IN A STATE OF DENIAL

In the song, The Kids Aren’t Alright, songwriter and frontman Dexter Holland sings “Chances thrown, nothing's free / Longing for what used to be / Still it's hard, hard to see / Fragile lives, shattered dreams” (The Offspring). In this chorus, Holland is detailing the harshness of growing up and trying to come to terms with the reality of the people he grew up with, as well as his own life. While in the play, A Streetcar Named Desire, Stella Kowalski may already be an adult, she struggles with the reality of the destruction of her sister Blanche’s mentality and life. After her husband, Stanley, raped her sister, rather than standing up for her, Stella chose the ignorance of denial, and repression of the truth.

By definition, denial is simply declaring something as untrue, whether it really is or not. It could be as easy as just not believing what someone claims, or can be fueled by deeper psychological trauma. As stated in the article, The Unified Theory of Repression, “The individual in denial does not fail visually to “see” some event but fails to “see” the deeper meaning or significance of the event” (Erdelyi 6). What this is referring to is the selective truth of a person. Denial is allowing them to ignore the significance of the truth. In Stella’s case, the truth of the scenario is not included in her personal reality. This corresponds with the given quote from the play, “I couldn't go on believing her story and live with Stanley” (Stella, 1232). Nested in that one line is Stella’s admittance that she has chosen not to believe Blanche and her recount of the rape.

In Stella’s case, denial with comes repression. “Repression, essentially, is a consciousness-lowering process. It consists of a class of operations that reduces the accessibility to consciousness of some target material” (Erdelyi 4). This applies to Stella because throughout the eleventh, and final, scene in Streetcar, she refuses to acknowledge what has happened to Blanche, and instead calls a doctor to take her away, presumably to a mental hospital, without telling her first. She merely aides Blanche in her disillusion, rather than trying herself to aide her.

Another quote from the aforementioned song that would apply to this setting is “What the hell is going on? / The cruelest dream, reality” (The Offspring). For Stella, just like it is for Blanche, it is so much easier to live in a denial plagued world of fantasy, than to stare into the face of reality and come to terms with the strong themes put on display in Tennessee Williams' play. Throughout the scenes it is blatant that Blanche is living in denial, but upon closer evaluation, it is clear that her sister is no different, and also suffering.