ENCW 205: Art & Identity in New Orleans

The following except from the book reminds me of Blanche from “A Streetcar Named Desire”:

“I wear my best silk gown for the picture—
white silk with seed pearls and ostrich feathers—
my hair in a loose chignon. Behind me,
Bellocq’s black scrim just covers the laundry—
tea towels, bleached and frayed, drying on the line.
I look away from his lens to appear
demure, to attract those guests not wanting
the lewd sights of Emma Johnson’s circus.
Countess writes my description for the book—
“Violet,” a fair-skinned beauty, recites
poetry and soliloquies; nightly
she performs her tableau vivant, becomes
a living statue, an object of art—
and I fade again into someone I’m not.”

I feel as though it encompasses the feelings of trying to show one characteristic of being demur in a place without the descriptions of a location, like how both Blanche tries to be for Mitch and how this woman describes how they hid her surroundings to make her more elegant. But at the end, it also describes how this is not how they truly are, which we find out of Blanche through Stanley’s looking into her past.

However, in contrast to Blanche’s almost delusional outlook onto what her life had become and the situation she finds herself in, I feel as though this woman knows the intentional image she is putting on for the camera, and how Bellocq and the Countess twist her image and sense of self, like so many before them have. The line “and I fade again into someone I’m not,” gives the sense that as a woman working in the redlight district of Storyville, she knows full and well how the people around her view her, even if it is different than how she truly is. She knows they try to make this almost immaculate image in their heads of a high-class women on a pedestal, a literal living statue, to get their own needs and desires met by the encounters they have with her by creating a fantasy of who they pretend she is in their lives.

To me, this is in contrast to Blanche, who does not know how people truly perceive her, and that they know who she is and what she does at the Flamingo during her time there. She keeps the image of herself that she is a high-class woman, a perfect southern belle, when the rest of society no longer views her this way due to her own actions. She continues on this deluded thinking even after moving in with Stella and Stanley and looking down on their lives as less than hers, when she is the one penniless and without a good reputation.

The woman from the above poem, however, is acutely aware of her circumstances, of the laundry piled in the corner and the truth of who she is and what she does. I believe she knows how others view her and she understands that this differing view of who she is is necessary to continue as she is, but also feels her true self fading behind the image she is masking with to be this demure fair-skinned beauty the countess describes for the book.