A Streetcar Named Desire Criticism

Tilscher, on Blanche

“Blanche is a threat to his authority and family”

Bigsby, on Stanley’s rape of Blanche

a “calculated act by Stanley by which he is forcing the issue to the conclusion”

Bigsby, on Stanley

Stanley represents the “crude forces of violence, insensibility and vulgarity”

Heilman, on trauma

after the death of Allan, Blanche’s “shock becomes illness, and illness eventually triumphs”

Dusenbury, on setting

“the plot is set in the times of an expansive socioeconomic change in America when the Old South was about to decline”

Gibbs, on the stage play

“a brilliant, implacable play about the disintegration of a woman, or, if you like, of a society.”

Albert Wertheim, on the South

the “clock” is “Stella’s pregnancy”, and the birth of the baby, a “postwar hybrid of Stanley and Stella”, is the “day that the representative of the antebellum South, Blanche, is defeated, raped and destroyed”

“Williams casts something of a cold eye” over the “triumph” of the postwar South consisting of “brutish and insensitive Stanley Kowalskis”

Freudian reading of Stanley

Stanley’s flamboyant, hostile sexuality and desire for power over Blanche may be symptomatic of repressed/unresolved Oedipus Complex