A Streetcar Named Desire (1947). Content and Description

A Streetcar Named Desire had its Broadway debut on December 3, 1947. A commercial and critical success, the play ran for 855 performances— Williams’s longest Broadway run—and was the first ever to earn theater’s triple crown: the Pulitzer Prize, Donaldson Award, and Drama Critics’ Circle Award. More than half a century later, it has become part of American literary and popular culture. The American Theatre Critics Association voted it the most significant American play of the 20th century; the American Film Institute voted the 1951 Academy Award-winning film adaptation one of the 50 greatest American movies of all time.

Set in New Orleans’s Garden District, Streetcar tells the story of Blanche DuBois’s six-month stay with her brother-in-law and pregnant sister, Stanley and Stella Kowalski. After the bank forecloses on the DuBois family’s Mississippi Delta plantation, Blanche moves into the Kowalskis’ two-room apartment. Confined to tight quarters, the refined Blanche and coarse Stanley quickly develop an aversion to one another, forcing Stella to mediate their arguments. Mitch, one of Stanley’s poker buddies, falls in love with Blanche but calls off their engagement when Stanley reveals Blanche’s checkered sexual history.

The play climaxes on Blanche’s birthday. After Stanley announces Mitch’s change of heart, Stella goes into labor. While Stanley and Stella are at the hospital, Mitch drops by, making a lewd sexual advance toward Blanche, who kicks him out. A few hours later, Stanley returns alone, and a seemingly routine Blanche-Stanley fight climaxes in rape. Unable to bear any more psychological strain, Blanche descends into madness. In the final scene Stella reluctantly agrees to commit Blanche to a psychiatric ward.

When Streetcar opened on Broadway, Williams was already considered one of America’s most promising young playwrights. The Glass Menagerie had made him the talk of New York’s theater aficionados. These plays share several recurring character types, themes, and images. Both feature aging southern belles—Blanche DuBois and Amanda Wingfield—in alien environments. Although Blanche lacks artistic talent in the conventional sense, she has an artist’s temperament. Until she was fired for making a sexual advance toward one of her students, she taught high- school English in Laurel and by all accounts retained a lasting love of literature.

With a chameleonlike ability to inhabit different roles, she is an artful manipulator. Her temperament, like Tom Wingfield’s, makes her an outcast. Her encroaching madness reflects shades of Laura Wingfield. Yet, as telling as the similarities are, the differences between Williams’s first two big hits reveal even more. With Streetcar Williams returned to exploring sex and violence, two issues he toned down considerably for Menagerie. In retrospect, Williams’s first great success seems an aberration for a writer now remembered for composing some of the 20th century’s most inflammatory dramas.

In post-World War II America Streetcar was shocking. At the time domestic abuse and rough language were considered unsuitable for the stage. Even more unthinkable was Williams’s refusal to moralize so-called aberrant sexual behavior. In 1947 such issues were considered inappropriate for public conversation, much less the high art of Broadway.

As in many of Williams’s works, character development drives A Streetcar Named Desire. While the story proceeds in chronological time, the incremental revelation of Blanche’s past creates most of the scene- to-scene anticipation. As do Maggie Pollit (Cat on a Hot Tin Roof), Lawrence Shannon (Night of the Iguana), and Amanda Wingfield (The Glass Menagerie), Blanche alienates those around her. She is petty, materialistic, insensitive, and offensive. She chides Stella about her impoverished lifestyle and fallen social standing; she considers Stanley “ape-like” and “sub-human.”

She is not, however, the story’s villain. In spite of her often-repugnant behavior and commentary, she conveys an inner humanity. She is quintessentially southern, yet her struggles resonate with the general American experience. Even those unfamiliar with southern culture and history can find something of themselves in Blanche’s character. Like Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Sophocles’ Oedipus, Blanche is an icon of her culture, a character type with universal appeal.

In Blanche’s character, the conflict between social norms and the individual’s freedom to act according to her desires is on full display. Blanche fancies herself a lady of refined taste, manners, and values. Having internalized the ideal of southern decorum, she judges and offends those who fail to conform to the ideal. She is also emotionally impoverished and terrified of losing her attractive face and trim figure.

Several times during the course of the play, Blanche evades direct light, hoping to obscure both her physical features and emotional pain. Blanche is not blind to the light symbolism. She uses the metaphor to describe her only experience with love: “It was like you suddenly turned a blinding light on something that had always been half in shadow.” Although she dodges an intruding headlight while confessing her guilt over her teen husband’s suicide, the “blinding light” shines through her facade, if only temporarily.

When Stanley reveals her seamy past, he unwittingly converts her from a conceited snob into a tragic heroine. Stanley’s fault-finding backfires, and audiences recognize that as her age advances, so, too, does her desperation, causing her to seek companionship with men whose desire for her temporarily restores her delicate self-image. Yet, every attempt at restoration takes her further from her goal. With each extramarital affair she betrays the very standards of propriety by which she wants to live. Ironically, in attempting to rebuild an idyllic feminine image, she develops a sordid reputation in Laurel.

The most heartrending aspect of Blanche’s predicament is the degree to which she has internalized an unattainable ideal. Her psyche bends under the glare of another’s judgmental gaze; it breaks when she judges herself. And yet, her self-criticism lies buried deep inside her. By the play’s end she has only grown less self- aware; her identity has become inseparable from the standards that make her miserable. Under social and self-induced pressure her psyche ruptures. Certainly, being raped hastens her psychosis; however, her mental breakdown began developing long before she arrived in New Orleans.

As the play’s title suggests, desire is a central theme. Through Blanche, Stanley, Stella, and Mitch, Williams explores the thin line separating sexual passion and violence. Blanche yearns for emotional and financial support, as well as a world that conforms to antiquated southern norms. Mitch also wants to forge an emotional connection, but only with someone resembling his mother. As soon as he discovers Blanche’s seedy past, his compassion evaporates, replaced by a dominating will. Love turns to lust, tenderness to brutality. Stanley and Stella have an even stormier relationship.

The same passion that makes Stanley physically abusive drives him to despair when Stella momentarily leaves him. For both of them anger, love, and lust originate in the same emotional well. For Williams desire is the cornerstone of human existence; it is what separates humanity from other life-forms. Depending on whether or not it is fulfilled, desire is equally capable of producing unbridled ecstasy and unmitigated anguish.

Williams stands in a long line of playwrights, poets, and novelists obsessed with desire’s tragic consequences. From the Greek tragedians to Shakespeare, desire has been synonymous with conflict. Rather than creating an entirely new take on tragedy, Williams contributes a fresh perspective on an ancient theme. Tragedy, roughly defined, demarcates a subgenre of drama featuring a hero whose tragic flaw brings about his or her own demise. According to this definition, Streetcar is textbook tragedy. In Blanche, Williams imagines the consummate tragic hero who possesses a uniquely American flaw: the inability to assimilate into a rapidly modernizing environment.

In addition to their fully realized psychological profiles, Blanche and Stanley play symbolic roles. Blanche embodies the southern agrarian ideal, wistfully longing for an idyllic past and mythic landscape that survive only in her mind. Blanche’s idealized world, like the DuBois plantation, Belle Reve, is nothing more than a “beautiful dream.” Elia Kazan, who directed both the Broadway production and the Warner Brothers film, labeled Blanche “the emblem of a dying civilization, making a last curlicued and romantic exit” (“Notebook for a Streetcar Named Desire” 365). Conversely, Stanley represents everything Blanche abhors: the cruel, vulgar, all-too-real industrialized urban landscape.

Kazan described him as “the basic animal cynicism of [post-World War II America],” a man whose motto is “Eat, drink, get yours!” (365) Unlike Williams, who considered Blanche and Stanley equally flawed, Kazan envisioned the Blanche-Stanley relationship along a good/evil axis. Their differences notwithstanding, Kazan and Williams were convinced that Blanche and Stanley stood for incompatible world orders. That Blanche’s world was fated to lose from the outset is implied by symbols on her journey: After leaving Belle Reve, Blanche travels on a “street-car named Desire,” transfers “to one called Cemeteries,” and gets off at “Elysian Fields!” In her first lines, Blanche reveals her trajectory.

Fueled by desire, she is expelled from a beautiful dream only to arrive at death’s door, seeking passage to an afterlife reserved for antiquity’s virtuous and brave. The grotesquely ominous foreshadowing draws us into Blanche’s strange mixture of realism and fantasy, where her struggles with Stanley herald an ever-escalating battle between old and new, kindness and cruelty, imagination and reality, all lurking underneath the promise of the American dream. Williams portrays this dream, as the Kowalskis’ rundown apartment complex, as an ironic ruse that traps us within invisible bubbles, rules out hope for community, and precludes human kindness.

For Discussion or Writing:
1. When used to describe a piece of literature, tone signifies the quality or characteristics of a writer’s work that reveal his or her presuppositions and attitudes. What is the tone of Blanche’s final line, “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers”?

2. Under pressure from the Motion Picture Association of America and the Catholic Legion of Decency, the Academy Award-winning 1951 film adaptation of A Streetcar Named Desire censored the script in two important ways. First, it excluded all references to homosexuality in scene 6. Second, it eliminated the implied rape in scene 10. After reviewing the script and watching the film (paying close attention to these two scenes), discuss the impact of the changes. Why do you think the film’s Hollywood producers cut out these details? Does the film work as well without them? If you did not know that Blanche’s husband, Allan Grey, was gay, would his suicide make sense? Given that Blanche blames herself for his death, does her descent into madness fit? Without knowing Stanley raped her, would you find her madness in scene 11 believable?

3. Williams is famous for exploring gender roles in mid-20th-century America. With this in mind, how does A Streetcar Named Desire portray differences between men and women? Are those differences based on genetic or cultural factors? Why do you think it is all right for Stanley to consume alcohol openly with his friends while Blanche must hide and/or feel ashamed of her drinking?

4. Philip Kolin interprets the poles Stanley and Blanche inhabit as an embodiment of Williams’s “androgynous nature. Like Blanche, Williams saw himself as the fugitive artist, a victim of rejection and hysteria. . . . Yet Williams was also present in Blanche’s executioner, Stanley Kowalski,” whose sexual appetite Williams recognized in himself and “the rough homosexual trade [he] was accustomed to in the 1940s”. How is Williams’s internal strife like Blanche’s? Compared with Blanche, how is Williams’s inner turmoil influenced by external social forces?

5. The years between 1945 and 1960 make up one of America’s most conservative periods, especially concerning sexuality. With his envelope-pushing plays, Williams is often credited with normalizing the portrayal and discussion of sexuality in American theater. For the most part, however, the characters who resist accepting traditional sexual norms wind up lonely, frustrated, and disturbed. This is particularly true of Williams’s gay characters. How does American society deal with sexuality differently now than it did in 1947, when Streetcar was first produced? What similarities between then and now do you see? Consider comparing the play to a more contemporary film or novel that examines sexuality, such as Broke- back Mountain.