A Streetcar Named Desire Compendium

Characters:

Blanche Dubois- Against society’s eyes, she is a fallen woman since the start of the play. The family fortune she used to have is now gone, and it was her fault that her young husband committed suicide. She is an insecure and dislocated individual, and tries to hide it behind her bad drinking problem and indiscrete sexual behavior. She is an aging Southern belle who lives in the state of perpetual and panic about her fading beauty. She sports a wardrobe of showy but cheap evening clothes, and Stanley quickly sees through these acts and seeks information about her past. Blanche depends on male sexual admiration for her sense of self-esteem, which means that she has often succumbed to passion. By marrying, Blanche hopes to escape poverty and the bad reputation that haunts her. As Blanche sees it, Mitch is her only chance for contentment, even though he is far from her ideal.

Stanley Kowalsi- An egalitarian hero at the play’s start. He is loyal to his friends and passionate towards his wife. He possesses an animalistic physical vigor that is evident in his love of work, of fighting and of sex. His family comes from Poland, and when he is referred as a “Polack” he expresses his outrage. He represents a new heterogeneous America to which Blanche doesn’t belong, because she is a relic from a defunct social hierarchy. He sees himself as a social leveler. His intense hatred of Blanche is motivated in part by the aristocratic past that Blanche represents. At the end, his down-to-earth character proves harmfully crude and brutish. His chief amusements are gambling, bowling, sex, and drinking, and he lacks ideals and imagination. His disturbing, degenerate nature, first hinted at when he beats his wife, is fully evident after he rapes his sister-in-law. Stanley shows no remorse for his brutal actions. The play ends with an image of Stanley as the ideal family man, comforting his wife as she holds their newborn child. The wrongfulness of this reputation, given what we have learned about him in the play, ironically calls into question society’s decision to ostracize Blanche.

Harold “Mitch” Mitchel- He is more sensitive than the other poker friends, and this is because he lives with his dying mother. He is a kind, descent human being who hopes to marry so that he will have a woman for his dying mother to know. He is a clumsy, sweaty, and had unrefined interests such as muscle building. He lacks Blanche’s romantic perspective and spirituality, as well as her understanding of poetry and literature. Himself and Blanche are drawn together by their mutual need of companionship and support, and they believe themselves right for each other. He has experienced the death of a loved one, the same as her, and the snare in their relationship is sexual. Mitch is a very kind, caring and loving man.

Stella Kowalski- She is Blanche’s younger sister, and has a mild disposition that visibly sets her apart from her more vulgar neighbors. She possesses the same timeworn aristocratic heritage as Blanche, but she jumped the sinking ship in her late teens and left Mississippi for New Orleans. Stella married low-class Stanley, with whom she shares a robust sexual relationship. After her sister’s arrival she is torn. She stands by Stanley in the confrontation, perhaps because she gives birth to his child near the play’s end. While she loves and pities Blanche, she cannot bring herself to believe Blanche’s accusations that Stanley dislikes Blanche, and she eventually dismisses her sister’s claim that Stanley raped her. Her denial of reality at the end of the play shows that she has more in common with her sister than what she actually thinks.

Eunice- She is Stella’s friend, upstairs neighbor and landlady. Eunice and her husband, represent the low-class, carnal life that Stella has chosen for herself. Eunice accepts her husband’s affections despite his physical abuse of her. At the end, Eunice forbids Stella to question her decision and tells her she has no choice but to disbelieve Blanche.

Allan Grey- He is the young man with poetic aspirations whom Blanche fell in love with and married as a teenager. One afternoon, he was found in bed with an older male. That evening, Blanche announced her disgust at his homosexuality, and he shot himself in the head. His death, which marked the end of Blanche´s sexual innocence, has haunted her ever since. Allan never appears onstage.

Setting:

Symbolism:

Shadows and cries- When Blanche and Stanley begin to quarrel in Scene 10, various oddly shaped shadows begin to appear on the wall behind her. Discordant noises and jungle cries also occur as Blanche begins to descend into madness. All of these effects combine to dramatize Blanche’s final breakdown and departure from reality in the face of Stanley’s physical threat. When she loses her sanity in her final struggle against Stanley. Blanche retreats entirely into her own world. Whereas she originally colors her perception of reality according to her wishes, at this point in the pay she ignores reality altogether.

The Varsouviana Polka- The tune to which Blanche and her young husband, Allan Grey, were dancing when she last saw him alive. Earlier that day, she had walked in on him in bed with an older male friend. In the middle of the tune, she told Allan how she disgusted him, which lead Allan to shoot himself in the head.  The polka music plays at various points of the play, when Blanche is feeling remorse for Allan´s death. The first time we hear it is in Scene One, when Stanley meets Blanche and asks her about her husband. Its second appearance occurs when Blanche tells Mitch the story of her ex husband. From this point on, the pola plays increasingly often, and it always drives Blanche to distraction. She tells Mitch that it ends only after she hears the sound of a gunshot in her head.

The polka and the moment it evokes represent Blanche´s loss of innocence. The suicide of the young husband Blanche loved dearly was the event that triggered her mental decline. Since then, Blanche hears the Varsouviana whenever she panic and loses her grip on reality.

“It´s Only A Paper Moon”- In Scene Seven, Blanche sing this popular ballad while she bathes. The song’s lyrics describe the way love turns the world into a “phony” fantasy. The speaker in the song says that if both lovers believe in their imagined reality, then it’s no longer “make-believe”. These lyrics sum up Blanche´s approach to life. She believes that her fibbing is only her means of enjoying a better way of life and is therefore essentially harmless.

As Blanche sits in her tub singing this song, Stanley tells Stella the details of Blanche’s corrupt past. Williams ironically juxtaposes Blanche´s fantastical understanding of herself with Stanley’s description of Blanche´s real nature. In reality, Blanche is a sham who feign propriety and sexual modesty. Once Mitch learns the truth about Blanche, he can no longer believe in Blanche’s tricks and lies.

Meat- In the first scene of the play, Stanley throws a package of meat at his adoring Stella for her to catch. The action sends Eunice and the Negro woman into peals of laughter. Presumably, they’ve picked up on the sexual innuendo behind Stanley’s gesture. In hurling the meat at Stella, Stanley states the sexual proprietorship he holds over her. Stella’s delight in catching Stanley’s meat signifies her sexual infatuation with him.

Themes:

Fantasy’s Inability to Overcome Reality- Although Williams’s protagonist in A Streetcar Named Desire is the romantic Blanche DuBois, the play is a work of social realism. Blanche explains to Mitch that she fibs because she refuses to accept the hand fate has dealt her. Lying to herself and to others allows her to make life appear as it should be rather than as it is. Stanley, a practical man firmly grounded in the physical world, disdains Blanche’s fabrications and does everything he can to unravel them. The antagonistic relationship between Blanche and Stanley is a struggle between appearances and reality. It propels the play’s plot and creates an overarching tension. Ultimately, Blanche’s attempts to remake her own and Stella’s existences—to rejuvenate her life and to save Stella from a life with Stanley—fail. One of the main ways Williams dramatizes fantasy’s inability to overcome reality is through an exploration of the boundary between exterior and interior. The set of the play consists of the two-room Kowalski apartment and the surrounding street. Williams’s use of a flexible set that allows the street to be seen at the same time as the interior of the home expresses the notion that the home is not a domestic sanctuary. The Kowalskis’ apartment cannot be a self-defined world that is impermeable to greater reality. The characters leave and enter the apartment throughout the play, often bringing with them the problems they encounter in the larger environment. For example, Blanche refuses to leave her prejudices against the working class behind her at the door. The most notable instance of this effect occurs just before Stanley rapes Blanche, when the back wall of the apartment becomes transparent to show the struggles occurring on the street, foreshadowing the violation that is about to take place in the Kowalskis’ home.

Though reality triumphs over fantasy in A Streetcar Named Desire,Williams suggests that fantasy is an important and useful tool. At the end of the play, Blanche’s retreat into her own private fantasies enables her to partially shield herself from reality’s harsh blows. Blanche’s insanity emerges as she retreats fully into herself, leaving the objective world behind in order to avoid accepting reality. In order to escape fully, however, Blanche must come to perceive the exterior world as that which she imagines in her head. Thus, objective reality is not an antidote to Blanche’s fantasy world; rather, Blanche adapts the exterior world to fit her delusions. In both the physical and the psychological realms, the boundary between fantasy and reality is permeable. Blanche’s final, deluded happiness suggests that, to some extent, fantasy is a vital force at play in every individual’s experience, despite reality’s inevitable triumph.

The Relationship Between Sex and Death- Blanche’s fear of death manifests itself in her fears of aging and of lost beauty. She refuses to tell anyone her true age or to appear in harsh light that will reveal her faded looks. She seems to believe that by continually asserting her sexuality, especially toward men younger than herself, she will be able to avoid death and return to the world of teenage bliss she experienced before her husband’s suicide. However, beginning in Scene One, Williams suggests that Blanche’s sexual history is in fact a cause of her downfall. When she first arrives at the Kowalskis’, Blanche says she rode a streetcar named Desire, then transferred to a streetcar named Cemeteries, which brought her to a street named Elysian Fields. This journey, the precursor to the play, allegorically represents the trajectory of Blanche’s life. The Elysian Fields are the land of the dead in Greek mythology. Blanche’s lifelong pursuit of her sexual desires has led to her eviction from Belle Reve, her ostracism from Laurel, and, at the end of the play, her expulsion from society at large. Sex leads to death for others Blanche knows as well. Throughout the play, Blanche is haunted by the deaths of her ancestors, which she attributes to their “epic fornications.” Her husband’s suicide results from her disapproval of his homosexuality. The message is that indulging one’s desire in the form of unrestrained promiscuity leads to forced departures and unwanted ends. In Scene Nine, when the Mexican woman appears selling “flowers for the dead,” Blanche reacts with horror because the woman announces Blanche’s fate. Her fall into madness can be read as the ending brought about by her dual flaws—her inability to act appropriately on her desire and her desperate fear of human mortality. Sex and death are intricately and fatally linked in Blanche’s experience.

Dependence on Men- A Streetcar Named Desire presents a sharp critique of the way the institutions and attitudes of postwar America placed restrictions on women’s lives. Williams uses Blanche’s and Stella’s dependence on men to expose and critique the treatment of women during the transition from the old to the new South. Both Blanche and Stella see male companions as their only means to achieve happiness, and they depend on men for both their sustenance and their self-image. Blanche recognizes that Stella could be happier without her physically abusive husband, Stanley. Yet, the alternative Blanche proposes—contacting Shep Huntleigh for financial support—still involves complete dependence on men. When Stella chooses to remain with Stanley, she chooses to rely on, love, and believe in a man instead of her sister. Williams does not necessarily criticize Stella—he makes it quite clear that Stanley represents a much more secure future than Blanche does. For herself, Blanche sees marriage to Mitch as her means of escaping destitution. Men’s exploitation of Blanche’s sexuality has left her with a poor reputation. This reputation makes Blanche an unattractive marriage prospect, but, because she is destitute, Blanche sees marriage as her only possibility for survival. When Mitch rejects Blanche because of Stanley’s gossip about her reputation, Blanche immediately thinks of another man—the millionaire Shep Huntleigh—who might rescue her. Because Blanche cannot see around her dependence on men, she has no realistic conception of how to rescue herself. Blanche does not realize that her dependence on men will lead to her downfall rather than her salvation. By relying on men, Blanche puts her fate in the hands of others.

Dialogue- Quotations:

1. They told me to take a street-car named Desire, and transfer to one called Cemeteries, and ride six blocks and get off at—Elysian Fields!

Blanche speaks these words to Eunice and the Negro woman upon arriving at the Kowalski apartment at the beginning of Scene One. She has just arrived in New Orleans and is describing her means of transportation to her sister’s apartment. The place names that Williams uses in A Streetcar Named Desire hold obvious metaphorical value. Elysian Fields, the Kowalskis’ street, is named for the land of the dead in Greek mythology. The journey that Blanche describes making from the train station to the Kowalski apartment is an allegorical version of her life up to this point in time. Her illicit pursuit of her sexual “desires” led to her social death and expulsion from her hometown of Laurel, Mississippi. Landing in a seedy district that is likened to a pagan heaven, Blanche begins a sort of afterlife, in which she learns and lives the consequences of her life’s actions.

2. There are thousands of papers, stretching back over hundreds of years, affecting Belle Reve as, piece by piece, our improvident grandfathers and father and uncles and brothers exchanged the land for their epic fornications—to put it plainly! . . . The four-letter word deprived us of our plantation, till finally all that was left—and Stella can verify that!—was the house itself and about twenty acres of ground, including a graveyard, to which now all but Stella and I have retreated.

Blanche gives this speech to Stanley in Scene Two after he accuses her of having swindled Stella out of her inheritance. While showing Stanley paperwork proving that she lost Belle Reve due to foreclosure on its mortgage, Blanche attributes her family’s decline in fortune to the debauchery of its male members over the generations. Like Blanche, the DuBois ancestors put airs of gentility and refinement while secretly pursuing libidinous pleasure.

Blanche’s explanation situates her as the last in a long line of ancestors who cannot express their sexual desire in a healthy fashion. Unfortunately, she is forced to deal with the bankruptcy that is the result of her ancestors’ profligate ways. By running away to New Orleans and marrying Stanley, Stella removed herself from the elite social stratum to which her family belonged, thereby abandoning all its pretensions, codes of behavior, sexual mores, and problems. Blanche resents Stella’s departure and subsequent happiness. In Blanche’s eyes, Stella irresponsibly left Blanche alone to deal with their family in its time of distress.

3. Oh, I guess he’s just not the type that goes for jasmine perfume, but maybe he’s what we need to mix with our blood now that we’ve lost Belle Reve.

In Scene Two, Blanche makes this comment about Stanley to Stella. Blanche’s statement that Stanley is “not the type that goes for jasmine perfume” is her way of saying that he lacks the refinement to appreciate fine taste as Blanche can. She suggests that, under normal circumstances, he would be an inadequate mate for a member of the DuBois clan because of his inability to appreciate the subtler things in life, whether material or spiritual, jasmine perfume or poetry.

Yet the second half of Blanche’s comment acknowledges that the DuBois clan can no longer afford luxuries or delude themselves with ideas of social grandeur. Since financially Blanche and Stella no longer belong to the Southern elite, Blanche recognizes that Stella’s child unavoidably will lack the monetary and social privilege that she and Stella enjoyed. The genteel South in which Blanche grew up is a thing of the past, and immigrants like Stanley, whom Blanche sees as crude, are rising in social status. Like Stanley, Stella’s child may lack an appreciation for perfume and other fineries, but Stanley will likely imbue him with the survival skills that Blanche lacks. The fact that Blanche’s lack of survival skills ultimately causes her downfall underscores the new importance such skills hold.

4. I am not a Polack. People from Poland are Poles, not Polacks. But what I am is a one hundred percent American, born and raised in the greatest country on earth and proud as hell of it, so don’t ever call me a Polack.

Blanche makes derogatory and ignorant remarks about Stanley’s Polish ethnicity throughout the play, implying that it makes him stupid and coarse. In Scene Eight, Stanley finally snaps and speaks these words, correcting Blanche’s many misapprehensions and forcefully exposing her as an uninformed bigot. His declaration of being a proud American carries great thematic weight, for Stanley does indeed represent the new American society, which is composed of upwardly mobile immigrants. Blanche is a relic in the new America. The Southern landed aristocracy from which she assumes her sense of superiority no longer has a viable presence in the American economy, so Blanche is disenfranchised monetarily and socially.

5. Whoever you are—I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.

These words, which Blanche speaks to the doctor in Scene Eleven, form Blanche’s final statement in the play. She perceives the doctor as the gentleman rescuer for whom she has been waiting since arriving in New Orleans. Blanche’s final comment is ironic for two reasons. First, the doctor is not the chivalric Shep Huntleigh type of gentleman Blanche thinks he is. Second, Blanche’s dependence “on the kindness of strangers” rather than on herself is the reason why she has not fared well in life. In truth, strangers have been kind only in exchange for sex. Otherwise, strangers like Stanley, Mitch, and the people of Laurel have denied Blanche the sympathy she deserves. Blanche’s final remark indicates her total detachment from reality and her decision to see life only as she wishes to perceive it.

Structure:

Tennessee Williams divides A Streetcar Named Desire into eleven scenes each one leading naturally to a climax, either a dramatic gesture (in Scene 1 Blanche sinks back, her head in her arms, to be sick) or a punch line (Blanche again, in Scene 3, ‘I need kindness now’, or in Scene 6, ‘Sometimes —. there’s God — so quickly!’). The effect is a sense of conclusion, as if a mini- playlet has drawn to a close.

The action of the play covers a period of some five months. The first six scenes stretch over the first few days of Blanche’s visit in May, but Scene 7 moves abruptly to mid September when Scenes 7 to 10 take place within one day. The last scene follows a few weeks later.

As such the first group of scenes sets the stage for the calamities that will take place in the second group, and the last scene, which takes place some weeks later, shows the outcome of these events. There is a clear chronological progression of events between the three groups of scenes with each group having a noticeably different mood, almost as if the play were split into three acts.

Dramatic tension is heightened early in the second group of scenes when Stanley denounces Blanche while she, blissfully unaware, is singing contrapuntally off-stage in the bathroom. In Scene 8 the mounting tension culminates in Stanley’s cruel birthday present of a bus ticket back to Laurel. In Scene 9 the first of the symbolic - one might say Expressionist - figures appears, the Mexican seller of flowers for the dead, followed by Mitch’s attempt at raping Blanche. The readers or audience may have guessed what will follow in the next scene. Scene 10 starts amiably enough, with Stanley even offering to ‘bury the hatchet’, but soon the tone of the conversation, and the mood of the set, changes. As Stanley strips off Blanche’s pretensions, menacing shapes appear on the walls of the apartment and the street outside is filled with violence. The climax is now inevitable, foreshadowed by Blanche’s terror. The condensed period of time in this ‘Act’ creates the impression of Blanche hurtling irrevocably to her doom.