the war going on by using diction such as “shell on frantic shell”, “fumes of whizz-bangs”, “their curse” and “dredged him up”. He specifically uses personifications, which can be considered hyperboles, while describing the conditions inside the trench, the position of his regiment and the way in which he discovers the sentry. One can consider examples such as the phrases “rain, guttering down in waterfalls”, “wild chattering”, “shrieking air” and “deluging muck”.

In the first stanza we are introduced to Owen and his men in “den”, [1]where they have just encountered “an old Bauche”. [2]Interestingly the poet uses a German soldier, who gives his regiment “shell on frantic shell” to introduce the poem which he later juxtaposes with the pathetic condition in which the British sentry is found. This is the first instance in the poem where juxtaposition is used; Owen contrasts weakness and surrender with strength and resistance. Notably this recurs throughout the poem; juxtapositions between dreams and nightmares, hope and despair are made. These can be treated as important psychological aspects of the war, as well as physical. It is important to note that Owen speaks for all soldiers (including the enemy) while referring to “those other wretches” who “left there curse in the den”. This is further indicated by his use of sequential use of pronouns (“us”, “their”, “he”, “I”) which strengthen the progression from external to internal conflict.

An important, unique feature of this poem is the use of slang words. On two occasions Owen uses the word “Bauche” which was WWI British slang referring to the Germans and on one occasion he calls shells “crumps”. Furthermore the sentence structure of the poem is fragmented throughout; perhaps indicative of the “shocked” mental state the poet was in while writing it. The reader is exposed to sentenced like “shell upon frantic shell, Hammered on top, but never quite burst through” where the poet uses the capitalized “H” to begin a new sentence. Such a sentence structure recurs across his poetry as does the poem’s rhyme scheme which is also thoroughly disjointed. This reader believes that an ABC rhyme scheme is followed as suggested by first seven sentences’ concluding words “knew”, “shell”, “through” “slime”, “hour”, “climb” and “sour”. Frequently used internal rhymes such as “gave us hell, shell on frantic shell”, “thud! flump! thud!” and “mud in ruck on ruck” add to the fragmented sentence structure and highlight the use of auditory imagery.

This poem has a blend of all types of imagery which the poet uses to create and enhance the atmosphere. Owen uses olfactory imagery to create the setting around him writing about the “smell of men” which can also be seen as indicative of how much time they have spent in the trenches. He refers to “rain, guttering down in waterfalls of slime” which is an example of both visual and auditory imagery. Perhaps the most horrific use of visual imagery is when Owen describes the physical condition of the sentry: “Eyeballs, huge-bulged like squids” which leaves a gruesome image in the reader’s mind. Incidentally, the sentry who Owen met went blind too. Owen uses many words such as “shell”, “steps”, “slime” and “steep” to create sibilance. There is also casual reference to nightmares which “watch my dreams still’ which the poet was also being treated for at Craiglockhart. It can be said that Owen uses horrific imagery to gradually develop the feeling tragedy and guilt.

Guilt and internal conflict are the primary sub-themes evolved in the poem. Owen’s literary critics have suggested he uses the setting of a secluded trench, against the backdrop of and external war to enhance the reader’s perception of internal conflict. The line “The sentry's body; then his rifle, handles Of Bauche bombs” emphasize the slow speed at which the body comes into view and to the reader is resembles the image of plunging a dagger into a heart and slowly pulling it out. Moreover it gives both Owen and the reader time to process the horrors of war and the guilt which begins to settle onto Owen’s heart. It is when the poet is trying to comfort the soldier that his guilt is most evident; he tells the soldier that he is not actually blind if he can see a flicker of light. This shows the medical negligence of the time and Owen’s desperate desire to appease his conscience. There is a touch of cruel irony in the lines “Eyeballs, huge-bulged like squids, Watch my dreams still; but I forgot him there, In posting next for duty, and sending a scout, To beg a stretcher somewhere, and floundering about, To other posts under the shrieking air” because it indicates that though the experience left the poet “floundering about”, he wishes to forget the incident.

“The Sentry” is unique in some respects, such as language, as highlighted above yet it resembles many of Owens’s other poems both thematically and linguistically. For example, he uses nightmares and disillusionment similarly in his poem “Dulce Et Decorum Est”. It aims to highlight the internal conflict faced by human beings in the face of a larger external conflict. Like in his poem “Insensibility”, he refers to all kinds of soldier however choosing to create a divide between enemy and friend instead of the various ranks of an army. He defines the susceptibility and dependence of human cruelty on circumstance which is highlighted by the difference in reaction to the condition of the British and German soldiers. Owen also highlights how emotional investment can lead to massive guilt by using his own example; literary critics have suggested that he felt personally guilty at the sentry’s death because as a Junior Officer he was responsible for deploying sentries at the front. In conclusion, “The Sentry” explores the nuances of human condition while highlighting its frailty, the worst of which is brought out, according to the poet, by “the pity of war”.

[1] Owen is referring to a trench

[2] British slang for a German soldier

Mrs. AstonEnglish Lang and Lit 2022