Most people stay in a relationship where pain outweighs pleasure because they perceive the possible separation as being more painful than being together, and so they choose the less painful option of staying. We will obviously try to choose something that will cause us the most pleasure. If all choices are perceived to be result in pain, then we will either choose to make no choice at all, or that which gives us the least amount of pain. Similar choices are made in the two texts that will be explored in this essay; Enduring Love and A Streetcar Named Desire. These two pieces are modern drama and modern prose, set fifty years apart, set in different places, dealing with the human condition – what unites us is stronger than what differentiates us. We will also be looking at how pain and pleasure are two binary oppositions but looking deeper into the texts, these two seem interchangeable and so it is possible to get both pain and pleasure in certain circumstances.
One interpretation of Enduring Love looks beyond the plot to the overall effect the author is trying to achieve, to the novel’s central theme, that ‘unreliability is an ineradicable part of who we are,’ according to Adam Mars-Jones. The novel can be seen as a philosophical argument that looks at the ideas that fascinate the post-modern world. The ideas involving the concept of truth are explored in the novel, what is truth? How can the truth ever be known and how can it ever be objective? It is with this base idea that the lead characters of the novel have trouble and so begins the breakdown of relationships. This idea of the truth is also portrayed in Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire. Streetcar is a story of damaged people. Blanche DuBois, a repressed and sexually warped Southern belle, seeks either atonement or reassurance; she wants someone to help lift the burden of her guilt for her twisted sexuality. Through this character’s introduction to the play, the story changes immensely and we learn that she does not tell the truth, but ‘what ought to be the truth’. The slow unraveling of her illusions is what makes up the foundation of the play. The theme of truth in both these texts determines how the characters act around each other. And with each action, comes an opposite and equal reaction from someone else. Joe, for example, has an extremely scientific mind and is able to remember details with uncanny precision, as is Blanche. Whether they divulge these details to the people around them depends on what they believe the truth is, or in Blanche’s case, what the truth should be.
Both texts focus on and analyze heavily the intricate web of relationships between their characters, in a variety of situations. Some of the relationships are painful, others pleasurable. Most, however, cannot distinguish the fine line between the two. There are two sides to every relationship and no matter how pleasurable they are, there is always the potential for pain. In Enduring Love, Jed begins to fall in love with Joe after the balloon accident and starts to stalk him, which we later realize is due to an illness. The formation of this one new relationship slowly but surely picks at the other relationships in Joe’s life and weakens them significantly. While this gives Jed varying amounts of pain and pleasure according to Joe’s reactions, it causes Joe only pain, ‘It was as if I had fallen through a crack in my own existence’. In the same way, when Blanche comes to Stella’s home in Streetcar, she must accept her sister’s relations and make them her own. Even though she loves her sister, Blanch is unable to get any pleasure from the other relationships. She seeks comfort from Mitch for some time but it does not last long and causes Blanche a significant amount of heartache, ‘But I have been foolish – casting my pearls before swine!’.
A recurring theme that can be found in A Streetcar Named Desire is the constant conflict between reality and fantasy, actual and ideal. This theme is read most strongly in Williams' characterization of Blanche DuBois and the physical tropes that she employs in her pursuit of what is magical and idealized, such as her letters and phone calls to Shep Huntleigh. Blanche says "I don't want realism, I want magic." As one critic writes, "Blanche spins a cocoon linguistically for protection." Blanche creates her own fantasy world through the characters she plays, such as the damsel, southern belle or school teacher. She wears her costumes to create a façade to hide behind, concealing her secrets and attempting to reach her former glory. Her character is not so different from McEwan’s Jed. He also creates his own world where he believes that Joe is in love with him. His belief is so strong that he constantly tries to meet Joe and tells him “ 'I just wanted you to know, I understand what you're feeling. I feel it too. I love you'...". This suggests that both Blanch and Jed are unsatisfied with their relationships and so have a desire to formulate ones that do not exist, pretending to get pleasure from them and hoping that if they believe hard enough, it may become a reality.
Havelock Ellis, in Studies in the Psychology of Sex, argued that there is no clear distinction between the aspects of sadism and masochism, and that they may be regarded as complementary emotional states. He also made the important point that sadomasochism generally desires that the pain be inflicted or received in love, not in abuse, for the pleasure of either one or both participants. This is most clearly seen in the relationship between Stanley and Stella in Streetcar. Scene three underscores the primal nature of their relationship. After Stanley throws out the radio, Stella shouts at him, inciting his attack on her. Later in the night, Stanley shouts to her and their reunion is described in terms of animal noises. Stanley cruelly abuses his wife yet she sides with him and later tells Blanche that he ‘didn’t mean it’. This compares to when Jed sent out gunmen to kill Joe, although changing his mind later, and the pleasure he felt causing Joe pain, receiving pleasure from Joe rejecting his advances and thinking he was doing God’s divine work. He writes in his letter to Joe ‘What were you trying to do to me? Hurt me? Insult me? Test me? I hated you for it, but I never forgot that I loved you too, and that was why I kept going.’ Jed is similar to both Stanley and Stanley as he receives pleasure from causing pain as well as inflicting it on Joe.
In some ways, Blanche and Clarissa aren’t so different from each other. Neither is able to have children for their own reasons. Blanche as she is unmarried, and Clarissa because she biologically cannot mother a child. This can cause a significant amount of pain to them, as is evident. Blanche comes to visit her sister while Stella is pregnant, and when she hears the news about the baby, is unsure what to do with herself. It is just after she and Stanley have had an argument about Belle Reve and so Blanche says she was ‘flirting with your husband’ to Stella, perhaps trying to make herself feel better. Clarissa’s pain is a little more overt, as we are told about her pain from Joe’s point of view and so he must be able to see it in order to tell the reader about it. This also affects her relationship with Joe near the end of the book. Perhaps if they had a child, or were capable of having one, they would have a last reason to stay together or it would make them work harder at their relationship. Instead, they have to even cover up the subject with talk of something else all together. As Joe says; ‘What we were really talking about this time was the absence of babies from our lives’. A child would make their relationship more pleasurable and less painful.
Joe and Jed's bond, forged in the masculine homo-social activity of a physical rescue, leads to a doubling whereby Joe is under increased anxiety to distinguish his heterosexual identity from Jed's homosexual one. When Clarissa hears Joe's first reports on Parry's phone calls and letters, she jokes, "A secret gay love affair with a Jesus freak! I can't wait to tell your science friends" and asks whether the two men are getting married. While a traditional psychoanalytic reading would say that her joke expresses the unconscious truth of Joe's latent homosexual desire, a Sedgwickian reading would claim, with somewhat different emphasis, that Clarissa indicates the shifting terrain on which male homo-social relations must always be enacted. This determination to prove himself as a heterosexual and worthy of Clarissa ends up isolating Joe from her instead and brings grief to both, although Clarissa is the first to realize this while Joe puzzles over her behaviour. In Streetcar, Stanley is equally determined to prove his masculinity, whether it be through sexual innuendoes and anecdotes, physical strength, teasing those less masculine than him or through rape. Where in most of his relationships this causes anguish to others, such as Blanche, he is almost revered by others for his blatant display of manliness, such as his friends and his wife Stella, to whom such things are painful to the point of being pleasurable or even pleasurable to the point of being painful. As the stage directions at the end of scene three tell us, Stella is ‘blind with tenderness’.
Blanche’s neurotic symptoms emerge as she represses the instance of discovering the true sexual nature of her husband. This painful rejection of her sexual love for him leads her into extreme promiscuity. This speaks of her need to control her sexuality with men and receive sexual validity through their desire for her. The ultimate testament of this is her relationship with a 17 year old. By engaging in this relationship, Blanche can be secure in her desirability to men. Blanche’s impossible desires to have the man she loved, her husband, find her sexually desirable leads her into this. The paradox of this relationship is that by trying to control men’s desire for her she gets swept up in promiscuous behaviour, through which she makes herself undesirable to the one man she wants to marry her, Mitch. She goes through tremendous pain with the death of her husband and no other relationships offer her the shelter that she needs. Even before she meets Mitch however, she begins to flirt with Stanley, perhaps hoping she could pull it off and he would let her stay as long as she liked. She obviously has no qualms about sabotaging her sister’s home, even though she cares deeply about her. The same intensity of emotion is reflected in Jed Parry. He is very manipulative in the way he attempts to get closer to Joe, he makes Joe curious about what he wants and uses this as a chance to try and persuade Joe to love him. He also uses Clarissa. When talking about his and Joe’s future he mentions Clarissa; ‘Clarissa. It’s best to deal with this head on.’ He knows he has the power to jeopardise their relationship and uses this to his advantage. He causes pain to Joe and Clarissa to receive pleasure for himself.
Relationships that we form with other people will always have both pain and pleasure, whether they are caused by that person or not. It is not possible for it to be a healthy relationship otherwise. As we are shown, both texts explore such relationships and each character receives a certain amount of both. McEwan and Williams balance these out with other characters, giving some more pain and others more pleasure. They are able to express such emotions through showing us the effects of positive and negative relationships and the toll they take on people.
One interpretation of Enduring Love looks beyond the plot to the overall effect the author is trying to achieve, to the novel’s central theme, that ‘unreliability is an ineradicable part of who we are,’ according to Adam Mars-Jones. The novel can be seen as a philosophical argument that looks at the ideas that fascinate the post-modern world. The ideas involving the concept of truth are explored in the novel, what is truth? How can the truth ever be known and how can it ever be objective? It is with this base idea that the lead characters of the novel have trouble and so begins the breakdown of relationships. This idea of the truth is also portrayed in Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire. Streetcar is a story of damaged people. Blanche DuBois, a repressed and sexually warped Southern belle, seeks either atonement or reassurance; she wants someone to help lift the burden of her guilt for her twisted sexuality. Through this character’s introduction to the play, the story changes immensely and we learn that she does not tell the truth, but ‘what ought to be the truth’. The slow unraveling of her illusions is what makes up the foundation of the play. The theme of truth in both these texts determines how the characters act around each other. And with each action, comes an opposite and equal reaction from someone else. Joe, for example, has an extremely scientific mind and is able to remember details with uncanny precision, as is Blanche. Whether they divulge these details to the people around them depends on what they believe the truth is, or in Blanche’s case, what the truth should be.
Both texts focus on and analyze heavily the intricate web of relationships between their characters, in a variety of situations. Some of the relationships are painful, others pleasurable. Most, however, cannot distinguish the fine line between the two. There are two sides to every relationship and no matter how pleasurable they are, there is always the potential for pain. In Enduring Love, Jed begins to fall in love with Joe after the balloon accident and starts to stalk him, which we later realize is due to an illness. The formation of this one new relationship slowly but surely picks at the other relationships in Joe’s life and weakens them significantly. While this gives Jed varying amounts of pain and pleasure according to Joe’s reactions, it causes Joe only pain, ‘It was as if I had fallen through a crack in my own existence’. In the same way, when Blanche comes to Stella’s home in Streetcar, she must accept her sister’s relations and make them her own. Even though she loves her sister, Blanch is unable to get any pleasure from the other relationships. She seeks comfort from Mitch for some time but it does not last long and causes Blanche a significant amount of heartache, ‘But I have been foolish – casting my pearls before swine!’.
A recurring theme that can be found in A Streetcar Named Desire is the constant conflict between reality and fantasy, actual and ideal. This theme is read most strongly in Williams' characterization of Blanche DuBois and the physical tropes that she employs in her pursuit of what is magical and idealized, such as her letters and phone calls to Shep Huntleigh. Blanche says "I don't want realism, I want magic." As one critic writes, "Blanche spins a cocoon linguistically for protection." Blanche creates her own fantasy world through the characters she plays, such as the damsel, southern belle or school teacher. She wears her costumes to create a façade to hide behind, concealing her secrets and attempting to reach her former glory. Her character is not so different from McEwan’s Jed. He also creates his own world where he believes that Joe is in love with him. His belief is so strong that he constantly tries to meet Joe and tells him “ 'I just wanted you to know, I understand what you're feeling. I feel it too. I love you'...". This suggests that both Blanch and Jed are unsatisfied with their relationships and so have a desire to formulate ones that do not exist, pretending to get pleasure from them and hoping that if they believe hard enough, it may become a reality.
Havelock Ellis, in Studies in the Psychology of Sex, argued that there is no clear distinction between the aspects of sadism and masochism, and that they may be regarded as complementary emotional states. He also made the important point that sadomasochism generally desires that the pain be inflicted or received in love, not in abuse, for the pleasure of either one or both participants. This is most clearly seen in the relationship between Stanley and Stella in Streetcar. Scene three underscores the primal nature of their relationship. After Stanley throws out the radio, Stella shouts at him, inciting his attack on her. Later in the night, Stanley shouts to her and their reunion is described in terms of animal noises. Stanley cruelly abuses his wife yet she sides with him and later tells Blanche that he ‘didn’t mean it’. This compares to when Jed sent out gunmen to kill Joe, although changing his mind later, and the pleasure he felt causing Joe pain, receiving pleasure from Joe rejecting his advances and thinking he was doing God’s divine work. He writes in his letter to Joe ‘What were you trying to do to me? Hurt me? Insult me? Test me? I hated you for it, but I never forgot that I loved you too, and that was why I kept going.’ Jed is similar to both Stanley and Stanley as he receives pleasure from causing pain as well as inflicting it on Joe.
In some ways, Blanche and Clarissa aren’t so different from each other. Neither is able to have children for their own reasons. Blanche as she is unmarried, and Clarissa because she biologically cannot mother a child. This can cause a significant amount of pain to them, as is evident. Blanche comes to visit her sister while Stella is pregnant, and when she hears the news about the baby, is unsure what to do with herself. It is just after she and Stanley have had an argument about Belle Reve and so Blanche says she was ‘flirting with your husband’ to Stella, perhaps trying to make herself feel better. Clarissa’s pain is a little more overt, as we are told about her pain from Joe’s point of view and so he must be able to see it in order to tell the reader about it. This also affects her relationship with Joe near the end of the book. Perhaps if they had a child, or were capable of having one, they would have a last reason to stay together or it would make them work harder at their relationship. Instead, they have to even cover up the subject with talk of something else all together. As Joe says; ‘What we were really talking about this time was the absence of babies from our lives’. A child would make their relationship more pleasurable and less painful.
Joe and Jed's bond, forged in the masculine homo-social activity of a physical rescue, leads to a doubling whereby Joe is under increased anxiety to distinguish his heterosexual identity from Jed's homosexual one. When Clarissa hears Joe's first reports on Parry's phone calls and letters, she jokes, "A secret gay love affair with a Jesus freak! I can't wait to tell your science friends" and asks whether the two men are getting married. While a traditional psychoanalytic reading would say that her joke expresses the unconscious truth of Joe's latent homosexual desire, a Sedgwickian reading would claim, with somewhat different emphasis, that Clarissa indicates the shifting terrain on which male homo-social relations must always be enacted. This determination to prove himself as a heterosexual and worthy of Clarissa ends up isolating Joe from her instead and brings grief to both, although Clarissa is the first to realize this while Joe puzzles over her behaviour. In Streetcar, Stanley is equally determined to prove his masculinity, whether it be through sexual innuendoes and anecdotes, physical strength, teasing those less masculine than him or through rape. Where in most of his relationships this causes anguish to others, such as Blanche, he is almost revered by others for his blatant display of manliness, such as his friends and his wife Stella, to whom such things are painful to the point of being pleasurable or even pleasurable to the point of being painful. As the stage directions at the end of scene three tell us, Stella is ‘blind with tenderness’.
Blanche’s neurotic symptoms emerge as she represses the instance of discovering the true sexual nature of her husband. This painful rejection of her sexual love for him leads her into extreme promiscuity. This speaks of her need to control her sexuality with men and receive sexual validity through their desire for her. The ultimate testament of this is her relationship with a 17 year old. By engaging in this relationship, Blanche can be secure in her desirability to men. Blanche’s impossible desires to have the man she loved, her husband, find her sexually desirable leads her into this. The paradox of this relationship is that by trying to control men’s desire for her she gets swept up in promiscuous behaviour, through which she makes herself undesirable to the one man she wants to marry her, Mitch. She goes through tremendous pain with the death of her husband and no other relationships offer her the shelter that she needs. Even before she meets Mitch however, she begins to flirt with Stanley, perhaps hoping she could pull it off and he would let her stay as long as she liked. She obviously has no qualms about sabotaging her sister’s home, even though she cares deeply about her. The same intensity of emotion is reflected in Jed Parry. He is very manipulative in the way he attempts to get closer to Joe, he makes Joe curious about what he wants and uses this as a chance to try and persuade Joe to love him. He also uses Clarissa. When talking about his and Joe’s future he mentions Clarissa; ‘Clarissa. It’s best to deal with this head on.’ He knows he has the power to jeopardise their relationship and uses this to his advantage. He causes pain to Joe and Clarissa to receive pleasure for himself.
Relationships that we form with other people will always have both pain and pleasure, whether they are caused by that person or not. It is not possible for it to be a healthy relationship otherwise. As we are shown, both texts explore such relationships and each character receives a certain amount of both. McEwan and Williams balance these out with other characters, giving some more pain and others more pleasure. They are able to express such emotions through showing us the effects of positive and negative relationships and the toll they take on people.
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