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Summary A LEVEL STREETCAR CRITICAL ANALYSIS, CONTEXT AND AO2 ANALYSIS
A LEVEL A* STREETCAR CRITICAL ANALYSIS, CONTEXT AND AO2 ANALYSIS, NOTES
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Streetcar Named Desire Analysis:Title:
Represents the dichotomy between reality and illusion, desire, and destruction. Derives from
a streetcar line in New Orleans called “Desire,” which serves as a metaphorical symbol for the
characters’ yearnings, hopes, and aspirations.
The streetcar represents the characters’ desires for love, fulfilment, and purpose. It serves as
a vehicle that takes them to different destinations, reflecting their shifting desires and dreams.
However, desire can also lead to destruction, as the characters’ fantasies clash with their
harsh realities.
The word ‘desire’ suggests a longing for something unattainable or difficult to obtain. It
encompasses the characters’ yearnings for love, success and happiness. The title
emphasises the universal nature of desire and its power to shape and influence individuals’
lives.
Title reflects central themes of the play, such as the destructive power of desire, the struggle
between reality and illusion and the search for identity and self-worth. It highlights the
characters’ desires and how they navigate their lives in pursuit of their dreams.
The streetcar has a fixed route; it is predetermined and cannot changed. In the same way, the
fate of Blanche is predetermined due to her character flaws. She is driven by longing and
desire for a perfect man and a perfect life and this leads to her downfall.
As Blanche intimates several times, we live our lives as if on a streetcar of desire unable to
control our sexual passions until the end of the line -- death.
Stanley and Blanche live on a section of the Old Quarter called the Elysian Fields, a classical
reference. In Greek mythology, after death the soul would roam the underworld seeking a
place of refuge. The souls of those favored by the Gods (poets, philosophers, statesmen,
etc.) would go to a place called the Elysian Fields in the underworld where they would live out
eternity in a state of drugged euphoria. This is the address Blanche asks about in the first
scene. Stanley and Stella clearly live in a state of drugged frenzy -- Stanley drinks and he and
Stella have a terrific sex life which Stella says leaves her tranquilly narcoticized. Stanley and
Stella are not poets, but they live in a "place-after-death."
This ambiguity underscores another of Williams' themes - the dichotomy in human life
between earthly lust and spiritual purity. We all hover somewhere between these
irreconcilable poles.... Desire and Death. So, Blanche takes a streetcar named Desire, exits
at Cemeteries and looks for the Elysian Fields.
Metaphor of experience as a physical journey- the kind of travel particularised by a streetcar
fits well the play’s representation of desire as a driving force taking characters to destinations
which are, at best, very approximate choices. On arrival, Blanche refers to bewildering tram
ride, and Williams uses the New Orleans districts- Desire, Elysian Fields, Cemeteries – as
indicators of her fears and compulsions. With her departure, the playwright reintroduces the
traveling metaphor with Blanches tragic ‘Please don’t get up. I’m only passing through.’
On the other hand, by the time the play opens, Blanche is near the end of her journey; in fact,
we were watching her last chance road stop. Between her arrival and departure- the opening
and closing moments of the play- Williams has created a fixed interior in the two rooms of the
Kowalski flat, with exterior stage areas also strongly suggesting a specific location.
Setting:
Streetcar: The name - Desire and the sexual symbolism. Called 'rattle-trap' to signify how
Blanche herself is breaking down mentally. Williams uses this at the beginning of the play
almost as prolepsis device. Context - how women were disgraced for sexual desire when men
were encouraged.
Belle Reve: Symbolism of the 'beautiful dream' that Blanche lost when she lost the house.
Williams uses this to contrast new and old views and how Blanche is outcasted because of
her inability to keep up with New Orleans' pace. Context - the American dream.
The Casino: Where Allan commits suicide. Busy, showing how even in a busy place he felt
alone - which is how Blanche later feels in New Orleans. The amount of people there is
overwhelming for her and in Stella's apartment, even when Stella and Stanley are there with
, Stanley's friends, she feels alone. Context - the activity in New Orleans and the society's view
on gay people - something Williams himself struggled with.
Racial conflict- George Crandell argues “the racialised discourse spoken by Stella and
Blanche serves to define Stanley as the Other, a sexual, cultural, and by implication, racial
alien”.
From a literary standpoint, Williams’s production notes, as David Savran observes “fracture
dramatic continuity” and “decentre the scenic representation”: “The force and violence of
these intrusions and noises from elsewhere create the impression that the scenes enacted on
stage, despite their dramatic urgency, are just a tiny part of a much more extensive and
extravagant series of actions that constantly exceeds the bounds of theatrical representation”.
The elaborate stage directions and locally specific dialogue evoke the romantic charm of
downtown New Orleans.
Kazan amplified the black presence in Streetcar and used black actors and black music to navigate
the realistic and expressionsitc registers of the play’s performance. Alternatively acting as realistic
sociological frame, nostalgic evocation of a nearly lost past, an expression of forbidden desire and as
a social and political conscience, blackness served as the bond which held these “unstable
compounds” together onstage.
The little twisted, pathetic, confused bit of light and culture puts out a cry. It is snuffed out by the crude
forces of violence, insensibility, and vulgarity which exist in our south. Musing that Blanche’s image of
herself cannot be accomplished in reality, certainly not in the South of our day and time, Kazan
suggests that Blanche’s crisis is closely connected to a South whose norms of gender, class and race
were newly and deeply unstable. Kazan approached the South of Streetcar as both profoundly social
("find social modes!" he noted to himself) and profoundly psychic ("the dark interior"); indeed, this
blend of realism and expressionism is characteristic of Williams and a particular challenge to directors
staging his works. As I shall suggest, Kazan turned to black actors and black music in order to
reconcile the realist (or socio logical) and the expressionist (or psychological) registers of Williams's
complex text.
If, as Marc Robinson has concisely argued, "Williams' main concern [was] aesthetic," Kazan's initial
instinct was to balance this Blanche-like quest for beauty with the squalid realism of the social world of
New Orleans. Playing Gorky to Williams's Chekhov, Kazan anchored Williams's quest for
transcendence in a realistic South of his own making.17 Critics noted that the actors of colour played
a crucial role in establishing the realistic milieu and showing the proletariat at work: "As background to
the drama of these principals, Elia Kazan has done his most-inspired work [sic]. Half a dozen casual
characters—a Negro woman neighbour, an old woman selling flowers, a Mexican tamale vendor ... all
enhance the sense of reality to the scene."18 As Negro Woman and Mexican Woman, James and
Thomas established the particularity of the New Orleans setting, which Williams described in his stage
directions as "a cosmopolitan city where there is a relatively warm and easy intermingling of races in
the old part of town." As the curtain rose, Kazan had James enter first, to the sound of the well-known
hot-jazz tune "Way Down Yonder in New Orleans," a directorial choice that visually and aurally
established the New Orleans of Streetcar as a black space.
Together, Kazan and Mielziner designated a portion of the upstage area as the street, made visible to
the audience by means of a scrim that functioned as a transparent upstage wall of the Kowalskis'
apartment. The nonwhite characters of the play never entered the claustrophobic and sexually
charged space of the Kowalski home, but rather traversed this street—simultaneously the most
exterior and the most interior space of the play—throughout, moving through both the realistic
environs of the French Quarter and the space of Blanche's psychic deterioration. The street was also
a central location in what Kazan called "the ballet"—the highly detailed scene that took place as
Blanche began to break down.20 As she desperately telephoned Shep Huntleigh, both interior and
exterior were transformed into a "jungle." The scrim grew transparent, and the audience witnessed a
confrontation between a prostitute and a police officer.
Tennessee Williams sets New Orleans in A Streetcar Named Desire at a similar angle from the
audience’s point of view. A steady flow of migrants, commerce, and culture dissolves the borders that
separate the South from the world. George Crandell argues “the racialized discourse spoken by Stella
and Blanche serves to define Stanley as the Other, a sexual, cultural, and by implication, racial alien”
(Crandell 339). Then again, Mary Brewer warns against too much emphasis on “Stanley’s relation to
, Black masculinity,” though she maintains Blanche “make[s] him appear to be something less than fully
White”.
In either case, the racial barrier stands inside the conventions of the immigrant success story,
functioning as a major hurdle in the transition from foreigness to assimilation. The more self-conscious
Stanley becomes about race, the more we see how blackness and whiteness do not offer neat
conclusions about the identity he inhabits.
A Streetcar Named Desire is set in a city that is neither here nor there. Geographically, New Orleans
belongs to the southern region of the United States, but economically and culturally, it feels like the
northernmost point of Latin America. Williams describes the opening scene for us in detail: “You can
almost feel the warm breath of the brown river beyond the river warehouses with their faint redolences
of bananas and coffee” (469). Bananas and coffee were integral to the development and expansion of
the New World economy. United States’ demand increased after Guatemala, Honduras, and Belize
pushed both products at the 1884 World Industrial and Cotton Centennial in New Orleans (Woodward
157). Susanna Delfino and Michele Gillespie apply the term “global South” in their discussion of the
region in world economic affairs: The word globalization is in common usage nowadays, but when
applied to the emergence of a ‘global South,’ the term . . . conjures up in many ways the crystallization
of distinctions of colonial origin between centres and peripheries in the development of the world
economy, by which the latter become structurally dependent on the former.
As New Orleans became a major player in international trade, Latin America was vital to the surge in
economic growth. Crosscurrents of money, labour, and power were uneven, of course; distribution
and packaging industries in New Orleans relied upon agricultural production throughout Central and
South America.
Tinkling keys from a “Blue Piano” greet the audience as the curtain rises. The recurring tune drifts
from the wings at key points during the play. Williams goes into even greater detail about the sound
that “expresses the spirit of the life which goes on here”: “In this part of New Orleans, you are
practically always just around the corner, or a few doors down the street, from a tinny piano being
played with the infatuated fluency of brown fingers” (469).
The elaborate stage directions and locally specific dialogue evoke the romantic charm of downtown
New Orleans. To tread a path less worn, however, Williams pushes the myth-tinged scenery to the
outer edges of his dramatic world. A new geographic distance, born of innovations in transportation
such as the streetcar, separated social groups and magnified the sense of danger with which the
business and professional classes viewed the working-class majority. In their own districts,
immigrants, blacks, native-born white workers, and even rural dwellers evolved marital standards that
reflected the conditions in which they lived. Large families, crowded living quarters, racial and ethnic
tensions, economic hardship, Old World cultural traditions, and other circumstances all conspired to
shape family forms that competed with those of the more prosperous.
The new iconic streetcar line to Desire drops Blanche in an unfamiliar environment, clearly marked as
a deviation from her notions- or illusions- of genteel morality. The impressions we get from the outset
predicts the class struggle that will partially sustain the conflict. Stanley walks on stage dressed in
“blue denim work clothes” and a “bowling jacket” (Williams 470). He tosses a package of meat to his
wife before the couple exits for the bowling alley. Sister Blanche appears soon after, wearing a “fluffy
bodice, necklace and earrings of pearl, white gloves and hat, looking as if she were arriving at a
summer tea or cocktail party” (471). A look of “shocked disbelief” on her face offends her new
neighbor, Eunice. After Blanche thanks her for unlocking the door, Eunice replies, “Por nada, as the
Mexicans say, por nada!” (471).
The cramped quarters make life generally unlivable for everyone involved. The interior design of the
set consists of two rooms—a single bedroom and a kitchen with a folding bed—split by a curtain. One
source of friction results from the inordinate amount of time Blanche spends in the only bathroom. She
confides in her would-be suitor, Mitch, on their first date, “It’s really a pretty frightful situation. You see,
there’s no privacy here. There’s just these portieres between the two rooms at night. [Stanley] stalks
through the rooms in his underwear at night. And I have to ask him to close the bathroom door” (526).
Domestic life in working-class districts departed from middle class “ideals of purity, reticence, and a
conjugal intimacy that rested on privacy.
New Orleans in A Streetcar Named Desire is not just a city paralyzed by race (though it is that, too); it
is a dynamic place made up of a far-flung cast of immigrants, all seeking a chance at a new life.
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