The Blanche du Bois Effect and the Utility of a Liberal Education - part 1

"A cultivated woman, a woman of intelligence and breeding, can enrich a man’s life--immeasurably! I have those things to offer, and time doesn’t take them away. Physical beauty is passing. A transitory possession. But beauty of the mind and richness of the spirit and tenderness of the heart--and I have all of those things--aren't taken away but grow! Increase with the years! How strange that I should be called a destitute woman! When I have all of these treasures locked in my heart. I think of myself as a very, very rich woman.” -- Blanche Du Bois in A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams

Every time I am asked what my college major was, a hesitation comes over me. I know what is coming. In making a pronouncement of English literature as my primary undergraduate field of study, I feel as though I am making a confession of some minor character flaw or mental defect. Like Blanche I feign a noble superiority, allowing my interrogator a slyly subtle glimpse to the wide-eyed panic beneath.  Thou dost protest too much.  The inquisitor invariably looks at me either quizzically as if to suggest why would someone want to major in that? of what practical use is it? do you want to be a high school English teacher? Or there are those whose physiognomy comes closer to suggesting some mild repugnance as if repressing an urge to flee to the far side of the room to avoid the humanistic contagion I have unceremoniously infected the air about me with. And then there are the worst lot--those whose smug self-assurance seems to imply you’re one of those “words people” without the slightest facility in numbers and complete disregard for hard facts, who rely on duplicitous rhetoric rather than real knowledge--that’s where the power is, you know. Verbal arcana are all fine and dandy but not really splitting the atom, are they? Not a cure for cancer. In short, you are counted among those charming but useless savants whose linguistic fancies constitute a world of their own without so much as a passing relationship to the world of cold, hard physical matter.

Blanche: I don’t want realism! I want magic! 
Mitch: Magic?
Blanche: Yes, yes, magic! I try to give that to people. I do misrepresent things to them. I don’t tell truth, I tell what ought to be truth. And if that is sinful, then let me be punished for it!--Don’t turn the light on! 

This state of affairs amounts to what I like to term the Blanche du Bois effect. Williams' most famous heroine and her numerous purple flourishes have become to my mind emblematic of a sort of identification of those who delve into humanistic pursuits as somehow ridiculously refined and pointlessly cultured in a world sadly lacking in either, entertaining in a quasi-improper sort of way but also a bit mad and in the end useless, impotent purveyors of rhetoric sans reason, sensibility in search of sense--or at least so it would appear, at least to the not inconsiderable number of Stanley Kowalskis in the world.  (In the same way, Marlon Brando's Method masterpiece of rough, brutish masculinity represented a challenge [and eventual cinematic successor] to the old guard acting represented by Vivien Leigh's tremulous, stylized, and deeply feminine British theatricality.)

Those of us foolish enough to put spirit and heart ahead of status and material goods are relegated to a quasi-court jester position within the pantheon of intellectual endeavor. We are the shy and euphemistically “sensitive,” “artistic” souls, for unless one can lay claim to inheriting the gifts of a latter day Shakespeare or Proust, the artist/wordsmith is about as sensible a vocation as counting the warp and woof of clouds in the sky.

Il Trovatore: From the Ridiculous to the Sublime

Il Trovatore gets no respect. It has become associated with a particular brand of operatic excess that eschews sense in favor of purely musical delights. This is the opera, after all, that the Marx Brothers memorably lampooned in A Night at the Opera. However, while the excesses of Trovatore cannot be ignored, I would venture to argue that the opera encapsulates what makes opera sui generis as an art form--that the sum of the various arts contributing to it--music, text, theater--is much more than their individual parts would seem to suggest.

First the ridiculous:

The chief complaint against Trovatore seems to revolve around its admittedly complicated plot straining credulity.  It is filled with melodramatic coincidences, mistaken identities, and gypsy curses: the noble Count di Luna and the rebel Manrico are sworn enemies both in love with the fair Leonora, torn between love and duty, but a secret known only to Manrico’s gypsy mother Azucena ties them together leading to tragic consequences for all, etc.

Perhaps Azucena’s fatal error seems the most farfetched of all.

Furthermore, some of the cultural values and gender stereotypes represented in Trovatore strike a modern audience as, to put it charitably, antiquated. The whole Spanish milieu of proud nobles and their ancient codes of honor can seem no more than macho posing, and poor Leonora, the fair damsel, is caught in the middle of this tug-of-war.

In musico-dramatic terms, the opera is far from polished and almost carelessly put together at certain points. The ending of the opera in which Manrico is carted off and executed as Azucena blurts out to the shocked Di Luna that he has just assassinated his own brother takes place in a mere seven seconds or so. Verdi sometimes sacrificed dramatic development at the altar of swift pacing (the same happens as late as Otello after Desdemona is murdered--I’ve always felt the resolution goes by too quickly).

And while possessed of a rough vitality, the orchestral fabric Verdi chose to clothe his plot contrivances in has been described, not unfairly, as one giant strumming guitar. Trovatore is far from the subtle scene painting seen in some of Verdi's later masterworks like Simon Boccanegra, Don Carlo, and Otello, and it lacks the intimate psychology of La Traviata, amazingly written concurrently with its rougher, bolder counterpart.

The sublime:

But despite the above, there is much to recommend in this opera. Verdi was one of the great melodists of opera. He held fast to Rossini's dictum that opera required nothing less than voice, voice, and more voice. Caruso allegedly commented that Trovatore required nothing less than the four greatest singers in the world to pull it off. To be sure, Verdi's melodic outpouring in Trovatore was unstinting, embodying all the ecstatic longing and pain and joy of love. We most surely see this in Leonora's soaring arias with their sweeping, arching phrases and delicate pianissimi. It is not for nothing that “D'amor sull'ali rosee” is the supreme test of a Verdian soprano.



The villainous Count Di Luna's “Il Balen” also presents opportunities for the baritone to show a soft, sweet yearning hitherto unseen in this staunch figure.



As a contrast, we have Manrico's “Di quella pira”--the quintessence of masculine bravado and impetuous tenor barnstorming. And, of course, the rousing Anvil Chorus, perhaps the prototypical opera chorus, that seems to originate in our collective unconscious.

More substantially, however, Verdi weds his melodic gifts with supreme musical dramatization--la parola scenica. This is what ranks him among the great opera composers, in my view. Azucena's “Condotta ell'era in ceppi” is a classic example.



In this tortured gypsy's narrative, what seemed implausible and even risible from the outset and which serves as the dramatic motor of much of the plot is transmuted by Verdi's genius into something powerful and raw. Azucena seems almost numbly deliberate at first, then, as wispy strings reprise “Stride la vampa,” she slowly unravels, accelerating inevitably toward the terrible revelation in a powerful explosion of grief and terror before subsiding back into numb oblivion and obsessive revenge-plotting which mark her throughout the opera. We are witness to nothing less than the disintegration of identity amid an implacable grief. In this passage, Verdi renders Azucena as an object of Aristotelian pity and terror--a truly tragic, obsessed figure. Her potent suffering transcends the material, as our rational objections to the plot fall away into niggling insignificance. This narrative elevates Trovatore, placing it among the great operas and goes a long way toward explaining why, despite its flamboyant excesses and plot convolutions, it endures to this day.