Blanche: The Life and Times of Tennessee Williams’s Greatest Creation

In this illuminating portrait, Schoenberger (Furious Love), an English professor at William & Mary, explores the cultural significance of Tennessee Williams’s bewitching, doomed Blanche DuBois—a “rich, multifaceted” character in A Streetcar Named Desire who evolved “through the psyches of the many actresses who played her.” Inspired by Williams’s high-strung, mentally ill sister Rose and perhaps his own alter ego, Blanche was born of “the Old South, land of terrors and of dreams,” and was emblematic of both the “exaggerated... femininity of the Southern belle” and the darker legacies it masked. Refined, English-born actor Jessica Tandy highlighted Blanche’s canny, schoolmarmish qualities when she played her in 1947, though she was sometimes outshone by costar Marlon Brando, while mentally fragile Vivien Leigh’s bipolar illness “began to assert itself” as she played the character on the London stage in 1951. Ann-Margret’s 1984 TV Blanche was a self-confident steel magnolia, while Jessica Lange’s 1992 portrayal brought out the character’s tragic, deluded loneliness. Black actor Jemier Jenkins’s 2018 depiction was fueled by a fragile, fighting spirit, and spotlighted “how Blanche helps us ‘unpack’ ” different ideas of feminism: Blanche is “a mess, but she wants better,” Jenkins said. Schoenberger’s detailed account is packed with vibrant cultural specifics and trenchant analysis, and she keeps up a brisk pace that will have readers turning pages. Theater and pop culture fans, take note. (Apr.)