A03 - Critical Thematic Opinions

1. The Past

"Everyone carries around all the selves they have ever been, intact, waiting to be reactivated in moments of pain, of fear, of danger. Everything is retrievable, every shock, every hurt. But perhaps it becomes a duty to abandon the stock of time that one carries within oneself, to discard it in favour of the present, so that one's embrace may be turned outwards to the world in which one has made one's home."

(From Latecomers, novel by Anita Brookner, 1988)

"A Streetcar Named Desire makes it clear that for Williams the act of fleeing always becomes the act of reliving the past. Flight forces the presence of the past on his characters as the presence of what they attempted to flee."

-Donald Pease in Tennessee Williams: A Tribute

- Consider how the 'onstage' events of the play seem to be repeating events in Blanche's past life.

2. Death:

"Death is my best theme, don't you think? The pain of dying is what worries me, not the act. After all, nobody gets out of life alive."

(Tennessee Williams to a reporter in 1963)

Consider what Blanche has to say about dying in Scene 1 and Scene 11. Consider what Blanche loses when she loses Belle Reve and Allan. How important is the intervention of the flower vendor in Scene 9?

3. The South:

"I write out of love for the South...It is out of a regret for a South that no longer exists that I write of the forces that have destroyed it."

(Tennessee Williams, quoted by his mother in Remember Me To Tom)

"You knew you were passing through a ruined kingdom. The myths, even in the moment you discovered them, were worm eaten...The lawns and columned porticos were never far from the tangled swamps with old flowers...And always drifting against the sky were the long grey-white tufts of Spanish moss on spreading live-oak trees. The live-oak was indeed a creepy symbol of the South, for in the sunlight and at a distance it was a majestic sight, and the Spanish moss trailed from its branches like the plumes of a jousing knight. As you get closer, the knight was slightly fly-brown. In the twilight the moss was grey fuzz...and you saw that it was a parasite clinging to the outline of a healthy tree."

(Alistair Cooke in Talk About America, 1968)

"The Southern accent gives Streetcar its music, its irony, its lyrical plangency, its curious decadent tone. These are not to be found on the page, silent. They are in that pervasive, strong, clinging accent which has so much dispossession in it. Williams's plays are full of dispossessed people who we feel were once gentle but who find the jungle has caught up with their gracious clearings and spaces and the animals with their civilised pursuits. We hear in it, too, a kind of self-defeat, self-delusion, a weakness, so we wonder what lies behind the gentleness, the civil behaviour."

(Gareth Lloyd Evans in The Language of Modern Drama, 1977)

Note: Some critics have noted that the battle between Blanche and Stanley is the conflict between the old world values of the South (see Blanche in Scene 10, the speech beginning, "A cultivated woman...) and the agressive materialism of the new urban world.

4. Survival:

"The play, and its author, beg the question of the price of survival."

"His idea of heaven had turned into a hell of his own making."

(John Lahr, from an article on Tennessee Williams in The Guardian, 2.2.88)

Note: Look at each of the characters and consider what they see as their salvation. Who 'survives' the events of the play? Who fails to survive? What is the price of their survival?