Section A: Post-1900 drama Section A is based on the study of
one post-1900 drama text from the list below:
Tennessee Williams: A Streetcar Named Desire (Penguin Modern Classics)
Candidates are required to answer one question from a choice of two. Each question will be presented
in two parts:
part (i) is extract-based and focuses on close language study;
part (ii) requires an extended response relating to the rest of the text. Candidates must use appropriate
literary and linguistic methods of analysis, adopting accurate and precise use of related terminology to:
analyse closely the language of the extract
use integrated linguistic and literary approaches
analyse how meanings are shaped in their set text
show knowledge and understanding of relevant language levels
use accurately a range of linguistic and literary terminology
demonstrate an understanding of the significance and influence of the contexts in which texts are
produced and received
organise responses in a clear and effective academic style and register with coherent written
expression.
Background information:
Williams’ father was a hard drinking, bad tempered, coarse man who called his son “Miss Nancy”- he
was often absent from the household. Williams’ mother was the daughter of an Episcopal minister. She
despised her husband’s drinking and womanising; she felt she was from a social standing that was ill-
suited to the life of her husband. They had 3 children: Rose, Tom (Tennessee Williams) and Dakin. Tom
withdrew into his writing, the mother withdrew into dreams of lost Southern gentility, and Tom’s sister
Rose, declined into madness – she was lobotomised in 1937. The mother, similarly, ended her life in a
mental institution.
THEMES
Desire/ Sexual Passion and fate
, Desire has brought Blanche to the point where she has to move in with her sister, and she
literally arrives on a streetcar ‘named Desire’.
Blanche tells Stella “What you are talking about is brutal desire – just – Desire! – the
name of the rattle-trap streetcar that bangs through the Quarter”
Sexual passion keeps Stella with Stanley, so that she says ‘I’m not in anything I want to
get out of’ (Scene Four).
Despite being newly married to Blanche, Allan allowed himself to succumb to his illicit
desire for another man.
Desire and fate combine when Blanche stops resisting Stanley; he says: ‘We’ve had this
date with each other from the beginning!’ (Scene Ten). This is foreshadowed at many
points; Williams makes us aware of Blanche’s attraction to Stanley on a physical level “A
man like that is someone to go out with- once -twice- three times when the devil is in
you.”
Death
Blanche has been traumatised by her husband’s suicide, so that she now ‘hears’ the music
that was playing at the time, then the gunshot.
Blanche tells Stella, then Mitch, about the family deaths she endured at Belle Reve,
saying that ‘funerals are pretty compared to deaths’ (Scene One).
Mitch carries a cigarette case given to him by a dying girl, inscribed with lines by
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, about love after death (the poem is entitled “Remember”)
A blind Mexican woman sells ‘ Flores para los muertos ’ (flowers for the dead) (Scene
Nine).
“Death is my best theme, don’t you think? The pain of dying is what worries me, not the act.
After all, nobody gets out of life alive.” (Tennessee Williams to a reporter in 1963)
Madness
Blanche recognises her own mental instability and says that because of it she cannot be
left on her own (Scene One).
Blanche suffers repeated hallucinations relating to her husband’s suicide.
Blanche’s preference for fantasy over reality is, arguably, always on the edge of madness.
Her mental decline is reflected in the way her fantasies become more elaborate (she tells
Stanley that she has been invited on a cruise and that she has spoken to Mitch after he
failed to turn up to eat with them)
Blanche is eventually driven over the edge into madness when she is raped by Stanley,
and is led away to a mental institution.
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