'Streetcar' AO3

Williams: “my work is…”

“emotionally autobiographical”

The Production of Code (1930): rape “should never…”

“be more than suggested, only when essential for the plot”

Which guidelines stated that rape “should never be more than suggested, only when essential for the plot”?

The Production of Code (1930) ~ regulated moral content of American films

Why would Blanche being taken to a mental asylum have been particularly shocking to its post-WW2 audience?

• WW2 shifted public preference away from institutional care

• idea of sending war veterans w/ PTSD/ combat fatigue into isolated institutions was unpopular

• conscientious objectors reported conditions including overcrowding, under-staffing, decaying physical infrastructure, + abuse

• Maisel's 1946 article exposing 2 state hospitals included pictures of patients lying unattended on the ground bound with heavy restraints, shocking many Americans

• pictures = stark contrast to Blanche's attempts to present herself respectably ~ patients with unattended ulcers, arms tied behind their back & no clothes etc.

Which literary work illustrates the belief that a cracked mirror brings bad luck?

Tennyson’s poem ‘The Lady of Shallot’

• forbidden from looking directly at outside world, the incarcerated Lady is forced to view the world’s reflection in a mirror

• when she looks out the window, the mirror cracks, a curse befalls her + she dies

Which literary work evidences the fact that narrational techniques (clear motivations for immoral acts or moralistic endings of punishments) in the early 1900s regulated expressions of sexuality?

‘Gone With the Wind’ (1936) ~ Margaret Mitchell

• scene of marital rape wherein Rhett Butler forces himself upon Scarlett O’Hara

• O’Hara portrayed as initially resistant before experiencing “ecstasy of surrender”

• awakening of her suppressed passion which she has struggled to feel for her husband

What have scholars identified as the two types of historical literary rape?

• those that depict women’s vulnerability as leading to rape

• those that depict the rape of an independent woman as making her vulnerable

many narratives resolve paradoxical relationship between vulnerability + independence by providing a resolution that incorporates the woman into a stable family setting

What sort of tragedy is A Streetcar Named Desire often conceptualised as?

a modern tragedy ~ no simplistic story of hero sacrifice as in many Aristotelian tragedies but rather guilt of audience identification with victimised hero

How do Blanche’s Southern accent and plantation origins predispose her to victimisation?

• “Southern belle” archetype

• debutante or other fashionable young woman of European heritage (Blanche emphasises French origins of surname) in the planter class of the Antebellum South, particularly as romantic counterpart to the Southern gentleman

• passive, submissive + decorous

• values of gentility anachronistic ~ have no currency ~ in Stanley’s new America

What did Williams observe in interviews and articles from his middle years?

the foundations of his work being laid down in childhood + adolescence

What was Williams’ father like?

• Cornelius = heavy-drinking + womanising, demanding salesman who preferred work to parenting

• Once broke his wife’s nose in a fit of drunken rage

• Known for his disdain for Southern pretensions

• Williams’ sexuality was form of friction with father who described him as ‘Miss Nancy’

What was Williams’ mother like?

• Edwina was genteel daughter of church minister who felt she had married beneath her & disliked lifestyle

• Her father was also Southern & she often adopted the airs of a Southern lady despite declining social status

• She + family had to move from the rural South into a cramped tenement in St Louis in 1918

• Williams described her as losing “belief in everything but loss”

• “It was just a wrong marriage”

• Described her as a “moderately controlled hysteric” with a fear of physical intimacy

What was Williams’ sister like?

• Very close to Williams

• Suffered from Schizophrenia (symptoms have retrospectively been identified)

• In 1943, Edwina ordered a prefrontal lobotomy for Rose which left her institutionalised + incapacitated for life

• Williams felt immense guilt as he was away pursuing writing at the time

• Rose was known for erratic behaviour + sexual fantasies

Who was Pancho Rodriguez Gonzalez?

• Williams entered a relationship with him in 1945

• hotel clerk of Mexican heritage

• prone to jealous rages and excessive drinking ~ relationship was tumultuous

What was America like post-WW1?

• Economic boom, partly because European countries stopped producing goods and started depending upon American products during wars, e.g. exported war equipment to the allies

• The Jazz Age: hedonism, rich cultural age

How did the Great Depression affect America in the 1930s?

• Catalysed by crash of NY stock market 1929

• High employment + interest rates → millions of Americans in deep debt

• Upper classes scorned by masses, who saw wealthy elite as indifferent to daily struggles

• "The invisible hands of the market" did not work and Neoliberalism started to be questioned with more gov. Involvement encouraged.

Why did Williams take the name Tennessee?

• 1938

• Comparing life as a writer to that of the soldiers who fought Native Americans to wrest control of the state

• Artistic sensibilities in constant battle against uncivilised forces

• Father was from Tennessee

How did WW2 (1939-1945) affect America?

• Enabled sense of heroism to develop

  • Spotlight shone on WC men (Stanley) as bearers of American spirit

  • American Dream: individualistic idea that WC men could be go-getters, embodying American spirit, an idealisation at odds with Blanche’s Southern belle fantasy

• Successful defeat of the Nazi threat

What was Williams’ play The Glass Menagerie (1945) like?

• About declassed Southern family living in a tenement

• Foolish but strong Amanda Wingfield based on his mother

• Laura lives secluded solitary life (with mother) fond of her glass menagerie of crystal animals, including her favourite unicorn, symbolising a mythical + distant world in which Laura lives

• Non-reality exploration of mimicry + illusion ~ almost Platonic

What was America like post-WW2?

• “The golden years” (lasted until 70s)

• Social Darwinism

• Young men returned ready to settle down & embrace ‘traditional’ values

• “Elysian Fields” = named after place that ancient Greeks believed served as a home for the dead

  • After victorious soldiers died in battle, went here for eternity to celebrate lives/courage

• After Great Depression, old Southern charm (aristocracy, chivalry) replaced by air of industry + efficiency

• One of the biggest economic booms in history

• Return of soldiers → increase in production + consumption of goods

• Sexual abuse still ubiquitous, inexplicable + unpredictable

The returning soldier

• Williams’ examination of returning veterans is less idealised than Hollywood films such as ‘The Best Years of Our Lives’ (1946) and ‘Till the End of Time’ (1946), which feature returning soldiers who build a feeling of community and develop a sense of responsibility for others (regenerative)

• Master sergeants in the corps during the Italian campaign (Stanley) would have had to take on extensive leadership responsibilities overseeing engineers deactivating mines/ working under shellfire

What was “the New South”?

• Movement aimed to modernise southern states both industrially + socially

• What would have once been genteel UC buildings adapted to serve as apartments for working people

What was the reception of Streetcar like?

Williams wrote A Streetcar Named Desire ~ 1947

• December 3rd 1947: Broadway staged Streetcar for the first time

  • Short silence before 30 min applause

  • 800 performances across America

  • Williams won Pulitzer Prize for Drama

  • Jessica Tandy (Blanche) won a Tony award

What was Streetcar’s adaptation into film like?

• 1951: director of play, Elia Kazan, made film under Williams’ screenwriting

• Controversy over rape scene but Williams refused to remove it

• Because of Catholic Legion of Decency, Stanley had to be punished on screen: Stella leaves him

theme: MARRIAGE

• Post-war conflict between challenge to traditional gender roles + returning soldiers demanding their old dominance

• Quick wartime marriages

• Nuclear family ideal ~ husband as earner + wife as homemaker

• Surge in marriages immediately after WW2 ~ 1946 saw more marriages than any year in US history up to that point

• Divorce still heavily stigmatised ~ many women felt trapped in marriages when leaving not viable option (Stella: “I couldn’t believe her story and go on living with Stanley.” Eunice: “Don’t ever believe it. Life has got to go on.”)

• War→feeling of urgency + time pressure (rushed marriages)

theme: GENDER ROLES

• After the war, women who had entered the workforce (eg. “Rosie the Riveter”) pushed out, back into domestic roles, reaffirming men as primary providers & reinforcing patriarchal structures

• Even male soldiers on home front were portrayed as “soldiers of production” to maintain their image of masculinity

• Welfare payments + social policies were based on the assumption that a man’s income supported his dependent wife + children

• Urgent labour demands of WW2→opportunities for women to take on jobs previously considered men’s work; approx. 6 mil. women took wartime factory jobs in the US

• When WW2 ended, strong push for women to return to traditional domestic roles to free up jobs for mil.s of returning male soldiers. Post-war era saw a resurgence of the traditional family model & the institutionalization of the male breadwinner/dependent housewife structure through social welfare policies

• % of college students that were women actually decreased from 1920-1958

theme: MASCULINITY

• Servicemen afforded respect + social benefits eg. G.I. Bill provided mil.s of veterans w/ low-interest home loans

• War effort had temporality opened up traditionally male occupation to women, challenging male economic establishment + notion of men as exclusive breadwinners ~ as men returned, federal + civilian policies actively pushed women out of higher-paying industrial jobs to restore pre-war gender norms

• Failure to provide adequate source of income = source of anxiety for many men

• Focus of masculinity shifted from violent war ~ the battlefield ~ to the home + workplace

• After the Great Depression - greatest threat to one’s sense of manhood at the time as it threatened men’s positions as providers - WW2 provided American soldiers with the opportunity to prove their manhood

theme: DESIRE

• Wartime economy transitioned to manufacturing consumer goods, & Americans desired the new products that represented a modern, comfortable lifestyle ~ eg. new cars, refrigerators, home appliances

• Wartime liberalisation ~ led Americans to live in the moment, reducing deference to traditional moral restraints

theme: BELIEVABILITY

• Stanley embodies post-WW2 “New South” ~ diverse, urban, + unapologetically masculine VS Blanche, whose genteel mannerisms + reliance on illusion were increasingly viewed as archaic + unconvincing

• Women who deviated from domestic norms often pathologised, stripping them of credibility

theme: TRAGEDY

• Classical tragedy includes fatal flaw ~ hamartia

• Elysian Fields = resting place for dead heroes in Greek mythology

theme: FAMILY BONDS

• “American dream” of self-made identity over definition by lineage (Blanche) via estate liquidations (economic base of Southern aristocracy couldn’t compete with Northern industrialisation)

• Families marketed as a place of safety as a reaction to the insecurity of the economic depression + WW2

• Programs like the ADC were explicitly intended to support widows/ families with disabled fathers presuming a stable home where the mother stayed home while the father provided security

• 1935 Social Security Act + its 1940s expansions were designed to insure male breadwinners against income loss

• During WW2, the Office of War Information coordinated messaging that portrayed the American home as what soldiers were fighting to protect

theme: SETTING

• Tennessee Williams lived in the French Quarter of New Orleans from 1938

• Elysian Fields = poor, industrial + low-rent neighbourhood

• In late 1940s, before air-con, open windows made neighbours' lives part of the internal drama, creating a sultry claustrophobic atmosphere ~ lack of privacy

• The “Desire” line served Bourbon + Royal Streets in the French Quarter nightclubs

theme: William’s use of LIGHT

• By 1947, unshaded incandescent naked bulbs were standard in urban WC homes

• In the post-war era, lighting was increasingly viewed through the lens of efficiency; Blanche’s attempt to decorate this utility with a Chinese paper lantern = an archaic attempt to re-impose 19th-century gentility

• Era of Fil Noir, a genre defined by high-contrast lighting (black + white, shadow + light contrast) & a mood of pessimism, fatalism + menace. Links to Williams’ “lurid reflections” + “shadows and light”

theme: MUSIC

• While much of the US remained strictly segregated, the 1940s French Quarter was diverse hence the prevalence of jazz, which rose to prominence

• The jazz revival spurred the establishment of dedicated venues in the French Quarter. Although Preservation Hall would not officially open until 1961, the building at St. Peter Street was already hosting frequent, informal jam sessions in the 1940s. Other clubs along Bourbon Street, eg. the Paddock Lounge and Mardi Gras Lounge, began featuring regular gigs by traditional jazz musicians like Oscar "Papa" Celestin.

• 1933 song “It’s Only a Paper Moon” encapsulates tension between illusion/propaganda + reality (“it wouldn’t be make-believe if you believed in me”). In an era of emerging mass media, represents the disposability of modern culture

theme: FEMININITY

• Women who worked often demoted or paid substantially less than men, as income was viewed as supplementary to the male breadwinner

• Expected to be sexually respondent to men but chaste in reputation (“virgin-whore dichotomy”) ~ Stanley’s sexual aggression viewed as animal joy/ manhood whereas Blanche’s is labelled promiscuity and leads to social destruction

• The term “hysteria” ~ originating from the Greek for “uterus” ~ was used to categorise symptoms like anxiety, insomnia, + even sexually-forward behaviour

theme: the play’s OPENING

Plays often opened with traditional orchestral overtures ~ vs Streetcar opens with blue piano

theme: use of STAGE DIRECTION

• Plastic theatre as a reaction against “typewriter theatre” plays that relied solely on dialogue

• Rise of method acting (Strasberg/Kazan) which changed how stage directions for movement were interpreted ~ made it more organic/ directed by emotion & less reliant on explicit direction

• Actors like Marlon Brando introduced a new, underplayed style w/ mumbled dialogue + spontaneous body language that challenged the rigid, over-emphasis of traditional acting styles

theme: tension between PAST and PRESENT

• Society valued raw economic power over family lineage (like the Old South)

• Digetic (heard within the context of the play) vs non-digetic (not heard by characters; meta-fictional) sound

theme: CLASS DIFFERENCES

• Post-war society valued money + utility over lineage ~ cultural capital as a burden

• American spirit shifted to the WC ~ Stanley is a Polish-American factory worker + decorated veteran so represents the upwardly-mobile everyman who replaced the indifferent aristocrat (GI Bill etc.)

• Between 1940 + 1950, the no. of Americans with college degrees more than doubled ~ by 1947, nearly half of all college students were veterans

• Between 1939 and 1947, no. of industrial workers in the South almost doubled (1.3-2 mil.), fueled by increased urbanisation + legislation that ensured higher wages than the agrarian past

• Increased taxation on large estates/land diminished the values of hereditary properties

• Southern class structure couldn’t survive industrialisation as labourers moved to urban areas for steady factory paychecks, leaving plantations without a workforce

theme: ILLUSION and REALITY

• Romanticised, genteel morality of the Old South increasingly viewed as a deceptive illusion that couldn’t survive in a pragmatic world

theme: SOCIETY and INDIVIDUALITY

• GI Bill (1944) etc. ~ by providing subsidized mortgages + education to veterans, the government effectively standardised the American life path ~ those who didn’t fit this mold eg. the aging, the unmarried, the intellectual elite, were social liabilities

• Thousands of “difficult” individuals were lobotomised to make them more socially compliant ~ solution for individuals who could not reconcile their internal reality with external social expectations

• Individual sexual orientation was often a death sentence for one’s social standing ~ signed the year the play premiered, the Executive Order of 1947 established a “Loyalty Program” to root out “subversives”, often including gay individuals

theme: RACE

• Jim Crow: racial segregation was the law, serving as a proxy for the era’s broader racial anxieties

• Rise of redlining (refusing loans/insurance because somebody is deemed to be a financial risk) + federal housing policies that systematically denied loans + housing investment in non-white or integrated neighbourhoods→concentrated poverty

• Black people had to sit separately in streetcars

theme: RELIGION and MORALITY

• the “Lavender Scare”: a mid-20th-century moral panic in the U.S. that led to the mass firing + blacklisting of thousands of LGBTQ+ federal employees, wrongly portraying them as national security risks + communist sympathisers due to fears of blackmail and threats to traditional values

• when first performed, audience members cheered Blanche’s institutionalisation

• America founded on Puritan + other Christian principles ~ prejudice against homosexuality + ideas about sexual immorality stem from Christian principles eg. idea that a "wife must submit to her husband" =a biblical principle advocated in 20th-cent. America, particularly the Southern states

theme: the SOUTHERN GOTHIC

• Tensions (North vs South) & changing world order

• Post-civil war ~ which decimated South’s economy ~ Northerners came south to help rebuild, including own fortunes

• Often strong female characters

• Tragedy = Aristotelean “unity of place”

• Shifted from the 19th-century ghost story to a modern exploration of social obsolescence

• The “double” or Doppelganger

• Character of the Mexican woman selling “Flores para los muertos” (flowers for the dead) during Blanche’s breakdown acts as a Gothic harbinger of doom

“I have only one…”

“I have only one major theme for my work, which is the destructive power of society on the sensitive, non-conformist individual.”

“I am…”

“I am Blanche DuBois”

“I began to find life…”

“I began to find life unsatisfactory as an explanation of itself and was forced to adopt the method of the artist of not explaining but putting the blocks together in some way that seems more significant to him”

What is the evidence that Williams’ works are emotionally-biographical?

• distress + guilt at lobotomy of Rose in Suddenly Last Summer where Catherine fights to remain intact in the face of Mrs Venable’s determination to destroy her memories + mind

• in short story The Resemblance between a Violin Case and a Coffin, Williams describes the shock of seeing a sister grow into a disturbingly separate woman

• relationship between aspiring writer + his emotionally vulnerable young sister in The Glass Menagerie

What literary allusion does Blanche make when she exclaims “Out there I suppose is the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir!”?

allusion to Poe’s poem Ulalume (A Ballad) ~ which details the narrator unwittingly returning to the grave of his lost love