a streetcar named desire - feminist, psychoanalytic and marxist

feminist criticism

- an approach to reading that focuses in the representation of women and the gender dynamic in a text

- often an assumption of female subordination or gender power imbalance in patriarchal social establishments

- an intention to celebrate female representation in fiction and authorship

psychoanalytic criticism

- an approach to reading derived from methods in psychoanalysis, best represented by its pioneer sigmund freud

- the emphasis is on using concepts like the conscious/subconscious, dream interpretation, child-parent dynamics (eg oedipus complex) to decode characters' deeper psychological state

marxist criticism

- an approach to reading which views texts as an interrogation and reflection of of the dialectic and struggle between social classes, most commonly the bourgeois capitalist and the proletariat worker

- while initially based on the works of karl marx like the communist manifesto, it's later practitioners expanded beyond the socialist dichotomy and would sometimes even challenge the viability of applying marxist ideas to every text

feminist interpretation of blanche and stella

they represent the "old" and "new" modes of womanhood

psychoanalytic interpretation of blanche's behaviour

it is steeped in a traumatic past

marxist interpretation of the dubois and kowalskis

they symbolise the "master-slave" class struggle

feminist streetcar

- blanche a damsel in distress or a fiercely defiant feminist?

- she uses sexual charms to ensnare male attention as the only way to survive/she won't let tragic life suppress her will to live, however desperately she goes about this

- (context) patriarchy was norm across the us south: blanche need to rely on men for survival, stanley's abuse against stella despite her pregnancy and the social gossiping of blanche's seedy past as a prostitute would not have stirred up outrage against williams' audiences as it's likely to do so with contemporary audiences

- stanley's behaviour is chauvinistic

- blanche's attitude is self-victimising

- stella's passivity is dispowering

(feminist theory pt2) do blanche and stella demonstrate their own feministic impulses, despite misguided intentions?

- despite blanche's trauma she seeks out ways of reinventing her identity by leaving laurel, mississippi to the new world of new orleans, louisanna despite force, and attempts to reveal authentic self to mitch (attempt to revive sense of womanhood)

- despite stella's disrespect from stanley, she is a woman who accepts her state of affairs in exchange for something she wants even more ie marrying stanley enables her self refashioning and breaking free from the archetypal mould of a "southern belle", for stella, a reasonable amount of verbal and physical abuse is worthy for a bigger goal of leaving a confederacy era behind

psychoanalytic streetcar

- streetcar tragedy of failing to overcome one's ptsd

- death drive: thanatos (people are subconsciously create circumstances to their death, ie repressing past traumatic or destructive experiences) counters life force: eros

- blanche occupies in between these two, life force: amplifies sexual instincts for survival, death drive: behaves in pattern that consistently puts reputation at stake and her own life in dangerous situations

- morbid: "all of those deaths! the long parade to the graveyard! father, mother! margaret, that dreadful way!" b sc1

- survival of dubois name still remaining in mississippi, blanche is ironically made to feel lifeless and psychologically dead with the loss of the belle reve estate

psychoanalytic pt2 "funerals are quiet, but deaths - not always. sometimes their breathing is hoarse, and sometimes it rattles, and sometimes they even cry out to you, 'don't let me go!'..." b s1

- she sees death as an osmotic force compelling people to realise their own deaths

- having seen death her whole life, she seems to want to live up to a successive persona but is unable to do so as unable to inherit belle reve, she symbolically compensates by inheriting the passion of death and destruction by those close to her

- paradoxically, the fact that she does not die by the end of the play but is instead made to live out the rest of her life in a mental institution impounds her tragic stature

- it implies that she has failed at the only remaining possibility of fulfilling a legacy role as being the daughter who must shoulder the baggage of losing the family home and the wife who drove her husband to suicide and does not carry on his bloodline

marxist streetcar

- marxist irony

- stanley is actually the property owner with power over the upper-class aristocrats

- blanche is forced to seek shelter from someone who she considers to be beneath her

- when stanley ransacks blanche's luggage, he discovers her flamboyant clothes and jewellery he compares her case to "the treasure case of a pirate!" s s2

- marxist of the capitalist master of someone who steals and acquires wealth through exploitative means

- irony of stanley as the proletariat property holder

- (context) 1940s new orleans as merging of new and old america which meant explosion of new economic possibilities for wealth among the working class

- the glaringly hollow and useless nature of blanche's so-called aristocratic pretensions (it doesn't help her in any way)