🍖 Entry 4: Stanley: Power & Class
Entry 4: Labor, Power & the Violence of “Realism” — Stanley’s Class Performance
Scene One — Wages and possession
Stanley arrives with a package of meat and throws it to Stella, marking the home as an extension of his labor and appetite. The gesture frames provision as ownership and sets the play’s pattern of equating work with the right to rule the domestic space.
Scene Two — The Code and the trunk
Stanley invokes the “Napoleonic code” to justify rifling Blanche’s trunk and demanding proof about Belle Reve, turning marital property law into a warrant for intrusion (Williams sc. 2). The phrase gives legal cover to a search already driven by suspicion and status anxiety.
Scene Three — Poker night as territory
The poker table organizes a male enclave where volume, drinking, and space‑taking define power. When Stanley explodes, the room’s order follows his will. Stella’s temporary departure and quick return show how the apartment is socially arranged around his moods, not mutual safety.
Scene Eight — Birthday authority and ethnic class pride
At the birthday dinner he asserts, “Every man is a king! … I am the king around here” (Williams sc. 8). In the same argument he rejects slur and stakes an assimilated masculinity: “I am not a Polack… I am a one hundred per cent American” (Williams sc. 8). The bus‑ticket “gift” that follows makes economic power visible as punishment, using money to expel Blanche rather than to repair the household.
• Scene 1: Stage directions show Stanley returning with meat for Stella, treating provision as a public performance of ownership (Williams sc. 1).
• Scene 2: He invokes “the Napoleonic code” while rifling Blanche’s trunk and demanding proof about Belle Reve (Williams sc. 2).
• Scene 3: The poker night establishes a male enclave; the table, drink, and noise operate as markers of territory (Williams sc. 3).
• Scene 8: “Every man is a king! … I am the king around here” (Williams sc. 8).
• Scene 8: “I am not a Polack… I am a one hundred per cent American” (Williams sc. 8).
• Scene 8: He gives Blanche a one‑way bus ticket as a “birthday gift,” using money to expel rather than repair (Williams sc. 8).
Stanley’s labor identity promises fairness by rules, but in practice the rules he cites—poker rules, household rules, and the Napoleonic code—are applied to secure his advantage. “King” rhetoric turns provision into hierarchy, so that food, service, and shelter circulate as commodities under his control. Williams complicates class sympathy by giving Stanley acute grievances about snobbery while also showing how legal and economic language can mask coercion. When the right to know and the right to own become the right to expose and to expel, realism hardens into domination.
Socio‑economic lens: The play links wage labor to jurisdiction over domestic space; money and legal codes function as tools of control rather than mutual security.
Gender lens: Masculinity is performed through possession—of meat, of the table, of information about a woman’s past—so that “king” rhetoric justifies policing Stella’s and Blanche’s dignity.
Text‑to‑world. Arguments about who “pays the bills” still surface as claims to decide whose stories and bodies matter at home. Law can protect dignity or become a script for control depending on who wields it and why. Williams asks whether respect for work requires others to accept humiliation, or whether dignity sets limits on what wages can buy.
This reminds me of the silly arguments I used to have my brother over who has or can do what; a stage we all seem to grow out of in life, but Stanly seems absorb it in a different way.