Notes from Scene 5

• A threatening undertone permeates this scene which is induced by Steve and Eunice’s row and Stanley’s probing interchange with Blanche about her past.

• A disturbance is heard upstairs.’ – note the ironic placement of this SD.

•  Stella ever the pragmatist:

STELLA: Has she got the police?

STANLEY: Naw. She’s gettin’ a drink.

STELLA: That’s much more practical

• Note the position of alcohol in the tragedy (escapism/blocking out reality) and its links with Williams’ own experiences of his alcoholic father.

• Irony inherent in Blanche’s comment of “Virgo is the Virgin.”

• Stanley hints that he has been hearing from “somebody named Shaw,” about Blanche’s reputation in Laurel.

QUESTION: Do you think that Stanley is partly to blame for Blanche’s tragic downfall?

•  Pathetic Fallacy in Scene 5: “Steve’s arm is around Eunice’s shoulder and she is sobbing luxuriously and he is cooing love-words. There is a murmur of thunder as they go slowly upstairs in a tight embrace.”

DIVISIONS OF THE PLAY

11 Scenes: Roxana Stuart (played Blanche in two productions of Streetcar)

• Scenes 1 – 4 take place on two consecutive days in early May; comedy

• Scenes 5 – 6 take place on a hot August evening; elegy, mood, romance;

• Scenes 7 – 10 on the afternoon and night of Blanche’s birthday, 15^th September; tragedy.

• Scene 11 – “some weeks later,” probably October; tragedy.

Domestic Tragedy in Scene 5

 

Slow revelation of information to the audience – we see this by Scene 5 as we are slowly starting to learn about Blanche’s tainted past and how that affects her in the present.

Issue-led – sense of Blanche’s alienation as a character is potent.

Issues in Streetcar force us to question the established systems/principles that underpinned 20^th Century America. (Marriage, position of women, ‘old/new’ American values) 

Family life is central, however it is presented as somehow corrupt and diseased;

Emphasis on psychological elements.

The ghosts of the past haunt the present.

Quotations to consider: (Try to engage with these to illuminate/support points you are making in your mini essays/coursework).

·         “While it was certainly a product of its time , A Streetcar Named Desire shocked audiences in that ‘outside of O’Neill’s work, this was the first American play in which sexuality was patently at the core of the lives of all its principle characters, a sexuality with the power to redeem or destroy.”

- C. W. E Bigsby, Modern American Drama, 1945 – 1990 (Cambridge University Press, 1992) 51.

·         “Streetcar for me will always be a poetic, brutal, thrilling lesson in how a single, brave playwright let his demons and angels dance with every ounce of truth he could know.”

-Paul Zindel in The Cambridge Companion to Tennessee Williams Ed Matthew C. Roudane (1997)

Der Rosenkavalier (Remember Blanche calls Mitch her Rosenkavalier at the end of Scene 5).

Der Rosenkavalier  (The Knight of the Rose) is a comic opera in three acts by Richard Strauss.

• Blanche romanticises Mitch by casting him as  her hero reminiscent of the hero of Strauss’s waltz opera.