A Streetcar Named Desire Critical Quotes

Tennessee Williams

On the main theme of his plays

"The destructive power of society on the sensitive non-conformist individual."

Samuel Tapp

On the Southern Belle tragedy of Blanche

Blanche Dubois is a victim of the mythology of the Southern Belle

Robert Brustein

On gender

"The conflict between Blanche and Stanley allegorises the struggle between effeminate culture and masculine libido"

Emma Kirby

On madness in ASND

“sanity is dependent on fitting in and adhering to the social roles expected of us"

Mary Ann Corrigon

On madness and the past.

"We cannot understand [Blanche's] behaviour until we see how the past affects the future"

Harold Clurman

On sexism, masculinity, and madness

"Blanche is a delicate and sensitive woman pushed into insanity by a brutish environment presided over by chief ape-man Stanley Kowalski"

The New Yorker

on corruption and decay/ culture vs individual clash

"A play about the disintegration of a woman…or of a society"

Elia Kazan

On gender and Stella

"Stella is a refined girl who has found a kind of salvation or realization but at a terrific price"

Nancy Tischler

On the old vs the new, and culture.

"…sees Streetcar not as a drama of natural selection but rather as "a reversal of Darwin's vision—back to the apes"

Joan Templeton

On desire

"…argues that Blanche, through her own "epic fornications," is just as responsible for her fall as the Old South is for its own demise"

Bert Cardullo

On desire and the destructive power of it.

"They are less victim and villain… than mutual victims of desire."

Drake (not that one silly goose)

On Blanche’s tragedy.

"presenting the pessimistic view of modern man destroying the tender aspects of love (…) and in Blanche's refusal to submit, she is being portrayed as the last representative of a sensitive, gentle love whose defeat is to be lamented"

Nicola Onyett

On social ostracism

Blanche has become a social outcast because she refuses to conform to conventional moral values . In cruelly unveiling the truth about her scandalous past, Stanley strips her of her psychological, sexual and cultural identity.

Melman

On desire, sex and death

Blanche "grasps at desire as a means of escaping death, her passion can only lead her closer to the grave for it fuels an attempt not to reach out to the future, but to deny it"

(Note: Not only B’s suppressed desire causes her downfall, but her dead husband Allan Grey was forced to suppress his homosexuality for her, resulting in his suicide)