Streetcar Named Desire, A

The Development

Set in the French Quarter of New Orleans in 1952, A Streetcar Named Desire chronicles the life of Blanche Du Bois, a fading Southern belle from Mississippi who affects a chaste façade to mask her disillusionment and alcoholism. Blanche's open-ended visit disrupts the home of her pregnant sister, Stella, and her brutish husband, Stanley, a working-class man of Polish descent. Blanche and Stanley engage in a power struggle that results in a fistfight, a rape, accusations of homosexuality, and a mental breakdown. At the end of the play, Blanche is institutionalized, and uncertainty exists in the relationship between Stanley and Stella.

While he was writing the play, Williams had actress Tallulah Bankhead in mind for the role of Blanche. (Bankhead eventually played the role in a production at New York City Center in 1956.) Some literary scholars have theorized that Blanche was inspired by Williams's older sister, Rose, whose issues with schizophrenia led to her being lobotomized. His dysfunctional childhood in Mississippi and Missouri, as well as his alcoholic, emotionally abusive father, the ill-fated same-sex relationships of his youth, and coworkers from his time employed in a factory in the 1930s all animated his construction of the world of A Streetcar Named Desire.

Blanche and Stanley: A Changing America

Socioeconomic and ethnic stratification, and the clashes between characters that they created, were woven into the very fabric of the play. Stanley's working-class roots and ethnic dissimilarity to other characters had its basis in reality, as the character was inspired by Pancho Rodríguez Gonzalez, a Mexican laborer-cum-boxer with whom Williams had been involved romantically. Many theorists have postulated that Blanche was a stand-in for Williams; the interracial tensions between him and Rodríguez Gonzalez paralleled those in the relationship between Blanche and Stanley.

Polish American Stanley represents America's shift toward the heterogeneous; he seeks to obliterate the exclusive, traditional society that Blanche represents. He is pragmatic and earth-bound, while Blanche is self-deluding and fragile. Further, Stanley is given few redeeming qualities, as he grows increasingly resentful, lacking in contrition after he assaults Blanche. Class conflict is realized fully onstage in the climax, when Stanley brutally rapes Blanche, signaling the dramatic social shift occurring in postwar America. In referring to Stanley as an ape and a Polack, Blanche means to dismiss and dehumanize everyone in his social class and ethnic group. Harold “Mitch” Mitchell, Stanley's best friend, shares his working-class background but not his ethnicity; accordingly, he is depicted as less boorish, belligerent, and brutish. And with its mélange of ethnic groups, New Orleans was the perfect setting for this battle of old versus new America.

...