A streetcar named desire

Tennessee Williams

Type of work - Play

Genre - Tragedy

Language - English

Time and place written - Late 1940s, New Orleans

Setting (place) - New Orleans, Louisiana

Protagonist - Blanche DuBois

Major conflict - Blanche DuBois, an aging Southern debutante, arrives at her sisters home in New Orleans hoping to start a new life after losing her ancestral mansion, her job, and her reputation in her hometown of Laurel, Mississippi. Blanches brother-in-law, a macho working-class guy named Stanley Kowalski, is so filled with class resentment that he seeks to destroy Blanches character in New Orleans as well. His cruelty, combined with Blanches fragile, insecure personality, leaves her mentally detached from reality by the plays end.

Rising action - Blanche immediately rouses the suspicion of Stanley, who (wrongly) suspects Blanche of swindling Stella out of her inheritance. Blanche grows to despise Stanley when she sees him drunkenly beat her pregnant sister. Stanley permanently despises Blanche after he overhears her trying to convince Stella to leave Stanley because he is common. Already suspicious of Blanches act of superiority, Stanley researches Blanches past. He discovers that in Laurel Blanche was known for her sexual promiscuity and for having an affair with a teenage student. He reports his findings to Blanches suitor, Mitch, dissuading Mitch from marrying Blanche.

Climax - After Stanley treats Blanche cruelly during her birthday dinner, giving her a bus ticket back to Laurel as a present, Stella goes into labor. She and Stanley depart for the hospital, leaving Blanche alone in the house. Mitch arrives, drunk, and breaks off his relationship with Blanche. Blanche, alone in the apartment once more, drowns herself in alcohol and dreams of an impossible rescue. Stanley returns to the apartment from the hospital and rapes Blanche.

Falling action - Weeks after the rape, Stella secretly prepares for Blanches departure to an insane asylum. She tells her neighbor Eunice that she simply couldnt believe Blanches accusation that Stanley raped her. Unaware of reality, Blanche boasts that she is leaving to join a millionaire suitor. When the doctor arrives, Blanche leaves after a minor struggle, and only Stella and Mitch, who sits in the kitchen with Stanleys poker players, seem to express real remorse for her.

Themes - Fantasys inability to overcome reality; the relationship between sex and death; dependence on men

Motifs - Light; bathing; drunkenness

Symbols - Shadows and cries; the Varsouviana polka; Its Only a Paper Moon; meat

Foreshadowing - In Scene Ten, Williams takes a brief detour away from events in the Kowalski household to show a street scene involving a prostitute, her male admirer, and a Negro woman. The man follows the prostitute solicitously, there is a struggle offstage, and then the Negro woman runs away with the prostitutes handbag. This scene foreshadows Stanleys rape of Blanche, which occurs offstage at the scenes end. Stanleys raiding of Blanches trunk in Scene Two also foreshadows the rape.

Context

Tennessee Williams was born Thomas Lanier Williams III in Columbus, Mississippi, in 1911. His friends began calling him Tennessee in college, in honor of his Southern accent and his fathers home state. Williamss father, C.C. Williams, was a traveling salesman and a heavy drinker. Williamss mother, Edwina, was a Mississippi clergymans daughter prone to hysterical attacks. Until Williams was seven, he, his parents, his older sister, Rose, and his younger brother, Dakin, lived with Edwinas parents in Mississippi.

In 1918, the Williams family moved to St. Louis, marking the start of the familys deterioration. C.C.s drinking increased, the family moved sixteen times in ten years, and the young Williams, always shy and fragile, was ostracized and taunted at school. During these years, he and Rose became extremely close. Edwina and Williamss maternal grandparents also offered the emotional support he required throughout his childhood. Williams loathed his father but grew to appreciate him somewhat after deciding in therapy as an adult that his father had given him his tough survival instinct.

After being bedridden for two years as a child due to severe illness, Williams grew into a withdrawn, effeminate adolescent whose chief solace was writing. At sixteen, Williams won a prize in a national competition that asked for essays answering the question Can a good wife be a good sport? His answer was published in Smart Set magazine. The following year, he published a horror story in a magazine called Weird Tales, and the year after that he entered the University of Missouri to study journalism. While in college, he wrote his first plays, which were influenced by members of the southern literary renaissance such as Robert Penn Warren, William Faulkner, Allen Tate, and Thomas Wolfe. Before Williams could receive his degree, however, his father forced him to withdraw from school. Outraged because Williams had failed a required ROTC program course, C.C. Williams made his son go to work at the same shoe company where he himself worked.

After three years at the shoe factory, Williams had a minor nervous breakdown. He then returned to college, this time at Washington University in St. Louis. While he was studying there, a St. Louis theater group produced two of his plays, The Fugitive Kind and Candles to the Sun. Further personal problems led Williams to drop out of Washington University and enroll in the University of Iowa. While he was in Iowa, Rose, who had begun suffering from mental illness later in life, underwent a prefrontal lobotomy (an intensive brain surgery). The event greatly upset Williams, and it left his sister institutionalized for the rest of her life. Despite this trauma, Williams finally managed to graduate in 1938.

In the years following his graduation, Williams lived a bohemian life, working menial jobs and wandering from city to city. He continued to work on drama, however, receiving a Rockefeller grant and studying playwriting at the New School in New York. His literary influences were evolving to include the playwright Anton Chekhov and Williamss lifelong hero, the poet Hart Crane. He officially changed his name to Tennessee Williams upon the publication of his short story The Field of Blue Children in 1939. During the early years of World War II, Williams worked in Hollywood as a scriptwriter and also prepared material for what would become The Glass Menagerie.

In 1944, The Glass Menagerie opened in New York and won the prestigious New York Drama Critics Circle Award, catapulting Williams into the upper echelon of American playwrights. A Streetcar Named Desire premiered three years later at the Barrymore Theater in New York City. The play, set in contemporary times, describes the decline and fall of a fading Southern belle named Blanche DuBois. A Streetcar Named Desire cemented Williamss reputation, garnering another Drama Critics Circle Award and also a Pulitzer Prize. Williams went on to win another Drama Critics Circle Award and Pulitzer for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in 1955.