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Popular Culture Review
gangs and tough neighborhoods (e.g., West Side Story in 1961). “Gala” speaks to
the perceived amplitude/magnitude of Stanley’s own athletic prowess, matched
only by his conquests of women. The name surely reinforces the intensity of
pleasure Stanley craves. The last line of Streetcar in fact sexualizes Stanley’s
most heinous gala sport—“The game’s seven-card stud” (419). Stud-bowler
Stanley racks up a win by knocking down the aristocratic dreams of his sister-inlaw, Blanche E)uBois. Even when critics write about Streetcar, they often resort
to violent sport imagery to describe Williams’s plot. For example, Jan Hoffinan
observes: “Streetcar Named Desire is, after all, a tragic gladiators’ battle
between the coarse, menacing Stanley and Stella’s sister, the elegant, unraveling
Blanche DuBois” (“The Importance of Being Stella”).
Williams also evokes “physical culture” to represent Mitch’s character,
^^4lose sport in Streetcar, like Williams’s own, is swimming, an anodyne to
Stanley’s brutish bowling. Mitch boasts, “Last Christmas, I was given a
membership to the New Orleans Athletic Club,” where Williams himself was a
member in the 1940s and 1950s. Speaking of this Club, Mitch boasts, “I work
out. . . with the weights and swim and keep [myself] fit. When I started there, I
was getting soft in the belly but now my belly is hard. It’s so hard that a man can
punch m e . . . and it don’t hurt.” But no man will “punch” him in this scene.
Instead, Blanche “pokes lightly at him"" (346), a gesture that diffuses Mitch’s
claims of manly valor. On the other hand, Stanley and his fiiends would know
precisely how to test/poke Mitch’s bravado concerning his physique and his
ability to play sports. Worried about his weight, his perspiration, and his
awkwardness, Mitch is burdened with “a heavy build,” but he is described as
“sensitive” (292) and “superior” to others in Stanley’s circle. Mitch’s sensitivity
is easily and often mocked by Stanley and his brutish team who paint him as a
mama’s boy who needs a “sugar-tit” (288).
Given the fact that Mitch works in “the spare parts department” (292),
Williams may also be hinting that Mitch is sexually unendowed. His
membership at an athletic club may prompt Mitch to think he has a hard
stomach and is in sound physical shape, the attributes of an athlete. But, in point
of fact, Mitch only performs at being a man through a masquerade of
masculinity represented through sports and “physical culture.” Stanley’s
bowling—^knocking down pins with hard balls—contrasts with the awkward
fiimbling of the “sensitive” Mitch whose troubled physicality (sexuality) was
superbly encoded by Karl Malden in the Streetcar film. Returning fi-om the
amusement park at Lake Ponchartrain in Scene Six, Mitch holds the prize he
won at the shooting gallery, “a plaster statuette o f Mae West,"" the famed
burlesque queen, “upside down"" (340). With this physical image, Williams
skewers Mitch’s athleticism and sexuality simultaneously. He cannot shoot
outside of an amusement park (Blanche pushes his advances away in Scene Six
and fiightens him off in Scene Nine) and he cannot even hold a woman (sex idol
Mae West) the right way.