Critical Perspectives

Some critical perspectives on the play. More to follow over half term...

Blanche DuBois - heroine, aggressor or victim?

According to Christopher Innes, Blanche represents:

 "the decaying South, neurotic and corrupted, hiding from herself behind artifical allusions."

 (Christopher Innes in John Russell Brown (ed) 1995: 422 

Blanche is running away from a past that we learn about slowly during the play. (Remember things are always revealed slowly in the genre of domestic tragedy). Frail, highly strung, ethereally dressed in white, she seems always to be out of place in her surroundings. She is the visible manifestation of Southern gentility, thrust into the seething modern world, unable to cope either emotionally or financially, having lost both her young husband and her family plantation. (Sean McEvoy, 2009 Tragedy A Student Handbook, English and Media Centre)

In this respect Blanche can be seen to represent what Felicia Hardison Londre calls:

"the evolution of the social system from the old agrarian South, burdened by its past...to the post-war urban-industrial society in which Stanley's class has gained leverage."

(Felicia Hardison Londre in M.C. Roudane 1997: 54)

And so where does the tragedy lie? Is it Blanche's rape, her defeat and eventual institutionalisation or elsewhere? Londre argues that Williams:

"intended a balance of power between Blanche and Stanley, to show that both are complex figures whose wants and behaviours must be understood in the context of what is at stake for them."

 (Felicia Hardison Londre in M.C. Roudane 1997: 50)

At stake for both is something essentially selfish - escape for Blanche, sexual satisfaction and dominance for Stanley - and the inference of this is that none of these old or new social forms is equipped to be anything other than, essentially, self-serving and vicious. 

Melting Pot taken from (Sean McEvoy, 2009 Tragedy A Student Handbook, English and Media Centre, p202)

At the play's conclusion, nearly every character is onstage. Indeed, outside of the Southern Blanche and Polish Stanley, the whole cast takes in a wide range of age, colours and ethnic backgrounds to paint a picture of a particular swathe of American society. These are the down-at-heel- newcomers, the lower depths working hard to better themselves the American way, in the troubled pursuit of the American Dream. The tragedy in this play, just as in Williams' Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, lies not in personal circumstances, but in the lives and losses of the culture and the society itself. In the final scene Eunice, comforting Stella, says that, "Life has got to go on. No matter what happens, you've got to keep on going." As the play ends, the men return to their cards and Stella receives her baby from Eunice it is clear that life and the community are still going to go on. In the face of great struggles this must always be the case and here, in this melting pot of people trying to better themselves, Williams is showing us that just to carry on is sometimes the hardest, most tragic thing of all.

The original Broadway production of A Streetcar Named Desire showcased vividly Williams' desire to create plays that exist in a clearly living, fully-realised world...He wanted to create theatre that had the fluid quality of imagination, allowing the audience to see, hear and feel more than just one flat, dimensionless aspect of his character's lives. The design for A Streetcar Named Desire allows for this beautifully, showing not only both rooms of the Kowalski apartment, but also elements of the apartment above, the alleyway, the street and the bars nearby. In creating a world so fully-layered and complex, he succeeds in stripping away binary certainties from his drama, creating a vibrant, dense and complex world where only the true goodness lies in a sense of social togetherness. All human life is here, and alive it certainly is.