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| A Streetcar Named Desire - Tennessee Williams (1947) |
A Streetcar Named Desire is a 1947 play, written by American playwright Tennessee Williams. The Play centres around Blanche Dubois who - after losing her family home, Belle Reve (Beautiful Dream) - goes to live with her sister, Stella, and her brother-in-law, Stanley Kowalski, in their two room apartment in Elysian Fields (named after the afterlife of ancient Greek heroes) in New Orleans.
Throughout the play Stanley and Blanche represent polar opposites in terms of gender. Stanley is presented as a archetypal male; his character is introduced as he is "Bearing the raw meat home from the kill in the jungle", throwing a parcel of meat at his wife. Blanche is usually decorated with pastel frills and jasmine perfume, and her nervous and flirtatious mannerisms convey a stereotypical femininity. However, where Stanley proves himself to be exactly the sort of sub-human alpha that he appears to be (and that Blanche accuses him of being), Blanche is not all that she appears. Blanche's Southern Belle exterior is carefully created, and the discrepancy between her outer appearance and reality - whether it be her real age, the truth of her past relations with men, or the genuine reasons she left Laurel - once uncovered by Stanley, proves to be her undoing. Blanche's refusal to acknowledge reality eventually leads to her losing her grip on it; and in Blanche, the theme of fantasy's inability to overcome reality manifests itself.
Themes and Relevant Quotes:
Gender
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Appearance vs. Reality
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Sexuality and Impurity
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Aging and Death
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Class Divides
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"There is something about her uncertain manner, as well as her white clothes, that suggests a moth." - Description of Blanche
"his emblem of a gaudy seed bearer" - Description of Stanley "How about by supper, huh?" - Stanley to Stella "... you'd better give me some money." - Stella to Stanley "What such a man has to offer is animal force and he gave a wonderful exhibition of that!" - Blanche |
"Her delicate beauty must void a strong
light" - Description of Blanche
"Myself, myself, for being such a liar!" - Blanche "... make a little - temporary magic - just in order to pay for - one night's shelter!" - Blanche "I want to deceive him enough to make him - want me..." - Blanche "There isn't a goddam thing but imagination!" - Stanley |
"The houses are
mostly white frame, weathered grey"
"faded white stairs" "around the
dim white building" -
Descriptions of Elysian Fields
"Blanche is bathing." - Stage directions "Then they come together with low, animal moans." - Description of Stella and Stanley "He smashed all the light bulbs with the heel of my slipper!... I was - sort of - thrilled by it." - Stella "But there are things that happen between a man and a woman in the dark - that sort of make everything else seem - unimportant." - Stella "Virgo is the virgin." - Blanche |
"You see I still have that awful vanity about my looks even now that my looks are slipping!" - Blanche
"All of those deaths! The long parade to the graveyard!" - Blanche "... funerals are pretty compared to deaths." - Blanche "It isn't enough to be soft. You've got to be soft and attractive. And I - I'm fading now!" - Blanche |
"[Defensively, noticing Blanche's look]: It's sort of messed up right now but when it's clean it's real sweet." - Eunice
"Oh, I guess he's just not the type that goes for jasmine perfume, but maybe he's what we need to mix with our blood now that we've lost Belle Reve." - Blanche "The Kowalskis and the Dubois have different notions." - Stanley "But what I am is a one hundred percent American, born and raised in the greatest country on earth and proud as hell of it, so don't ever call me a Polack." "Y'know how indifferent I am to money." - Blanche |
Critical Responses
- “[Williams is] presenting the pessimistic view of modern man destroying the tender aspects of love... And, in Blanche’s refusal to submit, she is being portrayed as the last representative of a sensitive, gentle love whose defeat is to be lamented” - Blanche Dubois: A Re-Evaluation (Constance Drake)
- "Blanche is dangerous. She is destructive. She would soon have him and Stella fighting. He’s got things the way he wants them around there and he does not want them upset by a phony, corrupt, sick, destructive woman. This makes Stanley right! Are we going into the era of Stanley?" - From Elia Kazan's director's notebook
- "...the play is structured on the basis of the oppositions past/present and paradise lost/present chaos; the characters are defined in terms of the way they relate to time, or, in other words, by their ability or lack of ability to accept or adapt to the historical process." - Myth, Ritual and Ideology (Ana Lucia Almeida Gazolla)
- "Scholars do not agree about a precise meaning, a single idea that informs the thematic framework of Streetcar. They do, nevertheless, see the play as dramatizing basic human conflicts—struggles not peculiar to twentieth-century man [or woman], but common to all humanity." - A Streetcar Named Desire: Twenty-Five Years of Criticism (S. Alen Chesler)
- "Streetcar is a cry of pain; forgetting that is to forget the play." - Regarding Streetcar (Arthur Miller)
