Unit 5: Tennessee Williams: A Streetcar Named Desire

ENG608 — Contemporary Drama 9 min read

I. Orientation: Poetic Realism on the American Stage

American drama between 1944 and 1955 was dominated by two writers — Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams — who broke with the well-made social problem play by fusing photographic realism with expressionist stagecraft. Williams named his method "plastic theatre" in his production notes to The Glass Menagerie (1944): a theatre in which lighting, music, sound and object are as expressive as dialogue. A Streetcar Named Desire (Ethel Barrymore Theatre, New York, 3 December 1947; directed by Elia Kazan) is its fullest achievement.

Defining conventions the rest of the unit depends on:

Plastic theatre: non-verbal stage elements carry meaning independently of speech — the "blue piano," the Varsouviana polka, the paper lantern, the shadows on the wall in Scene 10.
Poetic realism: a naturalistic tenement setting (a two-room flat in the French Quarter) rendered in lyrical, image-saturated language, so that squalor and poetry coexist.
Subjective realism: the audience is periodically made to see and hear as the protagonist does — the polka is audible only to Blanche.
The Southern Gothic inheritance: decayed plantation aristocracy, sexual guilt, madness and the "faded belle" figure, shared with Faulkner and Carson McCullers.
Continuous scenic structure: eleven scenes with no act divisions, so the action mounts without a formal interval of relief.
The Method context: Kazan's Group Theatre naturalism, and Marlon Brando's Stanley, permanently altered the acting style of American drama.

II. Tennessee Williams: The Man Behind the Play

A. Biography of Tennessee Williams

Thomas Lanier Williams III (1911–1983) drew almost all his major material from a single, damaged family constellation.

Birth and family: born 26 March 1911 in Columbus, Mississippi, in the rectory of his maternal grandfather, an Episcopal clergyman; father Cornelius Coffin Williams, a hard-drinking travelling shoe salesman; mother Edwina Dakin Williams, a genteel clergyman's daughter of Southern-belle pretension — the twin sources of Stanley's brutality and Blanche's affectation.
The move north (1918): the family left the small-town South for a cramped St. Louis apartment when Cornelius took an office post; the shock of urban confinement recurs in the Kowalski flat.
Sister Rose: diagnosed schizophrenic and given a prefrontal lobotomy in 1943 with their mother's consent — the biographical wound behind Laura Wingfield and behind Blanche's committal in Scene 11.
Education: University of Missouri, Washington University (St. Louis), and finally a BA from the University of Iowa in 1938, after which he adopted the pen-name "Tennessee."
Breakthrough and peak: The Glass Menagerie (Chicago 1944, Broadway 1945); A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1948 and the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award; Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955) won a second Pulitzer.
Sexuality and loss: a gay man in a period of legal and social prohibition; the death of his partner Frank Merlo in 1963 began a decade of alcohol and barbiturate dependence and critical decline.
Death: 25 February 1983 in New York, choking on a bottle cap in his suite at the Hotel Elysée.

B. Life into Art: What the Biography Explains

The divided inheritance: Blanche (Edwina's gentility, Rose's fragility) and Stanley (Cornelius's aggressive physicality) are two halves of Williams's own household set at each other.
Coded homosexuality: Blanche's dead husband Allan Grey, exposed with an older man and driven to suicide, allows Williams to dramatise homosexual shame at a moment when it could not be named directly on Broadway.
The South as lost place: having been removed from Mississippi at seven, Williams writes the South as memory and myth — Belle Reve is already gone before the play begins.

III. A Streetcar Named Desire (1947)

A. Plot Analysis

Synopsis. Blanche DuBois, a Mississippi schoolteacher, arrives at her sister Stella's flat in Elysian Fields, New Orleans; over eleven scenes her genteel façade is dismantled by Stella's husband Stanley Kowalski, culminating in her rape and committal to a state institution.

Exposition (Scenes 1–3): Blanche's arrival — she has taken "a streetcar named Desire… transfer… to Cemeteries… Elysian Fields." She reveals the loss of the family plantation Belle Reve; Stanley invokes the Napoleonic code ("what belongs to the wife belongs to the husband") and ransacks her trunk. The poker night ends in violence, Stella's flight upstairs to Eunice, and Stanley's cry of "Stella!" on the stairs.
Rising action (Scenes 4–6): Blanche's "Don't hang back with the brutes!" speech is overheard by Stanley; the courtship of Harold "Mitch" Mitchell offers escape ("Sometimes — there's God — so quickly!"); Blanche confesses Allan Grey's suicide at Moon Lake Casino after she told him "You disgust me."
Crisis (Scenes 7–9): Stanley reports his findings from Laurel — the Hotel Flamingo, the seventeen-year-old pupil, the dismissal from school — on Blanche's birthday, and gives her a one-way bus ticket back to Laurel. Mitch arrives drunk, tears the paper lantern from the bulb to see her face, and refuses to marry her: she is "not clean enough."
Climax (Scene 10): Stella in hospital in labour; Stanley, in his silk wedding pyjamas, corners Blanche — "We've had this date with each other from the beginning" — and rapes her as jungle cries and lurid shadows fill the walls.
Denouement (Scene 11): weeks later, another poker game. Stella chooses to disbelieve Blanche in order to keep her marriage. Blanche leaves on the doctor's arm — "Whoever you are — I have always depended on the kindness of strangers" — while Steve deals: "This game is seven-card stud."

Structural note: the poker game frames the play (Scenes 3 and 11), making the action a rigged hand in which Blanche holds no cards.

B. Character Analysis

The play is built as a duel between two irreconcilable ways of surviving, with Stella and Mitch as the contested middle ground.

1. Blanche DuBois — the yielding antagonist of reality.

Name and self-image: "Blanche DuBois… it means white woods… Like an orchard in spring!" — a virginal pastoral fiction against her actual history.
Method of survival: illusion. "I don't want realism. I want magic!" She avoids naked light bulbs, bathes compulsively, and drinks Stanley's liquor in secret.
Complexity: she is snobbish, dishonest and predatory towards the young newspaper collector, yet possesses the play's moral centre — "deliberate cruelty is not forgivable."

2. Stanley Kowalski — the resisting force of the actual.

Physical definition: introduced carrying a "red-stained package from a butcher's," the "gaudy seed-bearer" whose pleasure is "the giving and taking of it."
Method of survival: exposure and possession — the trunk, the birth certificate, the Napoleonic code, the bus ticket.
Class position: Polish-American, ex-Master Sergeant, factory parts salesman, immigrant confidence — "I am not a Polack… I am one hundred per cent American."
Stella Kowalski: the sister who has crossed over, "narcotised" by sexual fulfilment ("there are things that happen between a man and a woman in the dark"); her final choice to institutionalise Blanche is survival bought by denial.
Mitch: the sensitive mother-bound suitor, Blanche's near-escape; his tearing of the lantern makes him complicit in her destruction, though he weeps in Scene 11.
Minor figures: Eunice and Steve Hubbell as a coarse comic mirror of the Kowalski marriage; the blind Mexican woman selling "Flores para los muertos" as the play's memento mori.

C. Thematic Analysis

Desire versus death: the streetcar route yokes them — Blanche's promiscuity at the Tarantula Arms was "the opposite" of death, a response to the deaths at Belle Reve.
Illusion versus reality: dramatised in light — the paper lantern, the refusal to meet Mitch in daylight, and the bulb Stanley finally strips bare.
Old South versus new America: Belle Reve ("beautiful dream") against Elysian Fields; agrarian aristocracy against urban, ethnic, industrial democracy — Blanche's "epic fornications" of the ancestors lost the land before Stanley took the rest.
Sexuality, shame and gender: Allan Grey's suicide, Blanche's punished promiscuity against Stanley's licensed appetite; male violence normalised by Eunice's counsel to "keep on going."
Cruelty and dependence: the "kindness of strangers" is both Blanche's tragedy and her creed, delivered to the doctor who is taking her away.
Madness as social verdict: insanity is not diagnosed but conferred — by Stanley's evidence, Mitch's rejection and Stella's disbelief.

D. Significance of the Title

Literal source: New Orleans really operated streetcar lines named Desire and Cemeteries, and the Elysian Fields stop; the geography is factual before it is symbolic.
Allegory of a life: desire carries Blanche to death and then to a pagan afterlife (Elysian Fields), naming her trajectory in a single journey.
Determinism: a streetcar runs on fixed rails — desire is a route one is carried along, not a choice; hence "the opposite of death" and Stanley's "we've had this date from the beginning."
Discarded alternatives: Williams worked under the titles Blanche's Chair in the Moon and The Poker Night; the final title shifts emphasis from character or setting to the impersonal force that drives both.

E. Stylistic Devices

Leitmotifs: the "blue piano" for the raffish vitality of the Quarter; the Varsouviana polka, heard only by Blanche, always terminating in the gunshot at Moon Lake; the jungle cries in Scene 10 for predatory instinct.
Symbolic objects: the paper lantern (illusion, torn off twice); bathing (attempted purification); liquor; the red butcher's package; the white satin gown and rhinestone tiara.
Expressionist lighting: the walls of the flat become transparent in Scene 10, the shadows "grotesque and menacing" — external reality dissolving into Blanche's perception.
Poetic and idiomatic diction: Blanche's cadenced, image-heavy speech ("the tin roof of my own being") set against Stanley's monosyllabic, imperative idiom ("Be comfortable is my motto").
Off-stage action: Allan's suicide, the Laurel history, the rape and the birth all occur off-stage or before the play, so the audience judges them only through partial narration.
Irony and juxtaposition: the Mexican flower-seller's cries cut across Blanche's speech on death and desire; the birth of Stella's child coincides with Blanche's destruction.
Antithetical structure: every element is paired — light/dark, music/noise, French/Polish, white gown/red pyjamas — so the play's oppositions are visible even without dialogue.