A Streetcar Named Desire
This article is about the Tennessee Williams play. For the film, see A Streetcar Named Desire (film). For the opera, see A Streetcar Named Desire (opera).The play presents
Blanche DuBois, a fading Southern belle whose pretensions to virtue and culture only thinly mask her
nymphomania and
alcoholism. Her chastity and poise are an illusion which she presents, to shield others - and herself - from her reality. Blanche arrives at the house of her sister
Stella Kowalski in the
French Quarter of
New Orleans, where the seamy, multicultural ambience is a shock to Blanche's nerves. Explaining that her ancestral southern plantation Belle Reve (translated from French as "Beautiful Dream") has been "lost" due to the "epic fornications" of her ancestors, Blanche is welcomed to stay by a trepidatious Stella, who fears the reaction of her husband Stanley. Blanche explains to them how her supervisor told her she could take time off from her job as an English teacher because of her upset nerves.
In contrast to both the self-effacing Stella and the charming refinement of Blanche, Stella's husband,
Stanley Kowalski, is a force of nature; primal, rough-hewn, brutish and sensual. He dominates Stella in every way, and she tolerates his offensive crudeness and lack of gentility largely because of her self-deceptive love for him.
The interjection of Blanche upsets her sister and brother-in-law's system of mutual dependence. Stella is swept aside as the magnetic attraction between the oppositely-charged Stanley and Blanche overwhelms the household. Stanley's friend and Blanche's would-be suitor
Mitch is similarly trampled along Blanche and Stanley's collision course. Their final, inevitable confrontation results in Blanche's nervous breakdown.
Blanche and Stanley, together with
Arthur Miller's
Willy Loman, are among the most recognizable characters in American drama.
The reference to the
streetcar (
tram) called
Desire is symbolic, as well as an accurate piece of New Orleans geography. Blanche has to travel on a streetcar named "Desire" to reach Stella's home in
Elysian Fields, presenting an abiding theme in the play that desire and death are mutual aspects of the same pathos. Blanche's sorrow is that the pleasure brought from desire is only short-lived and ultimately doomed, much like her streetcar journey.
Illusion versus Reality
A recurring theme found in "A Streetcar Named Desire" is an ever-present conflict between reality and fantasy, actual and ideal. Blanche does not want, "...what's real, but what's magic." This recurring theme is read most strongly in William's characterization of Blanche DuBois and the physical tropes that she employs in her pursuit of what is magical and idealized: the purple shade she employs to cover the harsh white light bulb in the living room, her chronically deceptive recounting of her last years in Belle Reve, the misleading letters she presumes to write to Shep Huntleigh, and a pronounced excess to alcohol consumption.
Notably, Blanche's deception of others and herself is not characterized by malicious intent, but rather a heart-broken and saddened retreat to a romantic time and happier moments before disaster struck her life when her loved one Allan Gray committed suicide during a Varsouvian Polka. In many ways, Blanche is understood to be a sympathetic and tragic figure in the play despite her deep character flaws.
There is also a strong presence of sexism within the play. Throughout the play, women are portrayed as the "weaker sex" while men are shown to be in control. The gender struggle is apparent when Stella submits to Stanley's authority rather than come to the aid of her sister. The tragedy of Blanche is representative of the struggle of women in the South.
Abandonment of Chivalric Codes
In most fairy tale stories, the ailing princess or the damsel in distress is often rescued by a heroic white knight. "A Streetcar Named Desire" is characterized by the conspicuous absence of the male protagonist imbued with heroic qualities. Indeed, the polar opposite of what a literary chivalric hero might be is represented in the leading male character of the play, Stanley Kowalski. Stanley is described by Blanche as a "survivor of the
Stone Age" and is further depicted in this primitive light by numerous traits that he exhibits: uncivilized manners, demanding and forceful behavior, lack of empathy, crass selfishness, and a chauvinistic attitude towards women. The replacement of the heroic white knight by a character such as Stanley Kowalski further heightens Williams' theme of the demise of the romantic Old South in "A Streetcar Named Desire." Stanley, it should be noted, is not a villain in the literary sense of the word. His actions do not reflect a motivation to actively pursue the destruction of an individual as the primary goal, but rather the callousness and destructiveness of his actions bear a direct result from his incapacity to empathize and his instinctive, primitive desire to own or dominate. Stanley, as a result, is a symbol for the rising new values and attributes of industrial, capitalist America that has come to replace the chivalric codes of the dashing gentleman caller of the Old South.
In
1951,
Elia Kazan directed a movie based on the play; see
A Streetcar Named Desire (film)In
1995, the opera,
A Streetcar Named Desire composed by
André Previn with a libretto by
Philip Littell, after the play by Tennessee Williams had its premiere at the
San Francisco Opera during the 1998-99 season.
The first stage version was produced by
Irene Mayer Selznick with
Marlon Brando starring as Stanley,
Jessica Tandy as Blanche,
Kim Hunter as Stella, and
Karl Malden as Mitch. Brando portrayed Stanley with an overt
sexuality that made him, the character of Stanley, and Tennessee Williams into cultural touchstones. The play opened on
Broadway on
December 3,
1947. Brando's magnetic performance caused audiences to sympathize with Stanley in the opening scenes of the play, effectively implicating them in Stanley's eventual brutality towards Blanche. Tandy's performance won her a
Tony Award. A 1988 revival by
Circle in the Square Theatre starred
Aidan Quinn as Stanley,
Frances McDormand as Stella, and
Blythe Danner as Blanche. A 1992 revival starred
Alec Baldwin as Stanley and
Jessica Lange as Blanche. A 2005 revival sharred
John C. Reilly as Stanley and
Natasha Richardson as Blanche (Reilly previously played Mitch opposite
Gary Sinise's Stanley at
Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago).
As described above, Williams was writing in the familiar literary tradition of the Southern Gothic. Faulkner was soon to win the Nobel Prize for his many books set in a fantasy landscape of decadent (but chivalric) aristocrats shouldered aside by coarse (but vital) hustlers and ethnics like Stanley but the student should know that this interpretation has not been popular among Williams's critics. Blanche, with her aristocratic pretensions, is no bourgeois. It is Stanley who is a coarse, but genuine petit bourgeois: his life revolves around marriage, sex, his home, the money he fears Blanche is cheating him out of, the son he hopes for, and his immediate personal pleasures.
Over 50 years after the play opened, the revival of
the streetcar system in
New Orleans is credited by many to the worldwide fame gained by the
streetcars made by the
Perley A. Thomas Car Works, Inc. which were operating on the Desire route in the play, and have been carefully restored and continue to operate there in 2004 (though not on the Desire route.) Streetcars along the Canal Street in downtown New Orleans are up and running. The one on St Charles Avenue is still out of service due to
Hurricane Katrina.
American animated series
The Simpsons made specific reference to the play with a "musical version" of it in the episode entitled "
A Streetcar Named Marge." The musical presented by the characters in the show was a deliberate and effective attempt on part of the show's creators to completely, perhaps direly, miss the point of the original play, a quality that is exemplified by the line: "You can always depend on the kindness of strangers....a stranger's just a friend you haven't met!" Marge experiences an epiphany as she realizes the similarity between her boorish husband, Homer, and the character of Stanley. After the episode aired, The Simpsons' writers received negative feedback for the portrayal of New Orleans in the musical's opening number. In the song, the city is compared to Sodom and Gomorra and is said to be filled with drugs, prostitution, and "tacky, overpriced souvenir stores." The writers of the show later stated the intent of the song was not to comment on the city of New Orleans but to parody a song from the musical
Sweeney Todd.
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A Streetcar Named Desire: Study Guide*
Streetcar*
Tennessee WilliamsA Streetcar Named Desire has an important role in the Spanish film
All About My Mother.
