Blanche DuBois is the main character in Tennessee Williams's play A Streetcar Named Desire. Blanche gives a lot of attention to her body and looks. Her body is a perfect example of a woman’s docile body, about which writes Sandra Lee Bartky in connection to Foucault's groundbreaking work Discipline and Punish, where he writes about a new type of power, disciplinary power, and its product docile bodies. Disciplinary power disciplines bodies through surveillance gaze and through forcing bodies to homogeneity. Dispositive of disciplinary power that Foucault analyses is Panopticon, which is based on an omnipresent gaze. Individuals, because they feel like they are being watched all the time, internalize the gaze and start watching themselves. This gaze is normalizing, because power always sets norms for individuals. Bartky says that this gaze is the male gaze and that women are more subjected to it than men. Slavoj Žižek in his work Language, Ideology, Slovenians analyses the personality structure of pathological Narcissist based on Lacan's psychoanalysis. Pathological Narcissist is an effect of an unsuccessful symbolic identification with The Name of the Father. Consequently, a pathological Narcissist, even in his adulthood, stays dependent on demands of the others, because he was not able to free his desire from the caprice of the Other. That is why pathological Narcissist is an ideal personality structure for disciplinary power that strives for as much subordination of individuals to the gaze as possible. Blanche is a pathological Narcissist. She is completely subjected to a male gaze, through the »great« Ego she is tied to the image of an ideal woman. She determines her worth through the validation of Others. Only through the fall of her »great« Ego, can Blanche see her dependence on the demands of patriarchal others. Blanche's »great« Ego breaks down because she does not receive needed narcissistic approval from Others. She fails to be an ideal woman. Only through a mental breakdown, Blanche can free herself, through social defeat her »great« Ego falls apart, from what we can conclude that liberation is not easy, but rather painful.
|