Desire Under the Elms

In the play Desire Under the Elms, the aspect of an open ending could not be more obvious.

SHERIFF–Open in the name o’ the law! (They start.)

CABOT–They’ve come fur ye. (He goes to the rear door.) Come in, Jim! (The three men enter. Cabot meets them in doorway.) Jest a minit, Jim. I got ‘em safe here. (The sheriff nods. He and his companions remain in the doorway.)

EBEN–(suddenly calls) I lied this mornin’, Jim. I helped her do it. Ye kin take me, too.

ABBIE–(brokenly) No!

CABOT–Take ‘em both. (He comes forward–stares at Eben with a trace of grudging admiration.) Putty good–fur yew! Waal, I got t’ round up the stock. Good-by.

EBEN–Good-by.

ABBIE–Good-by. (Cabot turns and strides past the men–comes out and around the corner of the house, his shoulders squared, his face stony, and stalks grimly toward the barn. In the meantime the sheriff and men have come into the room.)

SHERIFF–(embarrassedly) Waal–we’d best start.

ABBIE–Wait, (turns to Eben) I love ye, Eben.

EBEN–I love ye, Abbie. (They kiss. The three men grin and shuffle embarrassedly. Eben takes Abbie’s hand. They go out the door in rear, the men following, and come from the house, walking hand in hand to the gate. Eben stops there and points to the sunrise sky.) Sun’s a-rizin’. Purty, hain’t it?

ABBIE–Ay-eh. (They both stand for a moment looking up raptly in attitudes strangely aloof and devout.)

SHERIFF–(looking around at the farm enviously–to his companion) It’s a jim-dandy farm, no denyin’. Wished I owned it!

For all we know, the sheriff could now be in the fight for the farm with this ending. Although it is pretty clear that Cabot got away with Eben’s mothers farm, the fate of him and Abbie is completely unknown. Did they get arrested? Let go? The death sentence? And how is Cabot going to handle the whole farm by himself?

Also, psychology is a huge aspect in this play. The tension between Cabot and Eben grows as the play goes on. “Ye needn’t heed Eben. Eben’s a dumb fool – like his Maw, soft an’ simple!”. It is obvious throughout the entire play that Cabot is hateful towards Eben, and Eben is the same way as he sneakingly tries to take back what belongs to him through his mother. Eben used his knowledge of his stop brothers’ desires to get them off his hands as Cabot brought another wife home, threatening, once again, Eben’s chance of getting his mother’s land back. Both Cabot and Eben were smart in their ideas of getting back at the other, but Cabot, it seems, was unfortunately the successful one in the end.

Blanche continued…

Another thing that drove me insane about Blanche that I forgot to mention in her last post was how her double personalitly almost made her forget who she truly was. She was convincing others, as well as herself, that her lies were the truth, for example in the very end of the play when she claimed Mitch tried to apologize and she dismissed him. Blanche thought of what she wanted to happen, and tried to talk about it and turn it into reality. Unfortunatly for herself, she was caught in the act and was attacked verybally and physicaly by Stanley, forced to know the truth about herself once again.

Blanche: But then he came back. He returned with a box of roses to beg my forgivness [...]

Stanley: Was this before or after the telegram came from the Texas oil millionaire?

Blanche: What telegram? No! No, after! As a matter of fact, the wire came just as-

Stanley: As a matter of fact there wasn’t no wire at all!

Blanche: Oh, oh!

Stanley: There isn’t no millionaire! And Mitch didn’t come back with roses ’cause I know where he is-

Blanche: Oh!

Stanley: There isn’t a goddam thing but imagination!

I’ve heard about this psychological reaction before in situations like divorce. Some kids whose parents got divorced try to tell people like teachers or friends that their parents are getting back together or that nothing changed or bothered them. I feel that Blanche tried to do the same, trying to act like her husband was never gay, that he simply died, or that she was still a proper southern lady while she was truly a woman known as a drunk whore in Laurel. Blanche regretted everything in the past, and as she tried to remain young looking and acting, she was trying to start over in New Orleans as if nothing had ever happened.

Street Car Name Desire: Blanche is a Psycho.

Blanche, in a Streetcar Named Desire is extremely insecure and searches for security in compliments and being desired.

Since her past husband was a homosexual and Blanche couldn’t “cure” him by being his wife leading to his suicide, she thought herself as less beautiful and less desirable to men in general.

Blanche: [...] There was something different about the boy, a nervousness, a softness and tenderness which wasn’t like a man’s, although he wasn’t the least bit effeminate looking-still that thing was there… He came to me for help. I didn’t know that. I didn’t find out anything until after our marriage when we’d run away and come back and all I know was I’d failed him in some mysterious way and wasn’t able to give him the help he needed but couldn’t speak of! He was in the quicksands and clutching at me- but I wasn’t holding him out, I was slipping in with him!

Psychologically Blanche was completely messed up by this experience and completely changed herself. Once a proper aristocratic woman in the south, she became a well known woman, searching to be desired and possibly “save” the men who suffered with the problem her past husband suffered with by keeping herself open to multiple men.

Blanche: Yes, a big spider! That’s where I brought my victims. Yes, I had many intamacies with strangers. After the deateh of Allan- intimacies with strangers was all I seemed able to fill my empty heart with. . . I think it was panic, just panic, that drove me from one to another, hunting for some protection- here and there, in the most- unlikely places- even, at last, in a seventeen-year-old boy [...]

When Blanche arrived at New Orleans, she c ouldn’t continue her way of finding comfort like she did in Laurel so she tried a new approach. Since she was caught and lost her job, she tried to convince everyone in her sisters town that she was still a virgin and was truly still a proper woman from the south. She looked for confidence by asking for compliments and doing her best to look well in hopes of finding another husband, or another young man to “save”.