Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire is a play that needs no introduction. This complex piece of drama is most readily associated with Marlon Brando’s iconic portrayal of Stanley Kowalski’s lamenting cry in the streets of New Orleans. Stanley screams STELL-LAHHHHH!, and his “heavenly-splitting violent” cry only emphasizes the voicelessness of the female characters (Williams 2322). Despite Blanche’s ability to hold her own in verbal sparring matches or Stella’s lively demeanor, both women are oppressively held under the thumbs of various men. Nancy Tischler picks up on these forces that lend themselves to a feminist critical approach. Running through the Tyson’s feminist checklist, it would seem like a feminist lens would clarify the actions of the play. Overbearing presence of patriarchy? Check. Societally constructed gender roles? Check. Strong seeded sexism? Check. Objectifying women? Oh, yeah. However, as Tischler begins to maneuver her way through the text, the meaning becomes more confusing, less convincing, and “enormously complicated” (54). Streetcar is a woman’s story that features problems that are distinctly female, and the submission reflected in Stella’s final decision is in accord with the demands on women across human history (Tischler 54). The complication comes into play when considering Williams’ personal view of the female characters he drew. Williams saw Blanche, the tragic hero, as a liberated woman, in the sense that her decision to live so freely was considered courageous at the time (Tischler 56). However, it seems that Tischler takes this opinion and stretches it beyond the clearly stated meaning to the point that it skews her criticism. Tischler proclaims Blanche and Stella to be “some of the fin... ... middle of paper ... ...iences don’t want realism or the truth. Ultimately, everyone seeks some kind of magic or truth as it ought to be, and not the sad rattle-tap streetcar named reality. And then, Sometimes––––there’s meaning–––so quickly! (Williams 2339). Works Cited Costa, Francisco. “There was something different about the boy: Queer Subversion in Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire.” Ege Journal of British and American Studies 23.1-2 (2014) : 76-85. Web. 4 April 2014. Griffin, Alice. Understanding Tennessee Williams. Columbia, South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press, 1995. Print. Tischler, Nancy M. Student Companion to Tennessee Williams. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2000. Print. Williams, Tennessee. “A Streetcar Named Desire.” The Norton Anthology of American Literature. Gen ed. Nina Baym. Shorter 8th ed. New York: Norton, 2013. 2297-2361. Print.
In Tennessee Williams' play, A Streetcar Named Desire, Williams uses the suicide of Blanche's husband to illuminate Blanche's insecurities and immoral behavior. When something terrible happens to someone, it often reveals who he or she truly is. Blanche falls victim to this behavior, and she fails to face her demons. This displays how the play links a character’s illogical choices and their inner struggles.
Tennessee Williams has poignantly depicted nature doing her bidding for the synchronization of, “unity of mental life,” (Freud, Reich, Lawrence, 499). The author appears to be like a naughty little boy running wild in the theater of universal consciousness. The projection of his inner life through his play A Streetcar Named Desire is his Picasso to the art gallery of replicas. He uses sublimation as an avenue to satisfy basic motives in a manner acceptable to society. In his attempt to escape social purgatory he constructed the characters Stanley and Blanche to give him wings unselfishly and put his ...
Or, as Mary Ann Corrigan later puts it [as does Judith J. Thompson, 38], the Blanche-Stanley struggle is purely an external dramatization of what is going on inside Blanche’s head: “the external events of the play, while actually occurring, serve as a metaphor for Blanche’s internal conflict” [Corrigan, 392]. Critics who share Sharp’s and Corrigan’s views feel that Streetcar is essentially a psychological drama about Blanche’s internal struggle with herself.”
6). Williams’s sister Rose is the real-life parallel of Blanche – Blanche’s illusions about life mirror Rose’s after her forced lobotomy*. However, unlike Rose Blanche is presented as knwing that she is “on the verge of - lunacy” (p.7). Similarly, Williams declared that after the events of ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’, Blanche left the asylum and lived a fulfilling life with a young gentleman – he was perhaps deluding himself, pushing his hopes for Rose onto Blanche, the fictional character believed to have been inspired by his
During early times men were regarded as superior to women. In Tennessee William’s play, “A Streetcar Named Desire”, Stanley Kowalski, the work’s imposing antagonist, thrives on power. He embodies the traits found in a world of old fashioned ideals where men were meant to be dominant figures. This is evident in Stanley’s relationship with Stella, his behavior towards Blanche, and his attitude towards women in general. He enjoys judging women and playing with their feelings as well.
Tennessee Williams gives insight into three ordinary lives in his play, “A Streetcar Named Desire” which is set in the mid-1930’s in New Orleans. The main characters in the play are Blanche, Stanley, and Stella. All three of these characters suffer from personalities that differentiate each of them to great extremes. Because of these dramatic contrarieties in attitudes, there are mounting conflicts between the characters throughout the play. The principal conflict lies between Blanche and Stanley, due to their conflicting ideals of happiness and the way things “ought to be”.
Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire is a play wrought with intertwining conflicts between characters. A drama written in eleven scenes, the play takes place in New Orleans over a nine-month period. The atmosphere is noisy, with pianos playing in the distance from bars in town. It is a crowded area of the city, causing close relations with neighbors, and the whole town knowing your business. Their section of the split house consists of two rooms, a bathroom, and a porch. This small house is not fit for three people. The main characters of the story are Stella and Stanley Kowalski, the home owners, Blanche DuBois, Stella’s sister, Harold Mitchell (Mitch), Stanley’s friend, and Eunice and Steve Hubbell, the couple that lives upstairs. Blanche is the protagonist in the story because all of the conflicts involve her. She struggles with Stanley’s ideals and with shielding her past.
Williams, Tennessee. "Tennessee Williams Interviews Himself." Where I Live: Selected Essays by Tennessee Williams. Ed. Christine Day and Bob Woods. New York: New Directions, 1978. 88-92.
Tennessee Williams explores in his play” A Streetcar Named Desire”, suggests the main protagonist, Blanche, who has ruins her reputation due to her adversity. She is kick out of Laurel. She have no choice, but to move to her sister’s house. This place can allow her to create a new identity and new life. However when Blanche is revealed , it cause her to choose to live in her own fantasy world , because she cannot face the harsh reality. The Play” A Streetcar Named Desire”, by Tennessee Williams illustrates that sensitive people may succumb to fantasy to survive when they faced adversity, ,which forsake their identity to find an acceptable existence.
While “The Yellow Wallpaper” mainly touches on the treatment of women in Gilman's time and only majorly addresses how negative the reception was for them while the men of her world were well-respected individuals, “A Streetcar Named Desire” makes a commentary on the gender roles of masculinity and femininity as a whole, including the two different portrayals of masculinity and how femininity was still generally looked down upon by American society in the late 1940s, unfortunately noting that not much had changed in the time between the stories passed.
As women's studies programs have proliferated throughout American universities, feminist "re-readings" of certain classic authors have provided us with the most nonsensical interpretations of these authors' texts. A case in point is that of Kathleen Margaret Lant's interpretation of Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire in her essay entitled "A Streetcar Named Misogyny." Throughout the essay, she continually misreads Williams' intention, which of course causes her to misunderstand the play itself. Claiming that the play "has proved vexing to audiences, directors, actors, readers, and critics" (Lant 227), she fails to see that it is she herself who finds the play vexing, because it does not fit nicely into the warped feminist structure she would try to impose upon it.
The characters in “A Streetcar Named Desire”, most notably Blanche, demonstrates the quality of “being misplaced” and “being torn away from out chosen image of what and who we are” throughout the entirety of the play.
Written in 1947, A Streetcar Named Desire has always been considered one of Tennessee William’s most successful plays. One way for this can be found is the way Williams makes major use of symbols and colours as a dramatic technique.
Tennessee William’s A Streetcar Named Desire is one of the most popular plays in American history. The play contains this theme of Old South versus New South where old southern ideals and way of life clashes against newly formed ideals of the late 19th and early 20th century. The distinctions between the Old South’s emphasis on tradition, social class, and segregation versus the New South’s emphasis on hard work can be seen throughout the play. It is manifested in the main characters of the play. Blanche DuBois’s civilized and polished nature makes her a symbol of the Old South while Stanley Kowalski’s brutish, direct, and defying nature represents the New South. Tennessee Williams uses the characters of his play to present a picture of the social, gender role, and behavior distinctions that existed between the Old South versus the New South. Furthermore, the two settings provided in the play, Belle Reve and Elysian Fields can also be seen as different representations of the Old versus the New with the way both places are fundamentally different.
A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams is a play about a woman named Blanche Dubois who is in misplaced circumstances. Her life is lived through fantasies, the remembrance of her lost husband and the resentment that she feels for her brother-in-law, Stanley Kowalski. Various moral and ethical lessons arise in this play such as: Lying ultimately gets you nowhere, Abuse is never good, Treat people how you want to be treated, Stay true to yourself and Don’t judge a book by its cover.