The Italian author Primo Levi declared in his book Other People’s Trades (1989) that ‘all authors have had the opportunity of being astonished by the beautiful and awful things that the critics have found in their works and that they did not know they had put there’. Often, we have no means of knowing an author’s intentions; what is important is the impact of the text on a reader or, in the case of a play, an audience. Even if an author has written explicitly about what he or she sees as the key thematic content of a work, that does not preclude other themes from coming to the attention of particular readers. Moreover, Williams’ work cannot be divorced from the circumstances of his life, values, assumptions, gender, race and class, and just as he was a product of his age, so you are a product of yours. How you respond to A Streetcar Named Desire will depend on your own experiences, ideas and values and it is well worth thinking about how readers and audiences decide what the major themes of any literary text are.
Reality and illusion
Williams’ famously poetic stage directions, in which Blanche is likened to a fluttering white moth who must avoid the light, suggest that she craves ‘magic’ because the truth about post-war America is too harsh to bear. Her antagonist, Stanley, on the other hand, is imbued with an earthy – even brutal – sense of realism which makes him loathe her ‘Barnum and Bailey world’ and do all he can to trash it. Thus the theme of fantasy and reality plays out on stage as another aspect of the desperate struggle between the play’s protagonist and antagonist. Which character you decide to side with is up to you. When Stanley rapes Blanche he uses the disturbingly incongruous word ‘date’ to describe what he has planned for her, as if they are lovers who have passed a pleasant evening in each other’s company; thus he ensures that her Shep Huntleigh illusion is utterly destroyed. The question of how far illusions are helpful or necessary remains; ironically, as Felicia Hardison Londré notes, it is only when Blanche actually tells Mitch the truth for once – about the death of Allan Grey – that she finally gains ‘what she has not been able to achieve in two months or so of artful deceit: a proposal of marriage’ (Londré in M. Roudané, The Cambridge Companion to Tennessee Williams, 1997). In both F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925) and John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men (1936) the tragic central characters’ dreams are ended with a violent gunshot. Look at these two novels and think about how far you agree that they – and Streetcar – present dreams as transient and illusory, but rare and valuable nonetheless.
Death and Desire
Streetcar was one of the first post-war dramas to present a range of characters for whom sex was of huge importance as a factor influencing their lives and relationships. One of the text’s defining images – that of the streetcar – explicitly links sex and death, making it possible to see the play within the context of the Liebestod tradition. At first glance it might seem a struggle to position Streetcar within this literary framework (after all, nobody dies at the end) but in fact the Liebestod theme may be seen to enhance (or parody) the romantic and tragic grandeur of Blanche’s downfall, depending on your point of view. Very early in the play the English teacher Blanche makes the first of her evocative and suggestive literary references when she likens the chain of events which culminated in the loss of Belle Reve to something ‘Only Poe! Only Mr. Edgar Allan Poe!’ could conceive, as her DuBois forebears went to rack and ruin through indulging in their ‘epic fornications’. The specific situation to which she refers here – the fall of a once great family and their home – calls to mind Poe’s Gothic horror story The Fall of the House of Usher (1839), with Blanche as the persecuted Madeline who is entombed, while still alive, by her twin brother. Blanche’s awareness of her own fate is signalled by her horrified reaction to the Mexican Woman with her flowers for the dead, and while Stanley is her brother-in-law and not her brother, his rape does indeed consign her to a kind of death-in-life which seems to resemble Madeline’s as she is ‘entombed’ within the walls of a lunatic asylum. Like her husband Allan, whose homosexuality led directly to his death, Blanche is a figure for whom sex and death are fatally entwined. Following Allan’s suicide, Blanche is left with a morbid fear of ageing, and in some ways her attraction to very young men suggests that in seducing them she hopes to recapture something of her own lost youth and innocence. Yet the love (or sex, or desire) with which Blanche tries to fight off death is also the direct cause of her tragic fall, the sickness as well as the cure.
On several further occasions throughout the play, literary references are used to evoke images of famous women, real and fictional, who have suffered and died for love. Introducing herself to Mitch during Stanley’s poker night, Blanche tells him that she’s an English teacher struggling to ‘instil a bunch of bobby-soxers and drug-store Romeos with reverence for Hawthorne and Whitman and Poe!’. The reference to ‘Romeos’ is doubly ironic, in view of her fatal attraction to underage boys, while the mention of Nathaniel Hawthorne evokes the image of Hester Prynne, the heroine of his most famous novel The Scarlet Letter (1850), who is shunned and scorned by her narrow-minded Puritan community for adultery and fornication. Later Blanche assumes the role of the doomed courtesan Marguerite, heroine of Dumas’ tragic romance La Dame aux Camélias, casting the hapless Mitch as her much younger lover, Armand, before referring to his physical strength by calling him ‘Samson’, a reference to the Old Testament strongman betrayed by the fatal temptress Delilah. Finally, and perhaps most ominously, however, it is Stanley who provides the last literary figure with whom we are invited to compare Streetcar’s doomed heroine. He viciously parodies Blanche’s ‘hoitytoity’ affectations by likening her to Cleopatra: ‘. . . lo and behold the place has turned into Egypt and you are the Queen of the Nile!’.
Marginality and Madness:
The outcast According to Alycia Smith-Howard and Greta Heintzelman, Williams ‘is celebrated as “a poet of the human heart” and as the “Laureate of the Outcast”’ (Smith-Howard and Heintzelman, Critical Companion to Tennessee Williams, 2005). In 1939, the playwright told his literary agent Audrey Wood, ‘I have only one major theme for my work, which is the destructive power of society on the sensitive non-conformist individual’ and in Streetcar Blanche is indeed cast out of society because she refuses to conform to conventional moral values. Forced to confess her sins, she is then viciously punished. The ancient Greek word for tragedy means ‘goat-song’ and Blanche is surely the scapegoat here, cast out of society in order to bear the sins of others. While Stanley, previously dismissed as an uncouth ‘Polack’, is socially on the up, Blanche is gradually stripped of her psychological, sexual, financial and cultural Context Blanche likens her experiences at Belle Reve to the Gothic horror stories of Edgar Allan Poe (1809–49). Poe, who died in poverty at the age of 40, was a master of the short story. The Fall of the House of Usher is a characteristic work that you might enjoy reading; another is The Masque of the Red Death. At the end of the play, Blanche is forced to retreat into a state of denial, her mental health all but shattered, in order to shield her fragile sense of self from Stanley’s brutal truth.