The underlying story that follows A Streetcar Named Desire is just that: Desire. Throughout the play, Stella and Stanley continue to have a more and more complicated relationship, evolving from Stanley yelling and breaking things to assaulting his wife. However, they often make up by having rough, carnal intercourse, which is one of the reasons why they both stay. Stella, however, stays for other reasons. Perhaps her own fractured psyche from the relationship has caused her to not be able to support herself. Perhaps she has other emotional issues. Mainly, the only thing we can do is speculate, and, coming from Stella’s quote, "I couldn't go on believing her story and live with Stanley" (Stella, 1232), it seems as though she doesn’t even want to leave Stanley, even after the way she has been treated. There is an emotional condition that is formed in one’s mind during a traumatic event, known as Stockholm syndrome. This condition, only making headlines in 1973, is a condition where, in a case of being held hostage, the hostages themselves would develop positive feelings towards their captors, and even align themselves with them, identifying with the captors. This psychological phenomena is often associated with bank heists in movies where the hostage would find themselves falling for the robber.
However, the problem is on a much less dramatic scale. Stella has grown a love for Stanley, even though he is horribly abusive. The readers must ask themselves, “Why does Stella stay if the threat of abuse keeps growing and growing and growing? She could be killed!” Yes, she could be killed, either choked, stabbed, shot, or any of the other man-on-man cause of death. And here lies the issue of Stella: she has grown to love Stanley. While this is attributed for a love formed before the abuse started, it often leads to a minor case of Stockholm syndrome. The person in the relationship knows the person is bad, but they stay anyway, seeing the person as someone they love. The ‘hostage,’ in this case Stella, because she can’t leave physically or psychologically, is controlled and dominated by the ‘captor,’ large, brute-like, alpha Stanley.
In the event that Stella thinks of leaving Stanley, she immediately turns around and states, ‘perhaps he could get better,’ or, ‘I love him.’ This traces back to the ‘reality versus fantasy’ discussion the class went in depth on. Stella subliminally knows that Stanley is breaking her psyche, and, in knowing so, develops a fantasy world where Stanley will cease his constant verbal and physical abuse. However, people like Stanley often never come to an end when it comes to being abusive. They continue and continue until they have no physical means to harm another soul.
Blanche knows this. She sees how Stella is being controlled, not unlike a puppeteer controlling the dummy. This happens as well, as viewed during certain cases of Stockholm syndrome, even after the captors are incarcerated and the hostages freed, the victims still seem to have an undying love for the criminals. They refuse to believe that the captors were horrible people, and they will continue to defend them and attempt to convince even the police and court system that the criminals are not bad people. Society sees this on a large scale, with abuse being present, either physical, verbal, or emotional, across every nation, across every continent. Abuse has no age restriction: with middle schoolers and early high schoolers being beaten and abused; abuse has no discrimination: it affects all skin tones, all genders, and all nationalities. We, as a species, may be intelligent, but when one single screw comes loose, the whole machine falls apart.
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