quotes from critics (AO5)

New Historicist Critical Lens

New Historicist Critical Lens

through a New Historicist critical lens, we can interpret Blanche’s attempts at undermining other characters’ self-worth as a social commentary on the immobility of the Old South morality

Ruhina Jesmin - ‘A Psychoanalytic Insight into Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire’

Blanche has a fixation with “replacing reality with fantastic embodiments or illusion”

Ram Panda

the “Stanley-Stella relationship is one of the supreme examples of hierarchization of activity/passivity opposition”

Susan Koprince

Stella’s subservience is further emphasised by critic Susan Koprince’s as she states that, “[Stella] is essentially a submissive, self-deprecating wife who tolerates and excuses her husband’s behaviour”

Laura Melvey - ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ (1973)

the ‘male gaze’ is a phrase coined by Laura Mulvey - it refers to the perpetual act of illustrating women from a heterosexual and masculine space in both literature and the visual arts; women are viewed as sexual objects for the pleasure of the heterosexual male viewer

Londré - ‘A Streetcar running fifty years’

“the mundane concreteness of ‘streetcar’ and the abstract quality of aspiration evoked in ‘desire’ point to the many antinomies – thematic, symbolic, and imagistic oppositions – imbedded throughout the play.”  

Mihaela Magdić - ‘Gender Stereotyping in Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire’

Stella “escaped her old life only to create almost an exact version of it.”