Streetcar crit

“The imagination is both

the source of both great strength and weakness” — Roudane

For Blanche, “the imagination creates a heroic

resistance against a contingent and bewildering universe” — Roudane

“Stage symbol, scenic image, body language

accentuate the conflicts that the characters themselves articulate” — Roudane

“How startling

A Streetcar Named Desire was for 1947 audiences” — Roudane

“Searing

adult drama” — Hardison Londre

“References to

unspeakable aspects of sexuality” — Hardison Londre

“Psychological realism set against striking

departures from realism in staging” — Hardison Londre

“Moves metaphorically from desire

to death” — Hardison Londre

Streetcar’s “moral

ambiguities” — Hardison Londre

“Reinvigorating theatrical

conventions by its symbolic use of stage space” — Hardison Londre

The “physical interior and exterior of the simultaneous setting

reinforce [Blanche’s] mingling of objective reality and subjective reality” — Hardison Londre

It is very often that “Stanley is

the one who garners the audience’s sympathies” — Hardison Londre

Blanche’s “desperate flight from

reality towards an illusory refuge” — Hardison Londre

Music and sound effects are used to “heighten or

comment upon a dramatic moment” — Hardison Londre

Blanche’s madness could be seen as “a crossing over to a ‘paradise’

beyond personal responsibility” — Hardison Londre

Blanche’s “basic motive:

need for refuge and desire for human contact” — Hardison Londre

Blanche’s desire for protection “in the tradition of

the Old South ‘must be through another person’” — Hardison Londre

“His crude violation of Blanche’s possessions [..] presages

his violation of her in Scene 10” — Hardison Londre

Stanley’s ‘silk wedding pajamas’ and Blanche’s ‘soiled […] gown’

give the scene “the aura of a desecrated marriage” — Adler

“Holy family

visual grouping” of Stella, Stanley and the baby in the final scene