A Streetcar Named Desire

Awareness of Author

Tennessee Williams

WILLIAMS, Tennessee (1911-83). The dramas of Tennessee Williams are some of the most moving and powerful ever written for the American stage. His Southern settings and Characters depict a world of human frustration in which sex and violence underlie an atmosphere of superficial, faded gentility. He was born Thomas Lanier Williams on March 26, 1911, in Columbus, Miss. He attended the University of Missouri from 1931 to 1933 and Washington University in Saint Louis (1936-37), where he became interested in writing. Williams worked at it during the Great Depression while employed in a shoe factory. He studied dramatic writing at the University of Iowa, from which he graduated in 1938. Afterward he traveled around the country, working at insignificant jobs and writing short plays that were often produced at community theaters. He won some recognition for 'American Blues' (1939), a group of one-act plays.

Williams continued doing odd jobs, however, until his first real success in 1944: 'The Glass Menagerie', a play about a decadent Southern family living under great emotional tension in a city tenement. The play won the New York Drama Critic's Circle award, as did three more of his plays. His next major play was 'A Streetcar Named Desire' (1947), a study of the mental and moral ruin of a former Southern belle, Blanche Du Bois. Her genteel pretensions are no match for her brutish brother-in-law, Stanley Kowalski. This success was followed by 'Camino Real' (1953), 'Cat on a Hot Tin Roof' (1955), 'Suddenly Last Summer' (l958), 'Sweet Bird of Youth' (1959), and 'Night of the Iguana' (1961). 'A Streetcar Named Desire' and 'Cat on a Hot Tin Roof' were both awarded Pulitzer prizes. In addition to long theater runs, all of these plays were filmed. His novel 'The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone' (1950) also became a motion picture.

Williams's later writing was compromised by health problems, addiction to alcohol and sleeping pills, and a nervous breakdown. His last plays were not well received. He died in New York City on Feb. 25, 1983.

Ongoing Questions to Consider:

• To what extent does fantasy help or harm people trying to cope with reality?

• How far should someone go to show loyalty to a loved one? To friends? To family?

• What are the consequences of pursuing overwhelming desire?

• Is “deliberate cruelty” the only unforgivable crime?

• How do characters simultaneously represent and deconstruct the “American Dream”?

• How do humans’ primal instincts both strengthen and destroy them?​

• Who was Tennessee Williams and what was his life like?

• How did Tennessee Williams' life influence his writing?

Schools of Thought

"Though a substantial number of critics believe Streetcar to be essentially a social drama, few have found themselves in concert in defining what kind of social drama Williams’s play most resembles. The first school argues that Blanche and Stanley represent archetypes of cultures or species. From this perspective, Eric Bentley and Roger Boxill call Streetcar a “social-historical drama” [Bentley, 402; Boxill, 79]. Thus Stanley and Blanche’s clash is not human against human but rather species against species. Three branches of this critical school of social dramatization find Streetcar to be a textbook representation of Strindbergian and Chekhovian Naturalism, of Nietzschean Apollonian/Dionysian dichotomy, or of Darwinian natural selection. A second school, however, focuses on Blanche and Stanley as unique individuals and not as types, with the audience acting as voyeurs of their personal war. This school can similarly be divided into three branches: those who see Streetcar as a study of Lawrentian blood knowledge, of hero versus antihero, and of villain versus victim."

Bak, John S. “Criticisms on A Streetcar Named Desire: A Bibliographic Survey, 1947-2003.”Cercles, vol. 10, 2010, pp. 3–32.