The Blanche du Bois Effect - Part 3

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!"

This fall from prominence with respect to the humanities has not, historically speaking, always been the case.  Prior to the second half of the twentieth century, an education was not to be considered complete without some considerable exposure to humanistic study.  Whereas nowadays, I would not be at all surprised if some graduates, greedily set on the capitalist highway, obtuse to the humanistic byways, have taken little to no courses in philosophy, art, literature and the like.   This is egregious error; while the capitalist mindset provides the physical basics, it offers little sustenance for the heart, mind, and soul.

So what was it that a humanistic education could give one?  The obvious advantage to humanistic pursuit lay in its emphasis on language, on vocabulary development and the contextual understanding that comes with it.  Also, a certain cultural broadening results from reading into the variety of life lived in every time and place known to man and the highs and lows of human experience.

English departments also used to teach old-fashioned grammatical analysis, largely abandoned in the last few decades in the rush to extirpate from the classroom that which stifled expression and did not produce effortless prose.  (This may be a correct and sensible conclusion with respect to writing finesse, but it bypasses the larger question of whether such emphases on objective analysis of the rudiments of language train the mind as a whole in systematic and analytic thinking necessary in so many fields of study and in so many ventures. Furthermore, by abandoning grammatical analysis, the field deprived itself of one of the few barometers of objective rigor available to it. Thus English as a discipline today is synonymous with a miasma of uncertainty, tentativeness, and unknowables.  The tragic error of so many in this field lay in their solipsistic mistaking of this central fact of their discipline for a universal trait of all others.)

Mitch:  I thought you were straight.

Blanche:  Straight? What’s straight?  A line can be straight or a street.  But the heart of a human being?

Above all, what humanists do, some recklessly, others shrewdly, is probe and analyze the murky undercurrents of human behavior, the underlying motivations and sub rosa drives, as it were, from which they extrapolate, infer, and imply.  What humanities people seem particularly predisposed to, beyond their apparent verbal facility, that more “what you see is what you get”-oriented math/science folk cannot (or choose not to) is instantly assessing the layers in a social context, the unstated motives, the hidden agendae, and making connections to other potentially contributing factors (to be sure, sometimes where they might not exist).  They are un-scientists, as it were, devoted to a view of life essentially not straight, not linear, but amorphous and not to be apprehended by logical-mathematical means, the stock in trade of the sciences.  In sum, they are insightful and perceptive, occasionally mystical, in ways that cannot always be rationally explained.  But they cannot coherently assemble these traits and their findings into a theory.  They cannot empirically demonstrate their observations and explanations -- i.e., they are essentially unfalsifiable -- relying on the intangibles of instinct and subtle sensitivity and a general consensus as to their veracity founded more on feeling than fact.  

I would like to argue that the humanities offer something beyond the tangible and somewhat practical effects made available by science:  the closest thing our secular culture has to religious training, to the development of a certain refinement and sympathy for the depths of despair and an appreciation of the heights of joy, for the value of compassion and sensitivity, for the aesthetic and emotional as valid, crucial life experiences.

In his seminal essay On the Idea of a University, Cardinal Newman describes higher education as a place for the teaching of "universal knowledge" rather than vocational training or research, where students may pursue a broad-based liberal education (the word university itself, ultimately derived from the Latin universus, implies that which surpasses the immediate and personal to encompass nothing less than the cosmos, or at least that which concerns all mankind).  The university promotes "formation of character" and nurtures "habits of mind" useful in lifelong endeavor, applicable to any situation.  Such unfashionable sentiments carry more than a whiff of quaint, old-fashioned notions of literature and the humanities in general as the moral educator of the culture.  (Who, outside of compulsory high school English class, reads the classics nowadays?)  Be that as it may, Newman’s sober assessment would seem to provide a sturdier (albeit antiquated) framework for discussion and imbue sober legitimacy on the notion of the validity of a liberal education.

And yet the taint of Williams’ fragile, voluble heroine lingers.  A hard-headed Stanley Kowalski realist might argue why resist the numbers?  They provide all there is to know that is worth knowing.  But what the Stanley Kowalskis of the world do not always recognize is that the materialist approach does not represent the one and only value in life.  It cannot account for the mystery, the love, the beauty, spirit, and soul that hold us in communion with this world and with the promise of something better to come--that which encompasses and embraces, nurtures and heals.

Mitch:  You might teach arithmetic.

Blanche:  Never arithmetic, sir! Never arithmetic!  I don't know my multiplication tables.  No, I have the misfortune of being an English instructor.  I attempt to instill a bunch of bobby-soxers and drug-store Romeos with a reverence for Hawthorne and Whitman and Poe!

Mitch:  Well, I bet that some of them are more interested in other things.

Blanche:  How very right you are.  Their literary heritage is not what they treasure above all else!  But they're sweet things.  And in the spring it's touching to notice them making their first discovery of love.  As if nobody had ever known it before.

Blanche does have her usefulness--she reminds us what a fragile thing it is to be human, to feel, to trust, to love.  Her tragedy lay in her unsympathetic environs and a culture that too soon discounted her reprobate ways and overlooked the sensitive, refined creature beneath.

Like Blanche and her rattle-trap streetcar, the humanities survive.  As Blanche might say, they provide a cleft in the rock of the world to hide in, one from which we can gain a better understanding of this life and a richer appreciation for its manifold joys, griefs, and wonders.