Evaluate how Tennessee Williams controls the audience's sympathies in 'A Streetcar Named Desire'
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Streetcar Named Desire
As essay to evaluate how Tennessee Williams controls the audience's sympathies in 'A Streetcar Named Desire' through the characters of Blanche, Mitch, Stella and Stanely. The evalutation is enhanced through the use of context..
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Unit 1 - Drama
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Voorbeeld van de inhoud
"I don't believe in 'original sin'. I don't believe in 'guilt'. I don't believe in villains or
heroes - only right or wrong ways that individuals have taken, not by choice but by
necessity or by certain still-uncomprehended influences in themselves, their
circumstances, and their antecedents." - from 'The World I Live In', Tennessee
Williams' 1957 interview with himself.
Evaluate how Tennessee Williams controls the audience's sympathies in 'A Streetcar
Named Desire'
Tennessee Williams controls the audience’s sympathies in ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’ by
portraying through his characters varying emotions which commonly invoke sympathy.
The titular quotation invites us to recognise the importance of ‘circumstances’, a
necessary concept due to it stopping the audience from blaming a character’s flaws for
their outcome. This allows anger, loss, and inferiority to be viewed with a sympathetic
eye as Williams teaches his audience to show a sense of understanding, unlike the
‘propaganda machines’ mentioned in the interview, which attempt ‘to teach us, to
persuade us, to hate and fear other people on the same little world that we live in’.
Anger is illustrated immediately by Blanche in Scene 1 as Williams writes ‘I stayed for it,
bled for it, almost died for it!’ The asyndetic tricolon combined with anaphora creates a
warrior-like image, uncovering true anger within the calm Southern Belle that Blanche
tries to be. It acts as a crescendo of an emotional outburst, bolstering the idea that
Blanche has not had the opportunity to expel her feelings, likewise to Williams who kept
the truth of his sexual orientation buried. Despite her personal focus diminishing the
sympathy the audience has for her, the emphasis on death as her anger climaxes
immediately counteracts this and her circumstance gives way to this selfish attitude.
Similarly, Blanche’s offensive use of ‘Polak’ can be understood as her projecting her own
feelings of guilt over letting Belle Reve collapse into social and financial ruins onto
Stella. Thus, it is ironic that the playwright does not believe in ‘guilt’ in the sense of
blame. Williams himself was immensely guilt ridden, similar to his hero Hart Crane,
who, like Blanche had sinned. In ‘The Broken Tower’ Crane writes ‘feet chill on steps
from hell’, implying that the unacceptability of homosexuals within the church converted
the cathedral lawn into hell. Therefore, Williams cutting himself from overt Christian
responses and not believing in ‘original sin’ is understandable. The anger with which she
uses the word ‘Polak’ demonstrates Blanche’s desperation to cling to social hierarchy,
likewise to Amanda in ‘The Glass Menagerie’, a Southern Belle in her youth, longing to
hold onto the romantic vision of her past rather than accepting her current circumstances
of poverty and abandonment. It is necessary to view this anger with moral relativism,
realising the importance of Blanche and Amanda’s antecedents and that their
circumstances left them with a pitiful salary that only worsened their outcome.
Furthermore, the pertinent development of the ordinary person allows us to feel sympathy
for Blanche because those who reside in America by working their way in an ordinary
life, such as Stanley, are placed in the same class as the original people who are in
America due to their heritage, such as Stella and Blanche. At the start of Scene 3,
sympathy can be felt for all the characters as the stage direction states that ‘there is a
picture of Van Gogh’s of a billiard-parlour at night’. This deliberately portrays a
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