KEY LITERARY ELEMENTS

PREFACE

A Streetcar Named Desire, published in 1947, is one of the better known and much
staged plays of Tennessee Williams. Williams turned to his personal life for
Themes and subject matter for his plays, and yet there is certain universality about
them, for his own life aptly depicted the shattering of the American Dream and its
effect on the American people. These domestic dramas, therefore, depict the
tragedy and despair of almost every household. This is what makes Williams' plays
relevant to the reader. Studying them will, therefore, help the reader to learn more
about himself and about the playwright.

SETTING

A Streetcar Named Desire is set in the residence of the Kowalskis located in a

poor, yet charming neighborhood of the French Quarter in New Orleans,
Louisiana. At the Kowalskis, the reader is introduced to the characters that are of
varied origins in their nationalities, in their backgrounds, and in their beliefs.
Through the play, therefore, the reader is given a glimpse of the world in
coexistence.

LIST OF CHARACTERS

Major Characters

Blanche Dubois

The central character and the tragic heroine of the play. She is a "moth-like"
creature who is overly sensitive and overly proud of her aristocratic background.
She is a stranger to New Orleans with its rough, boisterous ways. She lives in an
illusory world in order to shield her promiscuity, prompted by a very young
marriage that ended in tragedy. She seeks refuge with her sister Stella and her
husband Stanley after losing her teaching position. She is dubbed as a misfit by
Stanley and conveniently sent off to the state institution by Stella and her husband.

Stanley Kowalski

Stella's domineering and possessive husband and Blanche's brother-in-law. Of

Polish origin, he represents all that is virile, masculine, common, and boisterous in
life. Vengeful in nature, he becomes Blanche's nemesis, spoils her chance of a
possibly happy marriage with his best friend, Harold Mitchell (Mitch), and rapes
her himself.
Stella Kowalski

Blanche's younger sister, and Stanley's wife. She is a figure of silent suffering and
tremendous compromise. Despite her gentle and refined background, she has
surrendered to Stanley's domineering ways, for she truly loves him and enjoys the
physical pleasures he provides. She feels sorry for Blanche but sacrifices her to the
state institution to save her marriage.

Harold Mitchell (Mitch)

Stanley's poker friend and Blanche's last hope for a husband. He is sensitive in
nature, like Blanche, but also mediocre. He listens to Stanley's story of Blanche's
promiscuous past and decides to forget her, thus triggering her madness;
unfortunately, he repents too late to change the course of events.

Minor Characters

Eunice and Steve Hubbel

The Kowalski's landlords and upstairs neighbors. Although helpful by nature, they
have their own domestic problems and quarrels. Steve is a poker-playing friend of
Stanley.

Pablo Gonzales

A Spaniard who is a poker playing friend of Stanley.

Negro Woman

A helpful neighbor.

A Young Man

The newspaper boy who collects for the subscription to the paper. Blanche flirts
with him, for he reminds her of her deceased "boy" husband.

A Mexican Woman

A vendor of artificial flowers used in funerals. She reminds Blanche of her

numerous encounters with death.

A Doctor

A gentleman whose kindness persuades Blanche to leave for the state institution.

A Nurse
A rough, desensitized employee of the state institution who has accompanied the
doctor.

CONFLICT

Protagonist

Blanche Dubois, representative of the fallen aristocracy of the south, is a misfit

who is trying to straighten out her life while taking refuge in New Orleans with her
relatives, Stella and Stanley Kowalski.

Antagonist

Stanley, a domineering man with common ways, is set against Blanche and is
ultimately responsible for her descent into insanity and placement in the state
institution.

Climax

The climax of the play occurs when Stanley totally overcomes Blanche and rapes
her, causing her to cross from tenuous sanity into insanity.

Outcome

The play ends in tragedy with Blanche being sent to live at the state mental
institution.

Note:

The conflict also operates on a symbolic level with the protagonist as the
aristocratic old South, represented by Blanche, being destroyed by the new
Industrial Age, represented by Stanley. Tenessee Williams clearly reveals that the
genteel tradition of the Old South cannot successfully survive in the new age.

PLOT (Synopsis)

Blanche Dubois, who has been fired from her teaching job, arrives unannounced at
the small two-room apartment of her sister, Stella Kowalski. Stella, who lives with
Stanley, her rough and domineering husband, in a poor section of the French
Quarter in New Orleans, welcomes her older sister.

Blanche is shocked by the looks and size of the apartment and expresses her doubts
about the lack of privacy, but she refuses to go to a hotel for she cannot bear to be
alone. Blanche also drinks heavily to calm her nerves, but initially hides the fact.
Blanche knows that her youth is slipping away and wants to be reassured, which
Stella dutifully does. Blanche also reveals that Belle Reve; their old, aristocratic,
and palatial house in Laurel, no longer belongs to them. She speaks of the struggle
it took to hang on to the place and expresses resentment that Stella had taken an
easy escape route by marrying Stanley, a Polish foreigner. Blanche describes her
long vigils at the bedside of the dying members of the family and how the house
had to be mortgaged to pay for the funeral expenses.

Stanley arrives, and Blanche introduces herself. He is an ex-soldier, every inch a

male and very proud of it. He plays poker with his friends and is fond of drinking
and bowling. He is not very comfortable about Blanche's visit and does not make
her feel very welcome. He is a very dominating person. He is cold and extremely
practical, demanding to see the bill of sale for Belle Reve and resenting the fact
that, as Stella's husband, he has lost his lawful share in the property. He suspects
that Blanche has bought fur coats and jewelry by cheating Stella and Stanley of
their share of Belle Reve.

The next day, Stella and Blanche return from a late night show to find Stanley
playing poker with his rough friends. Blanche is attracted to Harold Mitchell, the
mildest of the poker players; he appears to have some sensitivity, and he takes an
interest in her as well. But the evening is not pleasant. Stanley has been losing
heavily and cannot bear to do so. He becomes mean and sarcastic, with his temper
steadily rising. He ends the evening by striking Stella, who is pregnant. To
guarantee Stella's safety, Blanche takes her upstairs to the apartment of the
landlord, but Stanley calls his wife downstairs, and they soon make up.

The following morning, Blanche scolds Stella for giving in to such a boorish
husband and suggests a solution. She will approach Shep Huntleigh about helping
them; he is an old admirer and a Texas oil billionaire. Blanche then reveals that her
funds have run down to a mere 65 cents, and she is desperate to change her
situation. She cannot bear to be under Stanley's roof and criticizes him for his
vulgar, animalistic ways. Reminding Stella of their old aristocratic life in Laurel,
Blanche encourages Stella to strike out at her aristocratic husband. Stanley, who
secretly overhears this conversation, realizes that Blanche is a threat to his
marriage. He will never be able to forgive Blanche.

Blanche tries to grow closer to Mitch. After a date, she reveals her tragic past to
him. She married a very young boy named Allan whom she later discovered with
another man. When she expressed her disgust to him, he committed suicide. She
has been unable to overcome the trauma of his death and her accompanying guilt
complex. Mitch, too, has had a tragic past. He loved a dying girl and cannot forget
her; and now, still single, he looks after his ailing mother with dedication. After
their first date, Blanche speaks to Stella of her growing hopes for marrying Mitch
and how she would now like to settle down and make him happy. Blanche,
however, seems to have trouble with faithfulness. She flirts with Stanley and kisses
the young newspaper boy who comes to the door. She blames her promiscuity on
her feeling lonely and fearful after the death of her husband. To help her forget her
trauma and guilt, she had brief affairs with several soldiers at an army camp in
Laurel. Her behavior was so sad that she was turned out of the Flamingo Hotel,
where she stayed after Belle Reve was lost. She lost her job as a schoolteacher
because of a fling with a seventeen-year old student. In fact, she has been
permanently exiled from Laurel.

THEMES

Major

People are products of their past as evidenced by Blanche being destroyed by the
events in her life. Her young husband has an affair with an older gentleman.
Because of her aristocratic past, Blanche is totally disgusted with his behavior, and
when she tells him so, he commits suicide, leaving her with feelings of loneliness
and guilt. To alleviate the pain of the past, she slips from one sexual affair to the
next and begins to drink heavily. This behavior causes her to lose her teaching job,
her place in Laurel society, and her self- respect. With no other place to turn, she
seeks refuge with her sister Stella and her husband Stanley. When they find out the
truth of her past, they reject her too, and she slips into insanity.

Minor

Fate is cruel, and human desire often leads to death (both literal and figurative).
(Remember that the Streetcar named Desire leads to the Streetcar named Cemetery,
and Blanche rides both of them.) Everything that Blanche wants from life seems to
crumble in front of her. She loved her young husband and loses him, first to an
older man and then to suicide. She fights to save her Old Southern roots and the
family mansion, but loses them both. She fights to regain her self-respect and for a
future with Mitch, and Stanley destroys her chances for either. She fights to hold
on to her sanity amidst mounting disasters, but loses that battle as well. At the end
of the play, hers is not a literal death; but as she is taken off to the mental
institution, the true Blanche is dead.

On a symbolic level, Blanche represents the Old South and Stanley represents the
new industrialized age. Tennessee Williams states, through this symbolic use of
characters, that the genteel ways of the Old South have been forever destroyed by
the coarseness and brutality of the modern age.

MOOD
The mood of the entire play is dark and somber, a reflection of the decadence and
loss described in the play. Blanche has lost her young husband, her family
mansion, her job, her self-respect, her new boyfriend Mitch, her trust in and by her
family, and finally her sanity.

BACKGROUND INFORMATION

Author Information

Tennessee Williams (1911-1983) was born in Columbus, Mississippi. His real

name was Thomas Laniear Williams. He spent his childhood years in the home of
his maternal grandfather, who was a rector, with his mother and only (elder) sister,
Rose. His father was a traveling salesman with a shoe company. His father
uprooted the family by taking them from the rural rectory to stay with him in a
grim city apartment in St. Louis. Both mother and son suffered a rude cultural
shock. Williams also suffered under his father Cornelious, who was offended by
his son's quiet pursuits and his interest in books. His mother's southern gentility,
derived from a Puritan/Quaker ancestry and conflicted with the father's rough
ways, that included long poker games, drinking bouts, and rough language.

Thomas began writing stories as early as age eleven. A favorite pastime for his
sister and him was to make up tales, which he would often record. As his family
atmosphere grew more unhappy, Thomas isolated himself. To avoid the family
conflicts, he increasingly took to writing stories alone behind a closed door, instead
of making them up with Rose. His sister reacted to the parents' fighting in a more
tragic way. From a spirited child, she slowly grew into a passive, beautiful girl
whose interaction with the world was confined to playing recorded music,
attending an occasional movie, or caring for her collection of glass miniature
animals. In fact, Rose was so depressed that she failed to mature into adulthood
and was sent to an asylum. At the asylum, she had a lobotomy that greatly troubled
her brother. The tragic Rose became the model for Laura Wingfield
in The Glass Menagerie.

Thomas attended the University of Missouri for three years but left after failing the
R.O.T.C. program. His father's influence landed him a clerical job in the shoe
factory but not before he had found solace in alcohol. After a miserable two years
at the warehouse, when he would stay up long hours writing into the night, he
suffered a nervous breakdown. In order to recuperate, he went to his grandfather's
house in Memphis, Tennessee. Thomas returned to college at Washington
University in St. Louis, where he joined a writer's group, and then entered the
University of lowa in 1938, to complete his course work.
Tennessee Williams performed odd jobs and led a bohemian existence in order to
concentrate on his writing. In 1940, he received the Rockefeller Fellowship. His
first major success was with his autobiographical
play, The Glass Menagerie, written in 1944-45. After that success, Williams was
recognized as an outstanding dramatist. In 1948 and again in 1955, he won the
Pulitzer Prize.

Williams' life was full of vicissitudes, and his Memoirs tell of his mental
breakdowns, his problems with alcohol, his health problems, his constant fear of
death, his acute depression after Rose's lobotomy, and his suicidal tendency after
the death of his companion of fourteen years, Frank Merlo.

In his writing, Williams is an intensely personal playwright and a literary moralist.

Art and life are masterfully dramatized in his work, for he felt an intense need to
identify with his characters in order to bring them to life. The dominating Themes
of his plays are the conflict between the puritan and the cavalier and the relation
between life and art. He often portrays these Themes through his female characters,
for women were always at the root of his deepest emotions.

Despite being influenced by D.H. Lawrence and Genet, Tennessee Williams wrote
in the Southern tradition. He romanticized the south and presented an idealized
notion of southern people and southern society. Using history and myth, he
sentimentally brought the Old South to life and seemed to worship everything
found there. Thus, Williams is a distinctly regional writer.

LITERARY/HISTORICAL INFORMATION

Thomas Lawier Williams, alias Tennessee Williams, lived and wrote in a private,
neurotic cocoon. Oblivious of external influences though D.H. Lawrence and
Genet influenced him to some extent, he was an intensely personal writer. Topical
to the extent of being a literary recluse, he emerged as a great and original
playwright.

Although Williams lived amidst troubling historical events, his plays do not
directly portray the times. The setting for The Glass Menagerie is the post-
Depression Thirties, and A Streetcar Named Desire is set in the war-torn years of
the forties; both times were periods of radical and turbulent events, but they are not
developed in the plays.

Most of Williams' characters are based on real people in his life, many of them
family members. Stanley Kowalski resembles Williams' father Cornelius in his
rough, boisterous ways, in his foul language, and in his love for poker and alcohol.
His character Tom Wingfield writes poetry by night while working in a shoe
factory by day. Like Thomas, Tom Wingfield feels compelled to leave home in
order to write, but that is where the similarity ends. Laura Wingfield, who suffers a
psychosis, is modeled on Williams' sister Rose. Both the real woman and the
fictional character are preoccupied with listening to records and collecting
miniature glass animals.

Williams often seems nostalgic for the past. For his female characters, he chooses
women with a solid, but romantic, southern background; he shows how the
aristocratic lifestyle fades around them. Blanche Dubois is one such woman who
clings to the past with a compulsive sense of duty, just as Amanda Wingfield
compulsively reminisces about her 17 gentleman callers on a Sunday afternoon.
Both women chase dreams of the past in an increasing urbanized and industrialized
present. This conflict is the basis for most of his fiction,
including A Streetcar Named Desire.

QUOTES

Blanche: They told me to take a street-car named Desire... (p15)

Stanley: WhatÂ’s a rhinestone? Stella: Next door to glass. (p36)

Blanche: IÂ’m sorry, but I havenÂ’t noticed the stamp of genius even on
StanleyÂ’s forehead. (p50)

Mitch: Poker shouldnÂ’t be played in the house with women. (p58)

Stanley: Stell-lahhhhhhh! (p59)

Blanche: What youÂ’re talking about is brutal desire-just-Desire! - the name of

that rattle-trap of a street-car that bangs through the Quarter, up one old narrow
street and down another. (p70)

Blanche: Thousands of years have passed him right by, and there he is-Stanley
Kowalski!-surivivor of the stone age! Bearing the raw meat home from the kill in
the jungle! And you-you here-waiting for him! Maybe heÂ’ll strike you or maybe
grunt and kiss you! That is, if kisses have been discovered yet! Night falls and the
other apes gather! There in the front of the cave, all grunting like him, and swilling
and gnawing and hulking! His poker night!-you call it-this party of apes!
Somebody growls-some creature snatches something- the fight is on! God! Maybe
we are a long way from being made in GodÂ’s image, but Stella-my sister-there
has been some progress since then! (p72)
Stanley: DonÂ’t ever talk that way to me! "Pig-Polack-disgusting- vulgar-
greasy!"-them kind of words have been on your tongue and your sisterÂ’s been too
much around here! What do you two think you are? A pair of queens? Remember
what Huey Long said-"Every Man is a King!" And I am the king around here, so
donÂ’t forget it! (p107)

Stanley: WeÂ’ve had this date with each other from the beginning. (p130)

Stella: I couldnÂ’t believe her story and go on living with Stanley. (p133)

Steve: This game is seven card stud. (p142)