A Streetcar Named Desire 🚃💔⚡

where is the Kowalski apartment?

“Elysian Fields”

how does Blanche get to the Kowalski apartment?

riding “a street-car named Desire”

what is the 2nd streetcar Blanche takes?

“called Cemeteries”

Stanley is a… [seed]

“gaudy seed-bearer”

Scene 1 → music

“blue piano” + the “Varsouviana”

“Varsouviana” → Non-naturalistic sound effect heard only in Blanche’s imagination

symbolises how Blanche is haunted by Allan Gray’s death

Southern Gothic in Blanche’s speech

her dialogue is saturated by gothic horrors:

• burning bodies,

“breath and bleeding”

“Grim Reaper had put up his tent on our doorstep”

Grim Reaper foreshadowing Blanche’s tragic downfall:

“Belle Rêve was his headquarters” p.12

Blanche on the downfall of Belle Reve:

“There are thousands of papers, stretching back over hundreds of years, affecting Belle Reve as, piece by piece, our improvident grandfathers and fathers and uncles and brothers exchanged the land for their epic fornications - to put it plainly!”

Blanche’s baths meaning:

• The bathing symbolises Blanche’s doomed attempt to erase her sordid past → almost like Lady Macbeth

The incorrect name: Belle Rêve

Rêve is a masculine noun, but it is incorrectly treated as a feminine noun with the feminine conjugation: “Belle”

→ this could link to the Williams’s effeminate nature

→ this could link to the illusory idea that there is something wrong with Blanche’s “beautiful dream”

the name Blanche DuBois:

→ soft consonants

→ Blanche = white

→ DuBois = of the woods

→ Southern aristocrat of French descent

the name Stanley Kowalski:

→ hard vowels

→ sibilance

→ working-class northerner of Polish descent

what does the trunk serve as?

an objective correlative of both Blanche’s tragic past and her precarious current existence

Blanche on Stanley’s corruptive hands opening her love letters:

“Now you’ve touched them I’ll burn them! … I hurt [Allan] the way you would like to hurt me, but you can’t!”

Scene 4 is the only scene…

with its own name: The Poker Night

what is the poker game a metaphor for?

bluffing, playing the hand you’ve been dealt + luck

what does Stella call Stanley [animal]

“an animal thing”

stella and stanley + animalistic love:

“they come together with low, animal moans”

stella on treating her abusive relationship as normal:

“when men are drinking and playing poker anything can happen” "

Stanley being a lamb:

“he was as good as a lamb when I came back and he’s really very, very ashamed of himself”

the steetcar that bangs through the Quarter: "

“bangs through the Quarter, up one narrow street and down another”

blanche on keeping her hands off kids: "

“Run along now!…I’ve got to be good and keep my hands off children” → Blanche is struggling to repress her violent sexuality

juxtaposition between the Young Man + Blanche’s encounter versus her attempted relationship with Mitch:

Marguerite in La Dame aux Camélias:

Blanche assumes the role of the doomed courtesan Marguerite in Alexander Dumas’s La Dame aux Camélias → 19th century tragic romance

→ casts Mitch as Armand, the much younger lover

→ Blanche acts as the playwright, and this shows her tendency to self-dramatise

Mitch + Samson:

“Samson” → Blanche calls Mitch “Samson”, a reference to the Old Testament strongman betrayed by the female temptress Delilah.

what did Allan Gray illuminate Blanche’s life with?

a “blinding light”

the time of year in scene 7:

“late afternoon in mid-September” → adds a bit of a clock to the tragedy

“contrapuntally”, Scene 7

Stanley reveals Blanche’s truth “contrapuntally”

• this is normally used to describe polyphonic music in which the various parts are clearly differentiated → in marked contrast to the original melody

• the shows the unbridgeable gulf between 2 enemies

• melodramatic + almost operatic sense of tension

Stella’s panic-stricken clichés:

“Lower your voice!” and “It’s pure invention!”

Stanley on Blanche’s future + maps:

“her future is mapped out for her”

Blanche + Stanley’s birthdays:

Blanche = 15th September, Virgo, or Virgin

• even her star sign is misleading!

Stanley = born “just five minutes after Christmas” → Capricorn → Goat → intrinsically animalistic

Howard Giles’s Communication Accommodation Theory (CAT)

→ made 25 years after Streetcar

→ argues that people with social differences tend to have their styles of speech diverge as tension builds → this emphasises the social difference between them

as the play progresses, Stanley’s lang. becomes more basilect + fragmentary → Blanche’s is more acrolect and formal

Paper Moon 📰🌜

• an actual song by Rose + Harburg

symbolises Blanche’s relationship with Mitch → her future happiness depends on Mitch’s continuing to believe her act

greatest showman reference from Blanche

“It’s a Barnum and Bailey world / Just as phony as it can be”

Stanley on being a real American:

“I am not a Polack. People from Poland are Poles, not Polacks. But what I am is one hundred percent American, born and raised in the greatest country on earth and proud as hell because of it, so don’t ever call me a Polack”

Stanley on being dirt:

“I was common as dirt. You showed me the snapshot of the place with the columns. I pulled you down off them columns and how you loved it, having them coloured lights going! And wasn’t we happy together, wasn’t it all okay till she showed here” → Stanley talking to Stella

the Varsouviana in Scene 8:

“rising with sinister rapidity”

when is scene 9 taking place:

“a while later that evening”

Stanley on the date with Blanche:

“We’ve had this date since the beginning!”

Flower Vendor → scene 9

Scene 9 → giving flowers:

• symbolism = flower seller functions as a memento mori, or a reminder of death

• breaks the English rhythm of the play → this interjection feels ghostly and otherworldly

• non-naturalistic characterisation → she doesn’t interact with the main characters but haunts the scene, mirroring Blanche’s internal deterioration

• Diegetic sound → her voice is a motif → representing Blanche’s trauma surrounding Allan Grey’s death

• foreshadowing → prefigures Blanche’s final mental + social breakdown → metaphorically among the dead, no longer belonging to the living world of Mitch, Stanley, or Stella

• Expressionism → externalising Blanche’s inner turmoil.

• Juxtaposition → contrasts Blanche’s attempt to defend her lies and preserve her fantasy

  • Language choice → makes the moment feel foreign, disorienting, and surreal

Blanche + Ophelia:

→ Flower vendor = a death omen for Blanche

→ Ophelia hands out flowers to Laertes, Gertrude, and Claudius

→ expressionistic sound motif → mirrors the musical and poetic form of Ophelia’s mad songs

→ both have ambiguous deaths

sexual assault is Stanley’s…

modus operandi

Stanley quashing Blanche’s idea of Shep:

“There isn’t no millionaire!” → Stanley removes any idea that Blanche has of sex with other men → sex with him his the only option → alludes to the New South annihilating the Old South

when does Scene 11 take place?

“Some weeks later”

Eunice on life:

“Life has got to go on”

Blanche on kindness:

“I has always depended on the kindness of strangers” → relies on people not knowing about her past

Steve + the final line of the play:

“This game is a seven-card stud” → Life in Elysian Fields will go on without Blanche

→ four cards face up → the truth has outed!!

Scene 11 serves as a….

coda → a dramatic postscript or afterthought

Blanche = Cleopatra

“Queen of the Nile”

→ Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra → Cleopatra prepares for her death, and her two faithful servants do as well: “Charmian” and “Iras”

→ Stella + Eunice do nothing of the sort → both are living in illusion

“Della Robbia blue”

→ Stella’s son is wrapped in in this colour

→ a reddened version of forget-me-not blue → desire!

→ the triptych of mother, father, and child → impurity + worry + desire riddles the child’s future

Critic Londré on Blanche + marriage:

“what she has not been able to achieve in two months or so of artful deceit: a proposal of marriage”

→ this only happens when Blanche actually tells Mitch the truth

Christopher Inness: the main themes of Streetcar :

“major themes: the ambiguous nature of sexuality, the betrayal of faith, the corruption of modern America, the over-arching battle of artistic sensitivity against physical materialism”

who does Blanche say could write the events of Belle Reve?

“Only Poe! Only Mr. Edgar Allan Poe!”

what happens in The Fall of the House of Usher (1830) + how does it link to Streetcar:

• the Usher mansion is crumbling + symbolises the family’s decline (like Belle Reve!)

• Death is inescapable → Blanche’s fantasy world collapses

• both psychologically trapped in their settings

Both texts explore the fragile boundary between internal and external collapse - where building, minds, and identities fall apart simultaneously

Blanche on bobbysoxers:

“instil a bunch of bobby-soxers and drug-store Romeos with reverence for Hawthorne and Whitman and Poe!”

→ ironic → Blanche and her attraction to underage boys

The Scarlet Letter reference:

The Scarlet Letter (1850) → Blanche evokes imagery of Hester Prynne, the protagonist, who is shunned and scorned by her narrow-minded Puritan community for adultery + fornication

Williams on being the outcast:

Williams is the “Laureate of the Outcast” → Alycia Smith-Howard + Greta Heintzelman

Shep + the ATO pin

Alpha Tau Omege college fraternity → aimed to divide the North + and South in the aftermath that had risen because of the civil war → this places Shep as Stanley’s social + cultural opposite

Shep Huntleigh name

shepherd → seems positive, helping Blanche

hunt → Machiavellian + actually out to get her

what is the purpose of the Greek chorus?

• to represent ordinary people on stage

• express the hidden ideas + emotions that characters were not able to express

  • their hidden fears and desire

    • Mexican woman + Tamale vendor fulfil aspects of these functions in the play

Williams on plastic theatre:

“new, plastic theatre which must take the place of the exhausted theatre of realistic conventions if the theatre is to resume vitality as a part of our culture”

theatre is, by definition, expressionistic:

“where the emotions of the play are rendered visually or aurally on the stage”

expressionism def.

a replacement of objectivity and realism with a more subjective picture of the world in order to express heightened stage of emotions. Ideas are presented as deliberately warped, artificial, and unnatural

memory play:

“a story that unfolds from the perspective of a major character” → could be argued that Streetcar is a memory play given how the events seem to fall around Blanche + are powered by her memories of Allan Grey

the purpose of plastic theatre?

to externalise Blanche’s inner turmoil

realism

a literary + theatrical movement aiming to represent everyday life, focusing on ordinary characters + plausible events → portrayal of Kowalskis’ modest New Orleans apartment + marital struggles

domestic realism

a subset of realism focusing on family life and household dynamics → Stella + Stanley

psychological realism:

a narrative technique that delves into characters’ inner thoughts, emotions, and motivations → Blanche’s monologues

dramatic naturalism:

focuses on the effects of an environment on the characters → the apartment, the south, etc.

poetic naturalism:

when the drama is located in the real, but reaches for the poetic

Surrealism:

Surrealist writes use image and metaphors to reflect and reveal unconscious thoughts of characters

the Kowalski apartment in Eliza Kazan’s film (1951)

• fabric between Blanche’s bed + kitchen = translucent

• opaque + patterned walls between Stella + Stanley’s room + kitchen

  • fabric EVERYWHERE → can be draped to highlight certain objects like the saxophone above Stella + Stanley’s bed + the little white doll in a hat as Blanche and Stanley argue

• the place is unmoored by Asian objets-d’art → like printed fans in the kitchen

when was the first Broadway showing of Streetcar?

December 3rd 1947 → Ethel Barrymore Theatre → directed by Eliza Kazan

metatheatre in Streetcar

• characters seem to stage their own dramas

• Blanche DuBois arrives with costumes and props

fourth-wall realism in Streetcar

• the fourth wall is normally between the actors + the audience

• but Williams subverts this → the audience can see through the back-wall, allowing the audience to see the street and the characters’ interactions with the outside world

word to describe Blanche’s fate:

ineluctable

lighting change upon Blanche’s arrival:

“tender blue” → “strong” white “light”

Stella name significance

• latin for Star

• delicate + trapped in relationship

metaplasm:

a type of neologism in with a grammatical error of misspelling is made to emphasise an idea: Belle Reve

Blanche fancies Mitch as a…

deus-ex-machina who can save her

antebellum

Blanche represents Antebellum South → she is a relic of time before the Civil war that divided America

postbellum:

Stanley → after the war + representing everything modern

idiolect:

the speech habits peculiar to a particular person

Blanche’s dialogue can be described as:

acrolect

elevated style

stichomythia:

dialogue in which tow characters speak alternate lines of verses → used in ancient Greek drama → could paint Blanche as a protagonist + Stanley as antagonist

Vivien Leigh + cadence:

Vivien Leigh delivered Blanche’s speech with poetic and melodic cadence, adding to the idea that Blanche is swept up in her own world of fiction

leitmotif in Streetcar:

• Varsouviana Polka → guilt of Allan

The Ego and the Id, 1923

• Stanley = id → impulsive + aggressive

• Blanche = superego → adheres to old-fashioned values + maintaining a facade

  • Stella = ego → caught between the id and the superego

bathos

a descent from the sublime → the normal

structuralist analysis of Streetcar:

• a play structured around binary oppositions

• past vs present

• paradise lost vs present chaos

• old vs new

• appearance vs reality

• wealthy vs poor

Gazolla on strucutralism in Streetcar:

“the characters are defined in terms of the way they relate to time, or, in other words, by their ability or lack of ability to accept or adapt to the historical process”