“Streetcar is a cry of pain,” Arthur Miller once said, paying tribute to Tennessee Williams’s achievement. The most famous line in the play – “I have always depended upon the kindness of strangers” – contains the three most important words for the entire drama. What does it mean to be dependent (or independent)? What does it mean to be kind (or cruel)? And what does it mean to be a stranger? Are we all more or less strangers to one another – even to those we love, and who love us? In a sense, all of Williams’s work addresses these fundamental questions, and never more powerfully than in Streetcar.

Broadway and Film Adaptations

A Streetcar Named Desire was a triumphant success for Williams, running for two years on Broadway (1947-49) and opening in London’s West End in 1949. It followed his first hit play, The Glass Menagerie (1944). Although they are vastly different in style, the two plays have much in common: their focus on the fragile female and the faded southern belle, their empathy for the outcast and oppressed, their emotionally immature male characters, their depiction of the artist figure, their infusion of realism with theatricality and an expressive, poetic language that led critics to hail a new lyricism in a theatre that many felt had grown unimaginative and dull. These elements have continued to define Williams as a playwright, despite a much more diverse body of work that is often bravely experimental (e.g. Camino Real) and diverges sharply from these early plays.

The fact that he is still best known for Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955) is not just because they are enduring and powerful works; it is also due to Hollywood. The film versions of these plays have stubbornly implanted themselves in the cultural memory through stars like Richard Burton, Marlon Brando, Paul Newman, Elizabeth Taylor and Vivien Leigh, and it is often a great surprise to encounter the plays as they were originally written and discover that the film versions differ radically – most prominently through changed endings that Williams only reluctantly went along with – in ways that deeply affect our interpretations and understanding of the plays. Hollywood gave us indelible individual portrayals, such as Leigh as Blanche DuBois; but it also dampened some of Williams’s theatrical ideas and narrowed his range in the public’s imagination.

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The play is set in the New Orleans tenement (a building shared by multiple flats) home of Stella, married to Stanley Kowalski and expecting their first baby. Their neighborhood is called Elysian Fields. The play opens with the arrival of Stella’s older sister Blanche DuBois, a thirty-something former southern belle whose delicate, refined good looks collide with the earthy, steamy, run-down surroundings of the neighborhood where Stella and Stanley live. Her appearance also masks her true situation: she is destitute, having lost the family home, Belle Reve (French for “Beautiful Dream”), to creditors. She has also left her job as an English teacher due to her nerves, she claims. She has come to live with her sister as a last resort. She and Stanley dislike each other from the start, as she finds him “common” and unrefined while he feels she is snooty and intrusive.

Bits of Blanche’s past gradually come forth in the ensuing scenes, as the truth of her circumstances is revealed. She had married very young but was widowed and finds it hard to discuss her dead husband. She confides some of her story to Mitch, a friend of Stanley’s who, though he sweats profusely in the New Orleans heat, seems a cut above the other men with whom Stanley plays poker. They flirt. But the evening turns malicious when Stanley, drunk and violent, hits Stella, and she and Blanche flee to the neighbour upstairs, Eunice, who has obviously seen this sort of thing before, while it is a complete shock to Blanche.

Even worse for Blanche, Stella goes back downstairs and to bed with Stanley when he cries out for her repeatedly in the open courtyard. Mitch and Blanche then sit on the front steps and talk about what happened. Mitch apologises for his friend’s behaviour. The next morning Blanche, assuming that Stella regrets having returned to Stanley after being so badly mistreated by him, tells Stella sympathetically that she regards Stanley as an animal; Stanley overhears this but doesn’t let on. Stella shows where her allegiance lies by pointedly hugging and kissing Stanley in front of Blanche.

Tensions mount over the following weeks as Blanche and Stanley continue their frosty stand-off, with no truce in sight. Blanche is nurturing her relationship with Mitch in the hope that she will no longer be a burden to Stella. She reveals to him the truth about her marriage: her husband was gay, as she found out when she discovered him having sex with an older man. Blanche told her husband that he disgusted her and he killed himself.

Mitch is drawn even closer to Blanche by this revelation. But Stanley is trying to undermine her. He has been looking into her past and tells Stella that Blanche was fired from her job as a teacher because she had sex with a student, and lived in a hotel, the Hotel Flamingo, which is known for prostitution. Stella is so angry and upset by Stanley’s viciousness, and for telling Mitch this gossip, that she goes into labour and is rushed to the hospital. Blanche is alone and Mitch comes to confront her. She denies the stories Stanley has told him about her but finally admits they are true. She begs him to forgive her but he spurns her. He seems about to assault/rape her so she screams “fire!” and he flees.

Stanley returns from the hospital, where Stella is in labour. He and Blanche are alone and he apparently rapes her, saying as he carries her into the bedroom: “We’ve had this date with each other from the beginning.” This causes Blanche to have a nervous breakdown and her sister decides to have her committed to a mental institution. Weeks have passed and Stella doesn’t believe that Stanley has raped Blanche. Stanley, Mitch and their friends are playing poker when a doctor and matron arrive to take Blanche away; she fights against them and collapses on the floor, bringing Mitch to tears. The doctor gently helps her to her feet and she goes with him, saying: “Whoever you are, I have always depended upon the kindness of strangers.” At the play’s close, Stanley is comforting Stella while the poker game goes on.

Timeline of Events

• Blanche arrives in Elysian Fields on an evening in early May.

• Blanche meets Stanley.

• Later that evening, Stanley says he will research into Blanche's past after finding all her costume jewellery.

• The Poker Night, Blanche and Mitch get to know each other.

• Later in the evening of The Poker Night, Stanley violently attacks Stella.

• The next day, Blanche writes to Shep Huntleigh.

• Blanche makes sexual advances towards the young man.

• Later that evening, Blanche and Mitch go on a date.

• Blanche opens up to Mitch about what happened to her first love.

• The play skips to September time to Blanche's birthday party.

• Stanley tells Mitch the secrets of Blanche's past (we do not see this in the play but find out Stanley has told Mitch of Blanche’s past in scene 7).

• Stanley buys Blanche a ticket back to Laurel.

• Stella goes into labour.

• Mitch and Blanche argue about Blanche’s relentless lies. Their relationship is over.

• Stanley returns home from the hospital.

• Stanley sexually assaults/rapes Blanche.

• A few weeks later, Blanche is sent to a mental institution.

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Scene 1

Blanche arrives in Elysian fields. We are introduced to Stella, Stanley and Eunice. Blanche is excited to see her sister but as the scene unravels there is anger. We learn as readers that Stella left the family home to pursue her own life while Blanche was left to support the family home, Belle Reve, and has seen the death of her closest relatives. Blanche reminds Stella that she abandoned the family; Stella is angry at the suggestion she is to blame for the collapse of the family home.

Scene 2

Stanley is aggressively questioning Stella on how Belle Reve was lost. It is from this point in the play we learn of Stanley’s thirst for money and materialistic gain. He introduces the Napoleonic code to Stella, Blanche and the audience to assert authority over Stella. Stanley is convinced Blanche is lying to Stella and has sold Belle Reve to buy herself nice clothes and jewelry. Stanley claims he has people he can contact to check Blanche’s credibility. Blanche and Stanley have a heated discussion concerning the documents of Belle Reve while also being flirtatious to each other. We learn Stella is pregnant but Stanley spoils Stella’s secret by telling Blanche.

Scene 3

Stanley, Steve, Mitch and Pablo are playing poker. We learn of Mitch’s sick mother, exposing a sensibility in his character amongst the strong masculinity of Stanley and the other men. Blanche is introduced to the men. Stanley is sexually violent towards Stella to show off his control over her. Stanley throws the stereo out of the window as he is annoyed at the women interrupting the poker game with the noise. Blanche and Mitch get to know each other, talking about their mutual liking of literature. Stanley lashes out and beats Stella so she runs upstairs for security from her neighbour, Eunice. Stanley pines for her and she returns to him at the end of the scene.

Scene 4

Stella is downplaying Stanley’s violent attack the previous night whereas Blanche wants Stella to “face the facts” that Stanley will never change his violent ways. Stella claims Stanley’s violence is just a habit that she has to put up with. Blanche mentions her friend Shep Huntleigh in order to get her and Stella some money and jobs so Stella can leave Stanley. Blanche explains she can’t live with Stanley due to his violence. She also believes Stanley is common and a wild animal and Stella only married him as she was blinded by his looks and uniform. By marrying Stanley, Blanche believes Stella has abandoned her respectable upbringing.

Scene 5

Blanche writes to Shep in a letter that is a highly dramatised version of her life to impress Shep. Blanche is slowly adapting to Stella’s lifestyle by picking at the language they use (English slang). Blanche starts a conversation about zodiac signs to understand Stanley’s violence. Following from Scene 2, Stanley has been in contact with a man named Shaw to uncover Blanche’s past. Shaw associates Blanche with the Hotel Flamingo. Readers are left to assume that this is not a respectable place. Blanche anxiously asks Stella if she has heard any “unkind - gossip” about her as she reveals there was much talk of her in Laurel. Blanche’s past is slowly being exposed to the audience, followed with hints of insanity through her hysterical actions. The character “Young Man” appears concerning the local paper. Blanche talks to him in a sexual manner and later kisses him without consent.

Scene 6

Mitch and Blanche have been out together until late at an amusement park. Mitch is showing off his strength to Blanche. Blanche wants to know whether Stanley has told Mitch any rumors about her. Blanche is convinced that Stanley hates her. As the scene develops, Blanche reveals all about her deceased husband; she had been in love with him but discovered he was gay.

Scene 7

Some time has passed and it is now Blanche’s Birthday (September). Stella has set up a birthday tea for Blanche as she is still living with the Kowalski’s. Stanley’s hatred for Blanche is made obvious throughout the scene in a conversation with Stella. Stanley gets information at work that Blanche is hated in her hometown of Laurel. Blanche is associated with the Hotel Flamingo for a second time. It was claimed she lived there for a while before being forced to turn in her key and then she arrived in New Orleans. Stella refuses to believe what Stanley has said about Blanche. It is also revealed Blanche lost her teaching job as she was “mixed up” with a 17 year old student. Stanley has told Mitch all the rumors he hears about Blanche. Stanley has bought Blanche a ticket to leave New Orleans in the coming days as he refuses to have her stay any longer after learning of her past.

Scene 8

Stanley turns violent again at the birthday party when Stella asks him to help clear away the table. He proceeds to throw the items from the table onto the floor. He shouts at the women for calling him names and asserts his authority; “Every Man is a king”. Blanche tries to contact Mitch as he has not arrived at her party. Stanley tells Stella everything will be better and will go back to normal once she has had the baby and Blanche leaves. Stanley gives Blanche the bus ticket back to Laurel as a cruel birthday gift. Stella suddenly goes into labour after the argument with Stanley.

Scene 9

Mitch eventually arrives at the Kowalski’s house. Mitch’s impatience increases throughout the scene after all the rumours he has heard from Stanley. Mitch eventually tears the paper lantern away from the light so he can see Blanche’s face and can see how old she actually is. Mitch checked the credibility of Stanley’s rumours with a merchant in Laurel called Kiefaber. He confirms again that Blanche was involved in the Hotel Flamingo and was very promiscuous after the death of her young husband. Blanche’s speech throughout the scene is melodramatic and deranged. At the end of the scene, Mitch tries to force himself on Blanche. He claims he no longer wants to marry her.

Scene 10

Mitch has left. Blanche is left alone when Stanley returns home from the hospital. He says the baby still hasn’t arrived. Blanche brags to Stanley that Shep Huntleigh has invited her on a Carribean cruise. Both of them have been drinking. Blanche continues to insult Stanley and she later lies about Mitch’s return. She claims he returned with roses and begged for forgiveness. Stanley loses his temper with Blanche, claiming she’s a liar and that he has “been on to” her from the start. Stanley plays “rough-house” with Blanche. The connotations of this is left to the reader's interpretation but is generally interpreted as sexual assault, or even rape.

Scene 11

The final scene is set a few weeks later. Stella is home with the baby. Blanche did not return to Laurel. It is evident that Blanche tells Stella about what happened with Stanley but the decision is made that Blanche will be sent to a mental institution. Blanche’s recollection of the events with Stanley have been blamed on her poor mental state. However, Blanche believes she is awaiting a call from Shep Huntleigh to take her on the Caribbean Cruise that was previously mentioned. Blanche is distressed when the Doctor tries to take her away as she was not informed of the Doctor’s arrival. Stanley seems eager to get rid of her once the Doctor has arrived. The Doctor and Matron take Blanche away. Stanley and Stella return to their life as new parents.

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Two main aspects of A Streetcar Named Desire are strongly biographical in nature, and Williams used them repeatedly in his plays. One is the theme of mental illness, particularly that suffered by the fragile female. This is based on Williams’s sister Rose, who was given a lobotomy and institutionalised for much of her life after being diagnosed with schizophrenia. Williams movingly depicts Rose in A Streetcar Named Desire. The other is the theme of repressed homosexuality. The powerful combination of these themes in so many of his plays makes Williams one of the leading spokesmen of Otherness and oppression.

Elysian Fields

A Streetcar Named Desire does not disappoint; even its title, place names and characters breathe symbolic meanings. The opening stage directions evoke all the senses as they describe Elysian Fields, the run-down New Orleans neighborhood permeated by the faint whiff of “bananas and coffee”, the feel of the “warm breath of the brown river”, the sight of “a peculiarly tender blue” sky, and the sounds of a tinny “blue piano [that] expresses the spirit of the life which goes on here”.

Since Elysian Fields is the last stop on the line, the streetcar is paradoxically going nowhere, to a dead end. It also suggests a life lived in transit, yet with no clear destination (or a destination only defined by unfulfilled emotion – desire). The paradox of Blanche arriving in Elysian Fields where her sister lives is clear. In Greek mythology, Elysian Fields was the final resting place of the souls of the heroic and the virtuous, and Blanche seems to be neither. As she tells Mitch in their first scene together, Blanche means white and DuBois means woods in French, one of the many languages of New Orleans, a multicultural and linguistic melting pot – or as Williams puts it in the opening stage directions, “a cosmopolitan city” with a “relatively warm and easy intermingling of races in the old part of town”. Blanche, by contrast, self-identifies with the woods: a non-urban, dark, solitary environment.

Blanche’s Name 

It is common to think of Blanche as a blank white page waiting to be written on. But “to blanch” also means to turn pale, or to turn something else pale, through shock. It has other meanings, too, that all involve unnatural, traumatic or violent processes: in cooking, “to blanch” means to peel by scalding, or to immerse something briefly in boiling water; in botany, it means to whiten a plant by depriving it of light; and in coinage, it describes a method used to whiten metal. Although she pointedly does not flinch when faced with Stanley’s rough and overbearing manners during the poker scene, this initial bravado gives way to a scared retreat into the bathroom throughout much of the rest of the play and an increasing sense of being blanched by too harsh an emotional light. How can she survive in the rough environment of Elysian Fields? Far from being the resting place she is seeking, the neighborhood is densely populated, poor, hot and loud from the noise of jazz and streetcars and trains.

Motifs of Light, Music and Blanche as a Moth

As Williams indicates, she looks “incongruous” in this setting, a pure white “moth” fluttering dangerously against the harsh light to which it is inexorably attracted. She has just been seen by both the audience and the men on stage walking in and out of the light, as if flirting with it – although here again we see an interesting contradiction in her as she tells Mitch to attach a lamp-shade to the light because “I can’t stand a naked light-bulb”. One of Williams’s innovations is the way he combines this notion of the light that ruthlessly reveals the truth (“the searchlight turned on the world”) with various musical motifs (jazz, polka) to convey Blanche’s inner turmoil.

A significant scene in the play is when Blanche tells the story about her failed marriage and her husband’s suicide, which she directly helped to bring about through her wounding comments (“you disgust me”), expertly interweaves these light and sound motifs. The “searchlight” went off again with his death, Blanche says, and “never for one moment since has there been any light that’s stronger than this – kitchen – candle…” When Mitch takes her in his arms, she is speechless; “the words won’t come,” the stage directions tell us, signaling a brief moment of genuine connection so real for Blanche that it can’t be described or expressed.

Purity and Cleansing through the Motif of Water

An added dimension to her character is the theme of cleansing by water; Blanche constantly soaks herself in a hot bath as if to regain her pure-white state, asks if the grapes Eunice has brought are washed, and refers to the cathedral bells as “the only clean thing in the Quarter”. She wants to die on the ocean, “be buried at sea sewn up in a clean white sack and dropped overboard”. In a very literal sense, her departure for the mental institution at the end of the play suggests that she will have this dream realised in the form of a straitjacket.

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“I don’t want realism, I want magic,” Blanche cries. She is an actress performing a role: that of the elegant Southern belle. The stage directions have her “improvising feverishly” and she does it like a pro. Blanche “lies as a protection against solitude and desperation”, says the critic Michael Billington, and her “limitless capacity for self-delusion”, a combination of “fake grandeur and genuine pain”, is tied explicitly to her gender.

With gestures straight out of a 19th-century melodrama – “she touches her forehead shakily”, she speaks with “feverish vivacity”, “her knuckles pressed to her lips” – Blanche plays not so much Southern Belle as Lady of the Camellias, and even self-consciously casts herself in this role with Mitch as her lover Armand (scene 6). Given her state of fallenness, some critics have dismissed her as just a “little trollop” (John Chapman), but Harold Clurman saw shrewdly that she was far more than that: she was “the potential artist in all of us”. As a woman, she has no stage on which to perform beyond the domestic sphere, so that potential remains untapped and this is what sends her over the edge of sanity. There is a direct line back to Ibsen’s heroines, particularly Nora in A Doll’s House, who likewise performs a role she has learned – how to be female in a male-ordered world – and then realises that she must start again and learn from scratch, without male instruction and coercion, what it means to be a woman. Nora and Blanche epitomise this gendered idea of the “theatricalising self”; something Joan Riviere calls “masquerading” and Judith Butler calls “performative”. The difference is that Nora comes back from the abyss of insanity while Blanche collapses into it.

Theatre history is full of “mad women”: Hamlet’s Ophelia is a famous example, and there are many, many others right up to the present day (e.g. in Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis). Blanche’s psychic deterioration is deeply moving, but Williams shies away from really depicting mental illness; he gives us a hint of what she is going through but doesn’t lift the curtain on it. (It’s a lot like Ibsen’s rather vague depiction of syphilis in his 1881 play Ghosts.)

Stella Adler most insightfully summarised the character of Blanche. The celebrated acting coach wrote in her performance notes that Blanche, like Amanda Wingfield in Glass Menagerie, suffers from the stress of having no profession and no other interest except being a lady. “It has to do with the world of charm or poetry – everything except the realistic world around them. That is their soft, charming world. Some cases have this neurotic clutching on to this sentimentality and dreams and charm because of a conflict within themselves.”

Adler’s notes illuminate the staging of Blanche’s psychological state – that of the floaty, flighty Southern Belle, an archetype that fascinated Williams because it belonged to a culture that had, in the words of C.W.E. Bigsby, “jumped the rails of history”.

Key Quotes for Blanche

- "incongruous" - Scene 1

- “moth” - Scene 1

- “must avoid a strong light” - Scene 1

- “I’ve got to keep hold of myself” - Scene 1

- “I think of money in terms of what it does for you” - Scene 4

- “Virgo…Virgin” - Scene 5

- “Hotel Flamingo” - Scene 5

- “men ...don’t even admit your existence unless they make love to you” - Scene 5

- “I’ve got to be good and keep my hands off children” - Scene 5

- “no lily!” - Scene 7

- “child...frolicking in the tub” Scene 7

- “Fire, Fire, Fire” - Scene 9

- “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers” - Scene 11

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Faulkner’s observation certainly explains much about Blanche’s entrapment in an outdated social paradigm. But what about her sister; how did she break out of the “southern belle” mould? Blanche describes Stella as “quiet” and “peaceful”, full of “beautiful self-control”. Stella does indeed seem low-key and compliant; yet her very first words in the play are a command issued to Stanley: “Don’t holler at me like that”. In many ways she is what Blanche and Stanley are competing for, the object that they both want to possess (both keep calling her “baby”). She consistently acts decisively and firmly in contrast to the uncertain and crumbling Blanche. But her implicit acceptance of Stanley, even though he has just raped her sister, poses a central problem for many readers and viewers.

Novelists have often made sexual violence the hinge of action, leaving it ambiguous as to what actually happens. Thomas Hardy does it in Tess of the d’Ubervilles, as does E.M. Forster in A Passage to India. It is not so easy to do in the theatre where actions are shown, not narrated. We know exactly what happens between Stanley and Blanche because we see it about to happen and we witness its consequences. How do we react, then, to Stella’s implicit forgiveness of Stanley’s crime? Is this a weakness of the play, suggesting that Williams held the kind of attitude displayed in playwright John Osborne’s statement that “the female must come toppling down to where she should be – on her back. The American male must get his revenge sometime”? Or does it raise uncomfortable questions about human nature when it comes to the complicated workings of love, desire, and trust?

Perhaps the answers lie in the play’s broader concern with the workings of human evolution, the potent mix of environment with the forces of change, adaptation and survival. Williams’s plays, “while rich in empathy for the defeated, also show an understanding of the instinct for survival” (Michael Billington). Though Blanche claims “I’m very adaptable”, it is Stella who is the survivor; she admits that she copes with the knowledge of the rape by suppressing it, just so that she can “go on living”. Blanche can see that, and in fact characterises life in evolutionary terms when she calls it a “dark march toward whatever it is we’re approaching” and urges Stella not to “hang back with the brutes”, alluding to Stanley as “ape-like”. Stella herself admits that Stanley belongs to “a different species”.

Stella is a character of wasted potential as she is the only character that could possibly settle the feud between the two enemies that are Blanche and Stanley. She is always trying to even out the divide between her head-strong and violent husband and her deluded sister yet fails to do so. Stanley refuses to accept Blanche’s past and Blanche refuses to accept the new lifestyle Stella is living. Stella’s ability to adapt to a new lifestyle has served her well in terms of survival.

Stella can also be interpreted as a more developed character than Blanche or Stanley. Stella has moved from being a “Southern Belle” like Blanche and adjusted her lifestyle to that of New Orleans and Stanley Kowalski, a working class male that she serves as a wife. Stella succeeded to adapt to the New Orleans lifestyle whereas Blanche did not. Stanley did not need to change his ways of living so he can’t understand that if Stella has adapted to his ways; why can’t Blanche? However, Stella may be developed in terms of living and understanding different ways of life but she still remains the weakest of the two sisters. If Stella had a strong will and mind of her own to act on there would be a three-way conflict existing in the play. Her willingness to please both parties leads her from her own mind and just tries to do what's best, not what is moral, making Stella a passive character in the play.

Key Quotes for Stella

- “little woman” - Scene 1

- “my {Stanley’s} baby doll” - Scene 3

- “I’m not in anything I want to get out of” - Scene 4

- “What have I done to my sister? - Scene 11

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Stanley is not just a simple brute – or, as the critic Harold Bloom rather alarmingly calls him, “amiably brutal” – but a vital bearer of the life force of sexuality “untainted by puritan guilt” (Billington). Bigsby notes that much of Streetcar’s shock lay in the fact that, apart from Eugene O’Neill’s dramas, “this was the first American play in which sexuality was patently at the core of the lives of all its principal characters”. No wonder George Jean Nathan at the time said that A Streetcar Named Desire occupied the “shadowy borderline between the unpleasant and the enlightening”.

Stanley Kowalski is the strongest character in terms of strength but also how he is physically depicted in the stage directions. The “red-stained package” and Stanley as a “gaudy seed-bearer” are just two of the initial images the audience receives from this character. The ideal of violence in the power of his hands already indicates the potential level of threat this character poses for the other characters in the play. Stanley is quite often portrayed as “sub-human” or animal-like throughout the play. He is referred to as “Polark” several times by Blanche, as if the idea of being from another country is something to be held against another. Stanley is an unknown subject for Blanche, with him being a “Polark” but also male, two things Blanche isn’t used to being around and therefore can’t fully understand or relate to. This could be a possible answer for why Stanley is able to control Blanche’s fate at the end of the play as he is an unknown variable that has disrupted Blanche’s life plan. The “fear of the outsider” perspective of the play often names Blanche as the outsider, however in this case, with constant animal imagery throughout the play in terms of Stanley’s presentations, he could be viewed as this “outsider”. However, the natural clashes in the stage directions of Blanche as “white” and a “moth” and Stanley as the “king” and “brute” invites the idea of Stanley as the antagonist of the play while Blanche is the protagonist. Naturally, these characters are destined to clash and it is no wonder their fates are drastically different.

Even Stella has been a victim of violent Stanley. Stanley is the predator in society and women are his prey. It is evident that Stanley violently abuses Stella regularly as in Scene 3, Mitch tries to convince Blanche that this level of violence is normal for the Kowalski’s; perhaps also a social criticism from Williams that violence within marriage was normalised in 1940s America. Stella is Stanley’s “baby doll” and if we take this literally, she is a toy for Stanley to play with when and as he choses. This shows Stanley’s child-like mentality, in contrast to his brutish manly facade (note his name rhymes with ‘manly’); he uses violence as emotional expression and play, and women as his playthings and a target for that violence.

It is often noted that Stanley’s domineering character lacks complexity; he is uncultured to the point of being animalistic. When Blanche enters his space, he sees her as a threat, as if another animal is invading his territory. His interrogation of Blanche shows the level of dominance Stanley needs to have; he is an alpha character who demands control and authority. At no point in A Streetcar Named Desire does Stanley seek to empathise with or support Mitch, his closest friend, or Blanche, his only sister-in-law. From Stanley’s perspective, the world is very much “survival of the fittest” and that is the simple ‘law of the jungle’ which he lives by; as the fittest and strongest character, he ensures his place at the top of the hierarchy survives by the end of the play. Perhaps a more emotionally mature or complex character may not have succeeded.

Key Quotes for Stanley

- “A different species” - Scene 1

- “pleasure of women the giving and taking of it” - Scene 1

- “richly feathered male bird among hens” - Scene 1

- “Sizes women up at a glance, with sexual classifications” - Scene 1

- “Napoleonic code” - Scene 2

- “I don’t like to be swindled” - Scene 2

- “I can’t imagine any witch of a woman casting a spell over you” - Scene 2

- “little boy’s mind” - Scene 2

- “Polack” - Scene 3

- “sub-human” - Scene 4

- “I am the King around here” - Scene 8

- “People like you abused her, forced her to change” - Scene 8

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Harold “Mitch” Mitchell is one of the more sensitive characters in the play, particularly when it comes to dealing with Blanche’s mood swings and diminishing sanity. His unwillingness to proceed in the poker game and concern over his sick mother reveals a deep caring nature that is not modelled in any other male in the play. He serves the purpose of Blanche’s love interest, but also the one true friend Blanche confides in during her time in Elysian Fields, particularly as Stella is too preoccupied with Stanley to fully support her sister. However, Mitch’s passive attitude towards the attack on Stella, his unaccepting of Blanche’s past and the hint of possible sexual assault on Blanche suggests that Mitch does not fit the bill of the “hero” needed to rescue Blanche from her deteriorating sanity. The ideal “hero” for Blanche would have been someone willing to love her despite her past – perhaps even because of it.

The goal for Mitch is clear here, the same for any other typical Male in 1940s America; to find a good wife who will be loyal and look after him. However, Mitch decides that Blanche does not meet this requirement and takes a violent turn out of frustration in one of his final encounters with Blanche in Scene 9. On the other hand, apart from Stella, Mitch seems to be the only person to truly understand the tragedy that is Blanche. Mitch did genuinely care for Blanche, evident in the tears he sheds at the end. This could imply that Stella and Mitch were the only two characters that could have possibly made Blanche happy and settled in life but they rejected her. The play ends with Mitch sobbing, showing his regret at how things ended.

Steve and Eunice, on the other hand, are examples of a typical husband and wife in 1940s America. They row, play poker and participate in local activities. These characters don’t necessarily bring anything significant to the play, yet, their actions and responses to certain situations bring a certain level of importance. Eunice allows Stella to return to Stanley after his violent episode in Scene 3 while Stella is pregnant and Steve, as one of the men playing poker, allows Stanley to follow through with his drunken violent attack. Steve and Eunice represent how domestic violence was normalised in 1940s America, and how ‘good people’ were complicit in it.

Towards the end of the play, Eunice convinces Stella that she has made the right decision by sending Blanche to a mental institution and Steve continues playing poker with Stanley; they seem keen to return to a normal life. An ‘every man for themselves’ attitude can be seen here also. Blanche needed someone to defend her and the one person who was supposed to do that was Stella, yet she has been convinced otherwise.

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Certain themes do recur in Williams’s plays, such as lying, self-deception, human frailty, mental illness, sexual repression, and otherness. But these are not the whole story. Like other great modern playwrights – Ibsen, Chekhov, Strindberg, Beckett – Williams was influenced by two key intellectual developments: psychology and evolution. His works powerfully merge these two strands of thought, exposing with compassion and insight the psychology of a character while keeping in focus the larger issue of how an environment affects the individual and the group. A Streetcar Named Desire puts these concerns centre stage, asking: how do organisms survive in a hostile environment? Why can’t they escape those environments?

Sex and violence in the play

A key issue here is the staging of domestic violence. A Streetcar Named Desire portrays domestic violence without much protest, as if it’s just a part of married life. Even if we don’t see all the incidents of violence, we hear them (“There is the sound of a blow. Stella cries out”) and we learn that they are part of a continuing chain of abuse. (Eunice hopes they’ll “turn the hose on you, same as last time”).

Yet Stanley gets away with it every time. Eunice’s reprimand – “You can’t beat a woman and then call ‘er back!....You stinker!” – barely registers as seconds later Stella capitulates to Stanley’s cry for her and Mitch brushes aside Stanley’s violence: “don’t take it serious,” he tells a distraught and confused Blanche, “they’re crazy about each other”. We also hear domestic violence going on upstairs, with Eunice fleeing her husband Steve to get the police – but this is immediately undercut by Steve emerging with a bruise on his head and the two of them eventually returning in a tight and loving embrace.

Eunice thoroughly approves of Stella’s decision to ignore Stanley’s rape of Blanche. “Life has got to go on,” she says rather lamely, excusing the domestic and sexual violence of the men around her. “No matter what happens, you’ve got to keep on going.” As Susan Koprince puts it, Eunice and Steve are the “facsimile of a dysfunctional relationship which normalizes Stanley’s abuse”. Domestic violence is staged, but it is not fully confronted. For this reason, in the critic Anca Vlasopolos’s view, A Streetcar Named Desire is a “problem play” because it remains too ambiguous to provide “ethics” or moral instruction to its audience on these issues, though Philip C. Kolin claims the opposite – that the small part of Eunice signals “complex feminist issues” and draws attention to the plight of battered women.

Williams also suggests that domestic violence is inextricably linked to sexual fulfilment, that these are in fact uncomfortably interdependent. The more intense the sex, the more prone to violence the couples are. Blanche is reputedly just as promiscuous as Stanley, and in fact they are not so different as they initially seem; “they are less victim and villain… than mutual victims of Desire” (Bert Cardullo). Sexuality determines people’s futures, often tragically from Williams (The Night of the Iguana, A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Suddenly Last Summer). Williams riskily widened the sexual spectrum to encompass greater extremes. Stella and Stanley have a deep and genuine connection through sex; she tells Blanche: “I can hardly stand it when he is away for a night… When he’s away for a week I go nearly wild!”

But heterosexual relationships can be repulsive in Williams’s plays. Williams is interrogating what is deemed natural sexual behavior. In addition, his plays often hinge on the revelation of some past incident of a sexual nature that has forever blighted the character’s life, as in Blanche’s aborted marriage to a closeted gay man.

There is another specifically American context for the play’s depiction of a domestic tension that leads to abuse. In 1947, the returning war veterans were coming back to an industrial landscape in which the role of the American male had fundamentally changed. It could be said there is a jealousy of females in work and showing independence; they are no longer an object of the household or a possession of the husband but are now functional members of society. The American Dream previously preserved by men seems to have disappeared with all benefits being lost along with their jobs.

Gender and Dependence on Men

The play exaggerates male and female stereotypes. Stanley’s “animal joy” is not just sweaty masculinity but is likened to “a richly feathered male bird among hens”. Blanche’s excessive preening suggests femininity as something performed, stylised, rather than natural. She can be interpreted as symbolising the repressed male homosexual, playing a role and suffering from the same constant state of dishonesty that homosexuality forces on the individual in an intolerant society. “The pedestrian truth Blanche abhors serves as a metaphor for theatrical realism, while the magic she endorses becomes theatrical experimentation” (Gail Leondar).

Despite these stereotypes, the dominance of male characters, which was consistent with the 1940s, is reinforced within A Streetcar Named Desire. Blanche and Stella mutual agree that it is the male in the life that makes them happy; Stella goes “wild” when Stanley isn’t present for long periods of time and Blanche, quite clearly desperately, makes plans on a future with Mitch as soon as he is present in the play. The tragic ending supports this as Stanley’s spreading of information is arguably to blame for Blanche’s fate as both sisters were hopeful that Mitch would take Blanche as his wife. Mitch was the person who could have saved Blanche and it was only possible through the means of marriage. Blanche has put her fate in the hands of men as she relies on them too often to fulfil her. This is evident from her first marriage, Blanche is so occupied with loving her husaband she is too distracted to realise his homosexuality and how he truely feels, which leads to his suicide. Her behaviour and mentality seems to spiral out of control from this point forward. For example, her association with the Hotel Flamingo and the kissing of the “Young Man” in Scene 5. Blanche requires men to keep her grounded and the lack of attention she receives could also be a factor that leads to her downfall.

Death

Blanche’s fear of death is apparent in many of her actions throughout the play. Her fear of light and constant lying about her age exposes how she values a young appearance. Her naturally flirtatious attitude towards younger men but also any man as she is often flirting with Stanley as she openly admits to Stella, “Yes, I was flirting with your husband!”, exposes a young reputation she feels that she must uphold.

The most significant death in the play is without a doubt the suicide of Blanche’s young husband.The reminder of his death in echoed in the motif of the Varsouviana polka theme that recures throughout the play. Blanche’s desperate want for love ended tragically for her husband but as she goes searching for a second love the tragic end seems to be Blanche’s as her attempt for love failed. Death has had a spiralling effect for Blanche, destroying her sanity and her outlook on love. Death has caused much of the heartbreak and pain in Blanche’s life which could suggest that Blanche is running from it by concealing her age.

Blanche’s end is foreshadowed with the Mexican seller proclaiming “flowers for the dead” in Scene 9. Even though readers don’t see the actual death of Blanche, being admitted to a mental institution is the death of a new life and opportunity for Blanche to redeem herself from her past.

Madness

Even from the very first moment Blanche speaks, we get an idea that her sanity isn’t fully stable. The fact that her initial depiction in the stage direction is “incongruous”, the audience has an idea that Blanche is not going to fit in completely in some way or another. The exaggeration of her speech when talking about Belle Reve, “I stayed and fought for it, bled for it, almost died for it!”shows that Blanche is losing sight of what is important and what isn’t.

It is often apparent that Blanche is trying to create a sort of dream world around her life. While she is staying with Stella she uses the bathroom as a kind of escape pod from Stanley and the world that attacks her delicate nature. She talks highly of her possessions and their values, even though Stanley and Stella find a chest full of costume jewelry. Another notable behaviour is Blanche’s constant talk of a friendly relation with a man called Shep Huntleigh which the audience can never quite decide whether he is actually real or not. However, with the dramaticised letter writing and fake phone calls, the possibility that Shep Huntleigh does not exist is more probable. It seems Blanche is either trying to make the best of her bad situation and so she isn’t really mad; her determination to find small luxuries in her life has become a realm of her imagination that no other character can understand. Maybe Blanche has started to believe her own lies which leads to her eventual insanity?

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Elysian Fields seems very far from the American Dream. But how relevant is that concept in the context of this play – how far does it encompass these characters, and their region, its outmoded values, and especially its women? The play’s setting is multicultural but only gives us token figures – a drunken and thieving “Negro woman”, a blind Mexican woman selling flowers, or the “Polack” Stanley – that never get much beyond stereotype. Perhaps that is exactly Williams’s point. He shows us an environment that is rapidly changing: “a culture on the turn… in process of surrendering to a new order” (C.W.E Bigsby).

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When the play was first performed, critics were overwhelmingly positive, generally agreeing with The New York Times’s Brooks Atkinson that Streetcarwas “a superb drama... a quietly woven study of intangibles”.

One 1980s’s scholar of the play, in fact, maintains that a dichotomy emerges in terms of the characters between reading and seeing it: “audiences favour Stanley, at least in the beginning, while readers favour Blanche” (Roger Boxhill). This chimes with a diagnosis pronounced years earlier by Harold Clurman that “the play becomes the triumph of Stanley Kowalski with the collusion of the audience, which is no longer on the side of the angels”. Boxill suggests that one reason for this is the play’s use of humour: Stanley gets all the big laughs. Robert F. Gross takes this further, considering key moments in the play and their significance in “forging [the] comic complicity between Stanley and the audience” which has the effect of making Blanche seem amusingly absurd: “in this climate of ridicule, even Blanche’s less histrionic moments make the audience laugh… Bereft of delicacy or pathos, the audience reads Blanche’s sexual desire as a comic characteristic.”

Many commentators were struck by Williams’s lyricism and operatic grandness. John Chapman, drama critic for The New York Daily News, called the play “full-scale-throbbingly alive, compassionate, heart-wrenchingly human. It has the tragic overtones of grand opera”. Although the play was instantly hailed as a ground-breaking combination of realism and lyricism, some critics felt it was marred by sentimentality. And, on the one hand, A Streetcar Named Desire does seem to be the kind of apolitical, family-oriented, sentimental and myopic “diaper drama” that Martin Esslin complained dominated American playwriting. On the other hand, Williams always gestures towards “a larger social and political context that looms forebodingly over the fragile and self-absorbed characters” (W.B. Worthen). Williams himself in an interview provided some insight into his seeming lack of engagement with contemporary political issues: when asked why he didn’t write overtly about Civil Rights, he replied:

I always try to write obliquely… I am not a direct writer; I am always an oblique writer, if I can be; I want to be allusive; I don’t want to be one of these people who hit the nail on the head all the time.

Critical Quotations: Blanche

- “Her consuming need...is to make herself and others constantly aware of her refinements” - John Gassner

- “The memories of her past, however, are just as unbearable as her present circumstances so she must create a dream world of delusion, which becomes apparent in her outward behaviour” - John Gassner

- “Blanche needs protection from a world to which she will not adjust” - John Gassner

- “Her previous life is nothing but a representation of a decayed society” - John Gassner

- “superficial” - John Gassner

- “Behind Blanche lies a past which seems to have been civilised” - Joseph Wood Krutch

- “Although she has the intelligence, idealism and tragic vision necessary for the classical heroine, falls short because psychopathology substitutes for fate.” - John Gasser

- “Blanche can’t sustain the role she has been asked to play in life...acceptance of a role we blindly play can actually destroy us as people” - Kirsten Shepherd-Barr

- “the bathroom is her place where she prepares for her role” - Kirsten Shepherd-Barr

- “Diva quality to this character that..against her will she has taken on” - Kirsten Shepherd-Barr

- “her failed encounter with a man...was determining of her entire subsequent kinds of relationships that she had” - Kirsten Shepherd-Barr

- “we can’t fully trust what she’s saying” - Kirsten Shepherd-Barr

- “Symbolises that old southern plantation” - Jon Connell

- “It’s not about physically how Blanche is it’s all about her mental state..that’s the through line of the play” - Kirsten Shepherd-Barr

- “She retreats into that bathroom because of all these different forces acting on her and pressuring her...there’s no actual space for her apart from the one realm that is her dominion” - Kirsten Shepherd-Barr

Critical Quotes: Stanley

- “personification of disgusting normality” - John Gassner

- “one of the brutes who will eventually inherit the earth” - John Gassner

- “Stanley [represents] the natural man” - Joseph Wood Krutch

- “expressing the ills of the world” - John Gasser

- “abnormal member of society” - John Gasser

- “Very virile” - Jon Connell

Critical Quotes: Stella

- “one of the weaknesses...of civilisation” - John Gassner

- “Williams wants the audience to believe that Stella is wrong in loving Stanley but right living with him” - Nancy Tischer

- “Stella represents the decaying aristocracy - Joseph Wood Krutch

- “Stella’s decision to choose her degenerate husband over an infirm sister lacks true motivation” - John Gasser

- “Stella is a refined girl who has found a kind of salvation or realisation but at a terrific price” - Elia Kazan

- “Stella ignores the needs of others and eventually adopts her own illusions” - J.M McGlinn

- “Turns out, in the end, to destroy her sister” -Jon Connell

- “Well-meaning destruction” - Kirsten Shepherd - Barr on Stella’s decision to have Blanche committed.

- “The world of Stella and her husband is a barbarism...a vigorous barbarism” - John Wood Krutch

Critical Quotes: General Play and Additional Characters

- “Almost unbearably tragic” - Brooks Atkinson

- “Poetic tragedy” - Elia Kazan

- “Allegorical representation of the author’s view of the world he lives in” - Randolph Goodman

- Mitch is a “likely candidate to...heal Blanche’s wounds” - Marie Lund

- “It always seems a very destructive play in which everyone comes across very badly” - Jon Connell

- “Everyone, on some level, destroys everyone else...The past creates those forces that then...spin out of control to destroy people.” - Kirsten Shepherd-Barr

- “Tennessee Williams is full of women who are monsters” - Jon Connell

- “Woman’s world of the past against this modern man’s world, very virile world of Stanley” - Jon Connell on the contrast of the characters Blanche and Stanley.

- “What interests Williams is how does this mental state play out in the very different pressures on it” - Kirsten Shepherd-Barr referring to Blanche.

Contextual Critical Comments:

- Narrow expectations of.. the south at this time there weren’t really any opportunities for [Blanche].. the big out would of been her getting married” - Kirsten Shepherd-Barr

- “[Blanche] crushes her husband simply by the force of the passing on of those expectations of masculinity and virility that society has passed on to her” - Kirsten Shepherd-Barr

Critical Approaches to A Streetcar Named Desire

Marxist - This implies looking at the play in terms of its socio-economic factors. The name is derived from Karl Marx, a philosopher and sociologist. He was active in the 19th century and believed in Communism and the rise of the working class. For example, a Marxist reader could see Stanley as a “hero” of the working class in 1940s America as he forces Stella to come away from her previous Southern Belle lifestyle and forces Blanche out of a society where she is not prepared to be lowered to a working class standard.

Feminist - A feminist reader would challenge the male dominated social values and how its characters fights back against them. Also, a feminist critic would analyse the treatment of women compared to men and a female’s treatment by men in both contemporary view points and 1940s American viewpoints. For example, Stella is subjugated to Stanley. A modern feminist reader would frown upon this as Stella has sacrificed her way of life to please a male. A 1940s American feminist critic would favour Blanche as she is the only female character fighting the injustices of the violence against women in their households.

Psychoanalytic - A Psychoanalytic critic looks into the logic of the mind and the thinking behind a character's actions or speech. This could be exploring the motifs behind sex, love and death. For example, a psychoanalytic critic may take the view of Carl Jung, a psychiatrist, and see the characters representing archetypes in Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious.

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Athur Miller once noted that “Williams had pushed language and character to the front of the stage as never before.” It’s a great irony that Williams has been perceived as a master realist when in fact throughout his career he experimented constantly with non-realistic forms.

He named Chekhov and Strindberg as key influences; he called himself a Symbolist; he used Brechtian devices; he played with elements of incongruity and the grotesque.

Williams’s vision of theatre draws especially from the world of visual art. For example, in the opening stage directions to Scene Three (the poker game), he invokes Van Gogh’s painting of a billiard-parlor at night, with its “lurid nocturnal brilliance” and “raw colors”. Van Gogh’s art is a fitting analogy with Williams’s own approach, showing realistic surroundings in an impressionist style in which it is more important to convey an idea or a sense of a place, an atmosphere, than to aim at faithful photographic replication.

Throughout the play there is an emphasis on bright, strong, vivid colour, especially red, blue and yellow – the primary colours. Surprisingly Blanche herself asserts that she prefers these shades, contrary to the association we often make of her with all things pale and white; perhaps because there is an authenticity to them – they’re unadulterated and raw, something she clearly longs for, yet tries conceals her own ‘raw’ emotions and reality.

The idea of betrayal ultimately provides the key to why Blanche ends up relying on strangers, and finding them “kind”, for she has been betrayed by her own family and friends and by the illusions she has created about her relationships with them. Stella delivers her sister to the insane asylum, without telling her the truth about where she is going. While this takes a toll on Stella, who is clearly devastated by guilt, the play’s ending suggests that life will go on; as the lights come down she and Stanley embrace and he is unbuttoning her blouse. Meanwhile, Mitch is “sobbing” over Blanche’s tragic departure – a poignant but fairly useless emotional response to her plight as it does nothing whatsoever for Blanche. In the face of such treatment, her shift at the end of the play from reliance on the familiar to reliance on strangers is inevitable, and is her only way out apart from death.

In 1957, Williams wrote an interview with himself called “The World I Live in” (published in the London Observer) in which he spelled out his “message”. He said he wrote plays in order to dramatise the crying, almost screaming, need of a great worldwide human effort to know ourselves and each other a great deal better, well enough to concede that no man has a monopoly on right or virtue any more than any man has a corner on duplicity and evil and so forth.

He said he didn’t understand why we are always being taught “to hate and fear other people on the same little world that we live in. Why don’t we meet these people and get to know them as I try to meet and know people in my plays?” In addition, Williams here speaks eloquently about the concept of “strangers” as it applies to his play A Streetcar Named Desire. Again, the keynote here is the breaking down of barriers between people, a process that is exactly the reverse of what we see happening in A Streetcar Named Desire as, coping with a confusing world in which the familiar is more threatening and duplicitous than the unknown, Blanche erects barriers (retreating into the bathroom, for instance, or telling lies about her past) between herself and those she knows, finally fleeing to the unknown and the “kindness of strangers”. Her story is in many ways an enactment of Williams’s own lifelong attempts through his writing to break down the embedded “hate and fear” he found in American culture and society.

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26th March 1911 Thomas Lanier Williams is born in Columbus, Mississippi. He is the second of three children. His older sister by five years is Rose Williams. His parents, Cornelius Williams and Edwina Dakin Williams are both descendants of Southern families.

1916 A young Williams contracts diphtheria. His legs remain paralysed for nearly two years, but he survives the disease.

1918 Williams and his family move to St. Louis, Missouri, where Williams’ younger brother Dakin is born.

1927 Williams’ first literary experience is at the age of sixteen where he enters an essay writing contest in The Smart Set magazine. He wins $5 for coming third in the competition. His essay title was “Can a Good Wife Be a Good Sport?”.

1929 - 1931 Williams attends the University of Missouri. This is where he is given the nickname “Tennessee” for his thick Southern accent.

1931 Williams drops out of University to work with his father at the Universal Shoe Company, where he works for approximately six years. During his employment here, he enrolls at Washington University in St.Louis but later withdraws from University again. During the day, Williams works and his nights are dedicated to poetry, short story writing and playwriting.

1937 Williams makes his dramatic debut when he entrols in the University of Iowa. He produces Cairo, Shanghai, Bombay. This is William’s first production. Later he is involved in plays produced by the Mummers of St.Louis which involves Candles to the Sun and The Fugitive Kind. Later this year, Rose Williams is hospitalised with schizophrenia.

1938 Tennessee graduates with a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Iowa.

1939 Williams legally changes his first name to “Tennessee” after his nickname in University which is also his father’s home state.

1940  Williams’ play Battle of Angels is produced in Boston and New York City.

1942  Williams moves to New York City.

1943  Williams’ mother allows Rose Williams to undergo one of the first ever lobotomies performed in the United States in an attempt to cure her daughter’s schizophrenia. This attempt results in Rose being left in a permanent state of semi-consciousness. Tennessee’s relationship with his parents takes a negative turn. Williams later takes a job in Los Angeles as a screenwriter for MGM but they reject his script. However, he retains the rights to his material and turns it into his first successful play that is The Glass Menagerie.

26th December 1944 The Glass Menagerie premieres in Chicago. It opens in New York three months later and receives the award for Best Play from the New York Drama Critics’ Circle.

1947  Williams starts a romantic relationship with his secretary Frank Merlo. Their relationship lasts 14 years.

3rd December 1947  A Streetcar Named Desire premieres on Broadway.

1948 A Streetcar Named Desire wins the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

6th October 1948 Summer and Smoke opens on Broadway.

1951 A Streetcar Named Desire is adapted into a film.

3rd February 1951 The Rose Tattoo opens on Broadway and Williams wins a Tony Award for Best Play.

17th March 1953 Williams considers Camino Real as one of his best works yet it is considered a “flop” after it opened on Broadway and closes after only 60 performances.

1955 Cat on a Hot Tin Roof opens on Broadway. Williams earns another Pulitzer Prize and Tony award from this production.

1956 Williams writes the screenplay Baby Doll.

1957 Williams falls into a depression after his play Orpheus Descending receives poor reviews during its short time on Broadway. Williams undergoes psychoanalysis.

1959 Sweet Bird of Youth opens on Broadway.

1960 Period of Adjustment opens on Broadway.

28th December 1961 The Night of the Iguana opens on Broadway.

16th January 1963 The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore opens on Broadway.

1963 Frank Merlo, Williams’ previous and longest partner, dies of Lung Cancer. Even though they had separated, after Merlo’s diagnosis, Williams cared for him until his death.

1967 The Seven Descents of Myrtleopens on Broadway.

September 1969 Williams suffers a mental breakdown. His younger brother Dakin commits him to a psychiatric hospital in St Louis. Williams remains here for 3 months.

1972 Small Craft Warnings opens on Broadway. This was considered his last successful performance. All productions produced after this only showed on Broadway for a small period of time, much like Camino Real in 1953.

1st March 1973 Out Cry opens on Broadway.

1975 Williams publishes Memoirs. This discusses his life, including topics of homosexuality and his relationship with his family.

23rd November 1976 The Eccentricities of a Nightingale opens on Broadway.

11th May 1977 Vieux Carré opens on Broadway.

26th March 1980 Clothes for a Summer Hotel opens on Broadway.

24th February 1983 Tennessee Williams dies in New York City. His cause of death is asphyxia. Williams leaves the majority of his fortune to his older sister, Rose. He is buried in St.Louis, Missouri.

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Character Questions

Is Stanley the strongest character in the play?

“In A Streetcar Named Desire Stella is a stereotype of female passivity.” To what extent do you agree with this view of Williams’s dramatic presentation of Stella?

Is Blanche a Tragic Heroine?

“Stanley can be admired for defending his home against the treachery of Blanche” Examine this view of A Streetcar Named Desire.

“Stella sacrifices everything to Stanley, with tragic consequences” Examine this view of A Streetcar Named Desire.

Examine the view that, in “A Streetcar Named Desire, Stella symbolises the position of the audience as torn between the splendour of Blanche’s glamourous dream and the passion she feels for Stanley’s gritty, earthy, lively, vibrant world.”

How far would you agree that “The main role of Blanche DuBois is to illustrate the fragile nature of female identity”?

Themed Questions

How important is the presentation of the past in the play?

How far would you agree that “A Streetcar Named Desire 

chiefly illustrates the tragic fate of the outsider and raises the question of justice”?

“I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.” (Blanche DuBois). “Williams presents 1940s New Orleans as a society lacking in kindness.” Explore this view of A Streetcar Named Desire.

How does Williams present madness in A Streetcar Named Desire?

How important is the presentation of the past in A Streetcar Named Desire?

“Ultimately, every single relationship in A Streetcar Named Desire is a failure” Examine this view of the play.

Examine the view that “A Streetcar Named Desire fails because the relationship between Stella and Stanley is ‘inconceivable’."

“A Streetcar Named Desire is an elegy, or poetic expression of mourning, for an Old South that died in the first part of the twentieth century.” Examine this view of the play

“We are all savages at heart” Explore how human sexuality is presented in A Streetcar Named Desire

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• Thomas Adler, Streetcar: The Moth and the Lantern (1990)

• C.W.E. Bigsby, Modern American Drama, 1945-1990 (1992)

• Michael Billington, State of the Nation (Faber, 2007)

• Michael Billington, The 101 Greatest Plays (Faber, 2015)

• Harold Bloom, ed., Modern Critical Views: Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire (2009)

• Roger Boxhill, in Macmillan Modern Dramatists: TW, 1987, p. 80

• Bert Cardullo, “Birth and Death in A Streetcar Named Desire,” in Philip C. Kolin, ed., Confronting Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire: Essays in Critical Pluralism(1993)

• Alan Chesler, Streetcar: Twenty Five Years of Criticism(1973)

• Harold Clurman, The Collected Works of Harold Clurman: Six Decades of Commentary on Theatre, Dance, Music, Film, Arts, and Letters (1994)

• Robert F. Gross, “Hello Stanley, Good-bye Blanche: The Brutal Asymetries of Desire in Production”

• Philip C. Kolin, Tennessee Williams: A Guide to Research and Performance (1998)

• Philip C. Kolin, ed., Confronting Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire: Essays in Critical Pluralism (1993)

• Susan Koprince, “Domestic Violence in A Streetcar Named Desire,” in Harold Bloom, ed., Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire (2009)

• Brenda Murphy, Tennessee Williams and Elia Kazan: A Collaboration in the Theatre (1992)

• Brenda Murphy, ed., The Theatre of Tennessee Williams (2014)

• Jacqueline O’Connor, Dramatizing Dementia: Madness in the Plays of Tennessee Williams

• Marc Robinson, The American Play (2009)

• Kirsten E. Shepherd-Barr, Theatre and Evolution from Ibsen to Beckett (2015)

• Stephen Sadler Stanton, ed., Tennessee Williams: A Collection of Critical Essays (1977)

• Anca Vlasopolos, “Authorizing History: Victimization in A Streetcar Named Desire,” in Feminist Rereadings of Modern American Drama, ed. June Schlueter, pp. 149-70.

• Katherine Weiss, A Student Handbook to the Plays of Tennessee Williams (2014)

• W.B. Worthen, Modern Drama: Plays/Criticism/Theory(1995)

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