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.