[The article from which this excerpt was taken was originally published as "American Blues: The Plays of Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams," in Encounter, May, 1954.]

If Willy Loman [of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman] is the desperate average man, Blanche DuBois is the desperate exceptional woman. Willy's collapse began when his son walked into a hotel apartment and found him with a whore; Blanche's when she entered "a room that I thought was empty," and found her young husband embracing an older man. In each instance the play builds up to a climax involving guilt and concomitant disgust. Blanche, nervously boastful, lives in the leisured past; her defence against actuality is a sort of aristocratic Bovarysme, at which her brutish brother-in-law Stanley repeatedly sneers. Characteristically, Williams keeps his detachment, and does not take sides: he never denies that Stanley's wife, in spite of her sexual enslavement, is...