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A Streetcar Named Desire

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Tennessee Williams's masterfully written drama explores the extremes of fantasy versus reality, the Old South versus the New South, and primitive desire versus civilized restraint. Its meager 142 page spine is no indication of the complexity and significance that Williams achieves in his remarkable work. A strong aspect of the play is Williams's amazingly vivid portrayal of desperate and forsaken characters who symbolize and presumably resolve his battles between extremes. He created and immortal woman in the character of Blanche DuBois, the haggard and fragile southern beauty whose pathetic last grasp at happiness is cruelly destroyed. She represents fantasy for her many outrageous attempts to elude herself, and she likewise represents the Old South with only her manners and pretentions remaining after the foreclosure of her family's estate. The movie version of A Streetcar Named Desire shot Marlon Brando to fame as Stanley Kowalski, a sweat-shirted barbarian and crudely sensual brother-in-law who precipitated Blanche's tragedy. He symbolizes unrestrained desire with the recurring animal motif that follows him throughout the play. A third major character, Stella Kowalski, acts as mediator between her constantly conflicting husband and older sister. She magnifies the New South in her renounce of the Old pretentions by marrying a blue collar immigrant. Conflicts between these and other vividly colorful characters always in light of the cultural New Orleans backdrop provide a reader with a lasting impression and an awe for Williams's impeccable style and intense dialogue.

Tennessee Williams utilizes sounds and music throughout A Streetcar Named Desire to change the mood, to foreshadow the future events, and to reveal the inner workings of the character's minds. The use of music, especially the use of polka music, dictates the mood of the play. The rushed, pounding polka inspires a sense of insanity in the reader, and even more so from a person watching the play. The reader can tell that Blanche is slowly going insane just because of the powerful polka music. The music even shows what could have been, such as when, in the beginning of scene nine, Mitch saves Blanche from the tortuous polka. This symbolizes that Mitch could have saved Blanche from her ultimate insanity. The other major music in the book is the "Blue Piano." This music is often in the background when Stanley and Stella are acting like they are in love. This music almost seems to entice the two lovers into an even deeper state of loving each other. In the first scene, the "Blue piano" plays, and the married couple are flirting and having a good time with each other. This musical symbol is very powerful and important, enough so to be the subject of the final stage direction in the play. The play's "happily ever after" ending is characterized by "the swelling of the 'blue piano' and the muted trumpet." Without this symbolism, Stanley and Stella's love for each other would not be as evident, and scenes like the end of scene three would be much more confusing if the music was not being played. These two major pieces of music serve as translators for the reader and film patron; the music foreshadows, interprets character's thoughts and emotions, and changes the mood of the play.

Tennessee Williams' Pulitzer Prize winning masterpiece has been the source of controversy since it was written five decades ago. It is the story of the fallen Southern belle Blance Dubois, whose desperate illusions of grandeur are rent to shreds by her earthy and realistic brother-in-law, Stanley Kowalski. Touching on issues of prejudice, sexual codependence, mental breakdown, and rape, A Streetcar Named Desire is at times disturbing in its brutal honesty. Readings of this sultry play have found it to be anything from a critique of the conflict between the North and South in post Civil War America, to a subtle commentary on the struggles of Williams' life as a homosexual. The image of Stanley bellowing drunkenly to his wife Stella, as well as lines such as Blanche telling how she has "always depended on the kindness of strangers" have become so much a part of the American consciousness that they are recognizable even to those who are unfamiliar with Williams' work itself.

Tennessee Williams probably signed there his best play, at least the one that is best-known. It is entirely centered on a woman who flees from Mississippi to New Orleans to live, for a while, with her married sister. The two sisters were born in the Southern aristocracy that got bankrupt by not being able, or even refusing, to get into the new flow of time. One went away and married a working class immigrant who is in many ways uncultured and rough, even violent at times. But desire is stronger than that violence and love survives a row from time to time, provided truthfulness and some sensual sincerity exist. But that is only the secondary theme to which Blanche, the other sister, is confronted and this brings back her real drama that is burried in her memory. She married very young. Her husband was also very young and a poet. But she discovered that he also was gay and she could not accept it due to her southern aristocratic principles. He was an abomination and she told him so one night and he went out and killed himself. She never overcame her guilt and she delved into a more and more dissolute life with any man that could come along, till she went back to a substitute of her dead husband, a 17 year old boy. The family protested and she was expelled from the school system (she was a teacher) and from the city. Confronted to the life of her sister and husband, she regresses into southern sophistication. She comes across a man, Mitch, who could and even would like to marry her. But her sister's husband, wanting to get rid of her, exposes her lies about her past to his friend Mitch and his wife. He destroys the dream and Blanche sinks into some psychotic nightmare that becomes a complete breakdown when her brother in law, on the very night when his son was born, rapes her. The end is a lesson about the savage and wild world in which we live and in which life must go on, or, as actors say, the show must go on. Her sister has to come to terms with this sad event, accept it or rather negate it not to be broken up by the event, and sister and husband have to get rid of Blanche. Only one solution : to have her institutionalized. The play is an extremely strong exposure of that simple fact that one has to follow the trend and change along with the world, no matter how hard it may be to adapt, to survive and remain balanced and sane in an insane and completely incomprehensible world. It also exposes that one is in a way one's own victim when one is not able to accept the world the way it is and imposes rules from the past onto it. This is probably the worst crime because it leads other people into suffering or even death, and you into guilt. So what is the desire that is at stake on such a play ? Sexual desire ? Maybe. Sentimental desire ? Maybe. But first of all the desire to survive by paying the price you have to pay for it. It thus becomes the exposure of a society in which feelings, sentiments, sexual impulses are nothing but secondary emotions and pleasures that can gratify your life if you are able to adapt to the world and survive in it. This world is inhumane, dehumanized, extremely savage. Men and women are like animals who can only aim at surviving or satisfying their animal impulses. Culture, civilization, principles, ethics, everything really human becomes a trauma in such a world. At the time of the play the only outcome could be the sacrifice of those who cannot adapt. Has it really changed ?

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University of Perpignan

This is the play that became the movie that forever changed American film. And it's easy to see why: Streetcar is a gritty and at times depressing look at realism. The main point of the play is the battle between two worlds, the real world and the ideal one.
We have the two main characters, Blanche DuBois and Stanley Kowalski, foils of each other. Blanche wants to live in a la-la magical world of gentleman callers and fancy clothes, while Stanley wants to, uh, play poker and bed his wimpy wife. His world is harsh and he is definitely a cruel bastard, but his is the world in which we live in. Like my old high school history teacher taught me, you must make the distinction between what's real and what's only a dream. Blanche can't make that distinction, but doesn't realize it (not to mention has a dark life of her own), and in truth her destruction is caused in part by herself. We can all learn a lesson from this masterpiece: You have to stop living in Dream World before you are destroyed by the Real World.

Tennessee Williams' play "A Streetcar Named Desire" came to Broadway in 1947, won the Pulitzer Prize for drama, and was made into an award-winning film. But you don't have to wait to see a stage or video version of the play. "Streetcar" is one of those theatrical triumphs which also succeeds in book form as a compelling read.

Taking place in New Orleans, "Streetcar" tells the painful story of aging southern belle Blanche DuBois, her sister Stella, Stella's brutish husband Stanley, and the circle of people who frequent Stella's home. Williams creates an incisive examination of human sexuality and socioeconomic difference. His characters come to life with powerful dialogue; this play is a heartbreaking read.

A compelling companion text for "Streetcar" would be Eugene O'Neill's classic play "Anna Christie," which won the Pulitzer for the 1921-22 theater season. Like "Streetcar," "Anna" deals with male expectations of female sexuality in a powerful way.

Willams' Blanche is truly one of the most memorable female characters in United States literature. "Streetcar" is an unforgettable tapestry of desire, shame, and disturbing revelations. An essential text for anybody with an interest in 20th century drama.

This is another classic from my high school days that seems wasted on youth. How can a fifteen-year-old in prep school appreciate the desperation and human frailty of Blanche DuBois? Or the dichotomy inherent in Stanley Kowalski's passionate brutality?

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BLANCHE: What you are talking about is brutal desire--just--Desire!--the name of that rattle-trap street-car that bangs through the Quarter, up one old narrow street and down another...
STELLA: Haven't you ever ridden on that street-car?
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Many will have seen either the stage or film versions of Streetcar, but reading through Tennessee Williams' Pulitzer Prize-winning play allows for the depression to really set in. Readers may even recognize qualities in friends and family members approximating those of alcoholism or domestic violence.

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BLANCHE: A hot bath and a long, cold drink always give me a brand new outlook on life!
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There are so many great dialogue exchanges here, outside of the classic "kindness of strangers" quote. I'll snip a few of my favorites.

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MITCH: You ought to lay off his liquor. He says you been lapping it up all summer like a wild-cat!
BLANCHE: What a fantastic statement! Fantastic of him to say it, fantastic of you to repeat it!
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The abusive domestic relationship seemed a common theme in mid-20th Century America; witness both Streetcar and The Honeymooners. "One of these days...POW! Right in the kisser! One of these days Alice, straight to the Moon!"

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STANLEY: When we first met, me and you, you thought I was common. How right you was, baby. I was common as dirt. You showed me the snapshot of the place with the columns. I pulled you down off them columns and how you loved it.
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Very easy to get through this in a sitting or two. Very hard not to be emotionally moved, even if the dénouement, vis-a-vis Stanley and Blanche, was not obvious to me after that first reading many years ago.

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BLANCHE: Don't you just love these long rainy afternoons in New Orleans when an hour isn't just an hour--but a little piece of eternity dropped into your hands--and who knows what to do with it?
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Postscript: My own copy is the mid-80s Signet printing, which includes a 4-page Introduction by the author.

Tennessee Williams creates a strong sense of reality in A Streetcar Named Desire through the complexity of his characters; none emerge as truly good or truly bad, leaving only the contrast of strong and weak. For example, Blanche, the closest character to a heroine, literally falls apart through the course of the play, her weaknesses intensified by desire and exploited by Stanley. Although one may feel moved to pity Blanche, her collapse counters a basic character flaw of not being able to cope with reality, of preferring "a moonlight swim at the old rock quarry" to the dark house on Elysian Fields where all her problems dwell. Thus it is inevitable that Blanche should meet with tragedy. For some, it is also a just end: Blanche has led a life not deserving of much admiration, tempting young and sexually inexperienced boys, conducting notorious affairs ("everybody else in the town of Laurel knows all about her"), and at the same time still maintaining her pretensions and self-superiority. Equally complex and opposing Blanche on all fronts is Stanley, who represents the raw, survivalist animal Williams saw in people. The honest man Stanley, a poor Pole simply trying to make ends meet to support his wife and new family, senses the weakness and dependence in Blanche and recognizes it as a force completely in contrast with his own brute strength. Stanley scorns her frailties and simultaneously scorns her claims that she has been "the strong one," upholding her duty to the family by caring for her dying relatives, whereas her sister Stella fled to New Orleans with her husband. The honest man Stanley, who beats his wife almost recreationally and brings about the final destruction of Blanche, represents, then, not a true villain, but an archetype: Stanley is the survivor, the top dog in a dog-eat-dog world, stopping at nothing to preserve his own interests. His tremendous strength both complements and counters his brutality as he maneuvers (to his liking) the streetcar named Desire, whose course, for all but the uncannily strong, ends in ultimate destruction. Lastly, one must consider Stella, somewhat of a foil to Blanche, and also the least clear-cut of the main characters. For the most part, the audience knows little of Stella; most of what one can say about her is deduced. She is the closest to virtuous out of the three; she accepts her duty first as wife, hoping that her duty as sister will not interfere. Until around scene eight, she always gives those she loves the benefit of the doubt. Thus a conflict exists within her, a conflict unlike that within Stanley and Blanche. Rather than the desire versus destruction dichotomy, Stella suffers from being torn between her husband and her sister. And there is such a thing as being too trusting. In the end, Stella makes her decision not so much based on her sense of morality or even ethics, but instead on the blind faith she instills in the person closest her. Stella's greatest fault lies in her inability to trust herself and in her complete willingness to submit to those forces greater than her without the slightest hint of a fight. The final image of the play, in fact, leaves Stella weeping in her brutal husband's arms, "in [a] complete surrender to crying." Stella gives up. Her strength, though somewhat greater than Blanche's, fails her in Stanley's shadow, and certainly does not serve as a particular virtue. Rather, it keeps her going just long enough to thrust her little world into an inescapable mess. Had she been as weak as Blanche, the conflict between the doomed Blanche and the destructive Stanley would have been resolved much sooner, and with less incident. Had she been as strong as Stanley, the conflict may not have existed on such a level. Thus Stella represents a final human pattern: the regret for what might have been. Williams's characters simply reflect the different types of people he observed in what he believed was a grim life. In writing so much of these universal paradigms into his work, he lends to it a sense of reality unmatched by those seeking to portray the melodramatic conflict of good versus evil.

I would like to stress that the reader from the US who stipulated in April of last year that this play was 'Dull... very dull', obviously has no serious interest whatsoever in modern literature, or indeed, quite possibly, serious literature of any kind. I am not arrogant, and I am more than happy to accept other people's opinions, but for them to say that they couldn't even specify three themes within the play is plain ridicuous. How can you study any kind of literature without being able to acknowledge the merits and even the structure of books that you don't like? I do not particulary care for Chaucer, but I can still see that it has some kind of literary basis. For you to dismiss one of the greatest & most acclaimed works of this century as 'dull' is beyond belief. I can identify more than 3 themes wiithout even thinking about it too hard. What about Blanche's ongoing descent into madness, the way in which she has problems distinuishing between truth & illusion, the way in which she consistently aggrovates Stanley & his marriage, the class distinctions, the distinctions between culture & so called 'neandertahlism', the distinctions between the old & the new, for example, the old streetcar & the new, more powerful locomotive, and, most notably, the theme of love? Blanche obviously needs security in the arms of a mutual love, and this is clearly portrayed throughout the whole novel. Perhaps you should take another read of the play so that you can make a more informed opinion. A Steetcar Named Desire is by no means 'dull', but one of the most interesting and enjoyable works from a great playwrite.

I've just finished reading this book, and have decided it is the best book I've ever read. Tennessee Williams brings together Stella, Stanley - her brutish husband- and Blanche Dubois, Stella's sister. Blanche comes to live with Stella and Stanley after she is kicked out of a different town for being a flirt. Stella who is in denial about this tries her best to be a good host and comfort Blanche. Stanley is more wise than Stella and does research. Through a whirlwind of the blue piano that plays by their street, and poker nights, Blanche realizes she is no longer the sophisticated southern Belle she made herself out to be. Basically, Blanche goes crazy and was "forced" to deal with Stanley the way Stella has for the while they've been together.
I love this book because it's like nothing I've ever read before.