A Streetcar Named Desire Critics Quotes

Opening night critic

Madness/deceit

"Although Blanche cannot face the truth, Mr Williams does in the most imaginative and perceptive play he's ever written."

Emma Kirby

Madness

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

Mary Ann Corrigon

Madness

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

Harold Clurman

Sexism

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

J. M. McGlinn

Illusion vs. reality

"Stella ignores the needs of others and eventually adopts her own illusion…Her refusal to accept Blanche's story of the rape is a commitment to self-preservation rather than love..."

The New Yorker

Corruption/Decay

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

Robert Brustein

Gender

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

Elia Kazan

Gender

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

Ruby Cohn

Gender

"Stanley has trained his wife to catch his meat, in every sense"

Nancy Tischler

Old vs. new

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

Elia Kazan

Destruction

"He's got things the way he wants them around there and he does not want them upset by a phony, corrupt, sick, destructive woman. This makes Stanley right!"

Joan Templeton

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"

H. Sambrook

Mitch

"His role is to offer Blanche the promise of a safe haven, to spur Stanley indirectly to find out about Blanche's past in order to protect his old buddy."

P. Allan

Illusion vs. reality

"She craves 'magic' because the truth about postwar America is too harsh to bear."

Tennessee Williams

Major theme in the play

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

Bert Cardullo

Desire

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

Joseph Riddell

The end of the play

"an expression of spiritual purification through suffering"

George Hovis

Southern Belle

"both a mask and a prison"

Elia Kazan

Blanche’s destruction

“Blanche is destroyed by the slow, relentless cruelty of a world unwilling to grant her the compassion she needs”

Williams

Stanley’s desire for Blanche

“His desire for her is not simply sexual, but about assertgin his control over her, destroying her illusions and proving his supremecy”

Philip C. Kolin

Blanche’s desire

“Blanche’s sexual desire is a mask, a sheild against the pain of her past, but also the source of her ultimate undoing”

Elia Kazan

Realism vs romanticism

“Stanley is a realise; Blanche is the last burst of the old romanticism. She lives in an illusion, and he tears it away and destroys her”

John Crassner

Mitch

“Ordinary man’s failure to rescue the extrodinary woman”

Williams

Setting

“I think the war between romanticism and hostility to it is sharp there”

Elia Kazan

William’s connection to the plays

“Everything in his life is in his plays, and everything in his plays is in his life”

Williams

Character choice

“I must find characters who correspond to my own tensions”