Tennessee Williams's play A Streetcar Named Desire contains more within it's characters, situations, and story than appears on its surface. As in many of Williams's plays, there is much use of symbolism and interesting characters in order to draw in and involve the audience. The plot of A Streetcar Named Desire alone does not captivate the audience. It is Williams's brilliant and intriguing characters that make the reader truly understand the play's meaning. He also presents a continuous flow of raw, realistic moods and events in the play which keeps the reader fascinated in the realistic fantasy Williams has created in A Streetcar Named Desire. The symbolism, characters, mood, and events of this play collectively form a captivating, thought-provoking piece of literature.
A Streetcar Named Desire produces a very strong
reaction. Even at the beginning of the play,
the reader is confronted with extremely obvious symbolism in order to express
the idea of the play. Blanche states
that she was told "to take a streetcar named Desire, and then to transfer
to one called Cemeteries". One can
not simply read over this statement without assuming Williams is trying to say
more than is written. Later in the play,
the reader realizes that statement most likely refers to Blanche's arriving at
the place and situation she is now in because of her servitude to her own
desires and urges. What really makes A
Streetcar Named Desire such an exceptional literary work is the development of
interesting, involving characters. As
the play develops, the audience sees that Blanche is less proper and refined
than she might appear or claim to be.
Her sexual desire and tendency to drink away her problems make Blanche
ashamed of her life and identity. Desire
was the "rattle-trap streetcar" that brought her to her pitiful state
in life.
Blanche is the most fascinating character in A
Streetcar Named Desire. One reason for
this is that she has an absolutely brilliant way of making reality seem like
fantasy, and making fantasy seem like reality.
This element of Blanche's personality is what makes her character
interest the audience and contribute to the excellence of the work. Returning to the beginning of the play,
Blanche, shocked with the dirtiness and gloominess of Stella and Stanley's home
in New Orleans, looks out the window and says "Out there I suppose is the
ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir!", to which Stella replies "No honey,
those are the L and N tracks."
Blanche would assume that something so common and simple as noisy, dark
railroad tracks might as well be "ghoul-haunted woodlands." Further evidence of Blanche's warped view of
reality and fantasy is shown throughout the entire play. She seems to hint to Stella and Stanley, and
therefore the audience, that she is actually much more than she seems. In scene seven, Blanche soaks in a tub,
singing:
"Say, it's only a paper moon, sailing over
a cardboard sea
-But it wouldn't be make-believe If you
believed in me!
It's a Barnum and Bailey world, Just as phony
as it can be
-But it wouldn't be make-believe If you
believed in me!"
As she sings this
song, telling the story of her tendency to believe a more pleasant, warped view
of reality over the actual reality, Stanley is telling Stella the horrifying
truth about Blanche's scandalous past.
The reader is as drawn into Blanche's illusion as much as Stella is, and
just as Stella refuses to believe Stanley's harsh words, the audience also does
not want to accept that the view they have had of Blanche for a good deal of
the play is nothing more than a story made up to hide her unpleasant
history. The clearest example of this is
also one of the most intense and involving scenes of the entire play. In scene nine, Blanche is confronted by
Mitch, who has learned the truth about her past. Mitch tells Blanche that he has never seen
her in the light. He tears Blanche's
paper lantern off of the plain, bright light bulb, and tries to see her as she
really is, and not in a view warped by Blanche's efforts to make herself seem
more innocent, young, and beautiful than she is. Blanche responds to this by saying "I
don't want realism. I want magic!...I
try to give that to people. I
misinterpret things to them. I don't
tell truth, I tell what ought to be truth...Don't turn the light on!" This intense, frightening scene reveals to
the audience the way Blanche views the world.
Tennessee Williams's use of this kind of dual view of the world to
develop Blanche's character is a perfect example of the way A Streetcar Named
Desire makes the audience react to the characters in the play. It is this reaction between the audience and
the brilliant characters in the play that makes the play such a valuable
literary work.
The literary value of A Streetcar Named Desire
is in Williams's ability to create a fantasy world which draws the reader into
it as if it was their own reality. In
some ways, the setting and conflict of the play is familiar to the reader, but
in many ways the conflicting worlds of Stanley Kowalski and Blanche DuBois are
too different to share the same reality.
Tennessee Williams's world in A Streetcar Named Desire, and the characters
within it, become so familiar and fascinating to the reader that every event
that occurs in the play affects the reader's reaction to the overall outcome of
the play and his opinions of the characters.
The theme of the play does not occur to the reader
until after the play's overall experience is concluded, and he is left to
reflect on just what Tennessee Williams was trying to say in the play. While the play is being read, the audience is
not interested in the overall meaning of the work, but simply in the intriguing
action occurring at that moment in the play.
However, A Streetcar Named Desire certainly contains many potential
themes. One theme of the play could be
that time is precious, and to waste it is to lose it. This theme of carpe diem, or "seize the
day" is strong in the play. As time
goes on in Blanche's life and her social behavior changes, she wastes away her
youth. The loss of her young husband
Allan has caused her loneliness, sexual desire, and even certain signs of
psychological instability. All of these
problems were increased by her attempt to lose them through drinking. What Blanche does not realize is that she can
not change the past through the present.
Blanche's youth is gone, and she tries to give the appearance of being
as youthful and innocent as she once was, but her illusion can not last. As an epigraph to the play, Williams quotes
from the poem "The Broken Tower", by Hart Crane:
"And so it was that I entered the broken
world
To trace the visionary company of love, its
voice
An instant in the wind (I know not whither
hurled)
But not for long to hold each desperate
choice."
The use of this
poem helps to express Williams's choice of theme in A Streetcar Named
Desire. Blanche has entered a
"Broken world" of fear, longing, and sorrow because of her simple
desire to hear "the visionary company of love, it's voice", or
tender, gentle words of love and appreciation from Stella and Mitch. However, these words are only
"visionary". Blanche hopes
that these words will bring to her what
she needs to rebuild her life, but they do not last. Stanley feels he needs to prove that Blanche
is not what she seems. To this end, he
destroys her dreams of becoming what she wants to be, and not what she
was. By telling Stella and Mitch about
her activities in the past, Stanley ruins Blanche's illusion. Blanche won their love by covering the past,
and she could no longer build a new person from herself. The breakdown of Blanche's character climaxes
when Stanley rapes her, trying to prove to her that he always knew she was less
than she appeared. After this event,
Blanche is forced to deal with the reality that she can never change who she
is, and she is doomed to live with her reputation. This final outcome for
Blanche is a brutally realistic way of proving the idea that youth is precious
and should not be wasted on trivial desires.
Thomas Lanier Williams, known as Tennessee
Williams, was born on March 26, 1911 to Cornelius Coffin and Edwina Dakin
Williams in Columbus, Mississippi.
During extended periods of Tennessee Williams's early life, his father
was on the road as a shoe company salesman.
Williams and his family lived with his maternal grandparents in the
parsonage of St. Paul's Episcopal Church. Between the ages of two to seven
years old, Williams lived in various locations in Tennessee and
Mississippi. After a long bout with
diphtheria and a kidney infection, Williams became withdrawn. In July of 1918, Williams's father became a
branch manager of the shoe company, and the family moved to St. Louis,
Missouri. His father taunted him for his
reclusion and effeminacy, nicknaming him "Miss Nancy." As Williams grew up, he took refuge from his
intense shyness in his creativity. He
wrote for his school newspaper, and became a published writer in 1927 at age
sixteen with the essay "Can a Good Wife Be a Good Sport?" in Smart
Set, for which he received third prize.
In September of 1928, Williams entered the University of Missouri. In 1931, his father withdrew him from the
university for failing ROTC. He began
work as a clerk in the warehouse for the International Shoe Company, and
pursued writing at home during the night.
In 1935, Williams suffered a breakdown and went to recuperate for a year
at his grandparent's home in Memphis. In
July of that year was the first production of his play Cairo! Shanghai! Bombay!
by the Memphis Garden Players. In 1936 and 1937, Williams Enrolled in
Washington University, where he wrote poetry and produced several plays, then
transferred to the University of Iowa.
In 1938, he received a degree in English from Iowa. From 1939 to 1943
Williams lived briefly in a number of locations in the Midwest, South, and
West, including New Orleans, which became his favorite city and where he had
his first homosexual experience. During
this time, he first used the name "Tennessee" as the author of
"The Field of Blue Children."
In 1944 and 1945, The Glass Menagerie premiered in Chicago on December
26Th., and opened on Broadway on March 31St.
In 1947, A Streetcar Named Desire opened on Broadway, won the Pulitzer
Prize for drama and made the longest Broadway run of any of Williams's plays,
885 performances. The next year his
parents separated. In the next 13 years,
over twenty of Williams's works were published, opened on stage, or made into
films, including The Night of the Iguana, his last Broadway success. In 1963, after the death of his intimate
friend by cancer, Williams entered what he refers to as his "Stoned
Age." In 1969, he was baptized as a
Roman Catholic, was awarded an honorary doctor of human letters from the
University of Missouri, and entered Barnes Hospital for psychiatric care from
September to December of that year.
During the next ten years, Williams received more awards, and dealt openly
with his homosexuality in Memoirs and Moise and the World of Reason. In the last three years before his death, his
mother died, he received the Medal of Freedom from President Carter, and
received an honorary doctorate from Harvard University. On February 24Th. or 25Th. of 1983, Williams
died at the Hotel Élysée in New York, apparently from choking on a cap from a
medicine bottle, and was buried in St. Louis, against his expressed wish to be
buried at sea, like one of his favorite poets, Hart Crane. (Adler, xi-xvii)
Due to Tennessee Williams's unique style of
writing and use of symbolism, there is much room for individual interpretation
in it's theme and meaning. Because of
this, many writers have presented their views of the work in critical essays
and books. One of these such authors is
Leonard Quirino in his essay, "The Cards Indicate a Voyage on A Streetcar
Named Desire." Quirino remarks that
the recurring theme of the poker game is a strong symbol in the play. Quirino states:
"...Much of the verbal and theatrical
imagery that constitutes the drama is drawn from games, chance and luck. ...Two of the most crucial scenes are
presented within the framework of poker games played onstage. Indeed, the tactics and ceremonial of games
in general, and poker in particular, may be seen as constituting the informing
structural principle of the play as a whole.
Pitting Stanley Kowalski...against Blanche DuBois..., Williams makes the
former the inevitable winner of the game whose stakes are survival in the kind
of world the play posits. For the first
of four of the eleven scenes of Streetcar, Blanche, by reason of her
affectation of gentility and respectability, manages to bluff a good hand in
her game with Stanley; thus, in the third scene Stanley is continually losing,
principally to Mitch the potential ally of Blanche, in the poker game played
onstage. However, generally suspicious
of Blanche's behavior and her past, and made aware at the end of the fourth scene
that she considers him an ape and a brute, Stanley pursues an investigation of
the real identity of her cards. ...He
continually discredits her gambits until, in the penultimate scene, he caps his
winnings by raping her. In the last
scene of the play, Stanley is not only winning every card game being played
onstage, but he has also won the game he played with Blanche. Depending as it does on the skillful
manipulation of the hands that chance deals out, the card game is used by
Williams throughout Streetcar as a symbol of fate and of the skillful player's
ability to make its decrees perform in his own favor at the expense of his
opponent's misfortune, incompetence, and horror of the game itself."
(Quirino, 62)
Quirino's view of the symbolism in A Streetcar
Named Desire is insightful and interesting.
The idea of the poker game being a microcosm of the conflict of the
entire play is not one that all critics and readers would agree with.
One other critical view on A Streetcar Named
Desire, that of Alvin B. Kernan, deals with Williams's interpretation of
reality within the play. The theme of
reality vs. fantasy is one that the play centers around. In "Truth and Dramatic Mode in A
Streetcar Named Desire," Kernan says:
"In each of his plays, Williams poises the
human need for belief in human value and dignity against a brutal, naturalistic
reality; similarly, symbolism is poised against realism. But where the earlier playwrights were able
to concentrate on human values, Williams has been unable to do so because of
his conviction that there is a 'real' world outside and inside each of us which
is actively hostile to any belief in the goodness of man and the validity of
moral values. His realism gives
expression to this aspect of the world, and A Streetcar Named Desire is his
clearest treatment of the human dilemma which entails the dramatic
dilemma. We are presented in Streetcar
with two polar ways of looking at experience: the realistic view of Stanley
Kowalski and the 'non-realistic' view of his sister-in-law, Blanche
DuBois. Williams brings the two views
into conflict immediately." (Kernan, 9)
Kernan's idea of the conflict between Stanley
and Blanche acting as a messenger of the conflict between reality and fantasy
is one that the reader sees quite clearly in the play. Critical interpretations of books like A
Streetcar Named Desire not only help the reader to better understand what the
author is trying to say in the work, but also provide the reader with many
other stimulating points of view on the work.
In conclusion, the reader of A Streetcar Named
Desire is not only entertained by an interesting story when he reads the
play. He is also thrust into a reality
which is not his own, yet somehow seems familiar. This realistic fantasy Williams creates with
his brilliant use of symbolism, intriguing characters, and involving action in
the play causes the reader to connect fully with the setting, characters,
conflicts, and emotions within it.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Adler, Thomas P. A Streetcar Named Desire: The Moth and the
Lantern. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1990
Kernan, Alvin B. "Truth and Dramatic Mode in A Streetcar
Named Desire, In Modern Critical Views: Tennessee Williams." Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chealsea House Publishers, 1987
Quirino, Leonard. "The Cards Indicate a Voyage on A
Streetcar Named Desire, In Modern Critical Interpretations: Tennessee
Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire."
Ed. Harold Bloom. New York:
Chelsea House Publishers, 1988
WORKS CITED
Adler, Thomas P. A Streetcar Named Desire: The Moth and the
Lantern. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1990
Kernan, Alvin B. "Truth and Dramatic Mode in A Streetcar
Named Desire, In Modern Critical Views: Tennessee Williams." Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chealsea House Publishers, 1987
Quirino, Leonard. "The Cards Indicate a Voyage on A
Streetcar Named Desire, In Modern Critical Interpretations: Tennessee
Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire."
Ed. Harold Bloom. New York:
Chelsea House Publishers, 1988
No comments:
Post a Comment