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Streetcar Lecture:
As a one-act play, A Streetcar Named Desire differs somewhat in structure from more traditional two- or
three-act plays. In a typical three-act play, each act ends on a significant point in the plot. In A Streetcar
Named Desire, most critics agree that these “plot points” are found in Scene Three and Scene Eight.
Collectively, the plot points build toward the climax in Scene Ten. Each scene can be studied as a
contained unit, as the action rises toward the plot points and ultimately the climax. Most of the scenes
also end on a note of tension or suspense, usually reinforced by the musical score. (The blue piano
music ends seven of the eleven scenes, while the Varsouviana polka closes two.)
While, on the surface, the plot structure of A Streetcar Named Desire may appear not to follow
the most conventions of its genre, it does follow a fairly typical story arc.
• The dramatic premise—the essence of the plot—is, of course, the conflict between
Blanche, the Southern belle, and Stanley, the working-class, master of his castle.
• The dramatic situation—the circumstances surrounding the action—involve the
incompatible characters of Blanche, Stella, and Stanley being thrust together in the tiny
apartment on Elysian Fields Avenue.
• The inciting incident—the event that sets the plot in motion—is Blanche’s unexpected
arrival with the news that the family plantation has been lost.
• Plot point 1—an event that forces the protagonist to change direction or meet a new
challenge—occurs during the poker game of Scene Three. This is when Stanley’s abuse
of Stella sets Blanche squarely against him and forces Stella to choose sides. It also casts
Blanche’s situation in sharp relief: she cannot stay long on Elysian Fields Avenue.
• Obstacles—events, character traits, or circumstances that prevent the main character
from achieving his or her goal—include the fact that Blanche has no money. Most of the
obstacles she encounters, however, are emotional and of her own making.
• The first culmination—the point when success seems within reach of the main character,
just before he or she suffers a major reversal—occurs in Scene Six. Blanche is on the
verge of establishing a relationship with Mitch that could lead to marriage. In Scene
Seven, it is revealed that Stanley has destroyed Blanche’s chance at love by telling Mitch
about her sordid past.
• Plot point 2—typically, the second major pivot or turning point, which generally occurs
at the protagonist’s darkest hour—sometimes, however, leaving a suggestion that the
protagonist may yet be able to prevail—occurs in Scene Eight when Stanley “gives”
Blanche a one-way bus ticket to her home. This suggests that she might still leave the
situation without either being destroyed or destroying Stanley and Stella.
• The climax (second culmination)—the zenith of the action or the point at which the
conflict reaches its peak—occurs in Scene Ten with the final destruction of Blanche’s
delusions about herself, her past, and her future. The offstage rape physically represents
the final shattering of Blanche’s fragile state. This is also the moment when the audience
knows that Blanche has “lost,” and Stanley has “won.”
• The denouement—the wrapping up of loose ends or the calm after the storm of the
climax that precedes the ending—occurs at the beginning of Scene Eleven, as Stella tells
Eunice about their plans for Blanche and her rejection of Blanche’s allegation of rape.
Nothing in what is said or occurs in this scene has an impact on the outcome of the play.
That was determined in the climax.
• The catastrophe—the denouement or ending of the action, usually arousing a sense of
fear and pity in a tragedy—occurs at the end of Scene Eleven when an utterly destroyed
Blanche is taken from the apartment to an insane asylum where she will undoubtedly
spend the rest of her life.
THE DRAMATIC PRODUCTION
As with any drama, Williams uses costumes, music, and scenery to communicate his intentions
and meanings in both subtle and direct ways.
COSTUMES
Blanche first appears on stage dressed in a ruffled white suit, hat, and gloves, as though attired
for a summer garden party. She looks—and is—out of place in the ramshackle neighborhood
of small frame houses. Her incongruous appearance underscores the conflict between Southern
gentility (good manners, pretensions, lost plantations, etc.) and the rough masculinity of urban
society (bare-chested men, loud poker players, coarse language).
Stanley seizes upon Blanche’s wardrobe as evidence that she spent money intended for Belle
Rêve on herself: “Look at these feathers and furs that she comes here to preen herself in! What’s
this here? A solid-gold dress, I believe. And this one! What is these here? Fox pieces… Where
are your fox pieces, Stella? Bushy snow-white ones, no less!”
The finery emphasizes Blanche’s pretensions and her tenuous hold on reality. As her situation
becomes more desperate and her mental condition begins to deteriorate, her costumes become
increasingly frayed and farcical. By Scene Ten, she “has decked herself out in a somewhat soiled
and crumpled white satin evening gown and a pair of scuffed silver slippers with brilliants set
in their heels.” On her head is a rhinestone tiara. Stanley ridicules her get-up as a “worn-out
Mardi Gras outfit, rented for fifty-cents from some rag-picker.”
The men wear strong, loud colors, silk bowling shirts in bold, primary colors. Stanley, upon
first meeting Blanche, takes off his tight, white T-shirt—with blatant disrespect—to show off
his powerful chest. Stanley’s red pajamas are left lying across the bedroom doorway after a night
of sex with Stella. And significantly, Stanley is wearing these same pajamas (his wedding night
attire, his flag of conquest to wave when his son is born) when he rapes Blanche.
Stella and the other women wear softer, muted pastels. Blanche tells Stella, “I never was hard or
self-sufficient enough. When people are soft—soft people have got to shimmer and glow—they’ve
got to put on soft colors, the colors of butterfly wings, and put a paper lantern over the light.”
SETTING, SCENERY, AND SET DESIGN
The play is set in the Faubourg Marigny district of New Orleans. Williams, who lived for a time
in New Orleans, describes the Marigny as poor but with a “raffish charm.” The neighborhood’s
Creole cottages appear on stage as “mostly white frame, weathered grey, with rickety outside
stairs and galleries and quaintly ornamented gables.”
While Williams uses actual street names and streetcar lines in his dialogue, there is an indisputably
symbolic value to the setting of the play. The Kowalskis live on Elysian Fields Avenue. The Elysian
Fields are, of course, where the heroes of Greek mythology found their final rest and spent their
afterlives. The street name is ironic since the Kowalskis’ home is far from “heavenly,” but it is the
place to which Blanche hopes to escape from the ruins of her life in Laurel, Mississippi.
The symbolic irony is intensified, however, and the primary theme of the play introduced,
when the confused Blanche tells Eunice in Scene One, “They told me to take a street-car named
Desire, and then transfer to one called Cemeteries and ride six blocks and get off at—Elysian
Fields!” “Desire” leads to “Cemeteries” (death), which takes one to the “Elysian Fields.” In
Scene Four, during Blanche and Stella’s argument, the sisters use the name of the streetcar line
both literally and metaphorically:
BLANCHE: What you are talking about is brutal desire…the name of that rattle-trap street-car
that bangs through the Quarter…
STELLA: Haven’t you ever ridden on that street-car?
BLANCHE: It brought me here—
Given the context of their argument, both Blanche and Stella have arrived “here” by riding on
the literal and the metaphoric streetcar named desire.
Here, of course, is the two-room Kowalski apartment. According to the stage directions, the
apartment itself is squalid and sparsely furnished, with a bed and vanity in one room and a
convertible sofa and a kitchen table in the other. In addition to the physical conditions of the
apartment, however, Williams uses lighting and music to evoke the sensuality of New Orleans
and signal key shifts in the plot and character development.
Lighting—particularly dimmed lights—and shadows are used throughout the play to create
mood. Blanche arrives at night and throughout the play eschews the bright light, placing a
paper lantern over the naked ceiling bulb, going out for dates with Mitch only after sundown.
The external light shifts with the time of day—gentle for morning, bright for afternoon—
creating the sense of the passage of time. The poker game is harshly lit by a hanging lamp
with a “vivid green shade.” The kitchen-turned-gambling-den, “now suggests the sort of lurid
nocturnal brilliance” of Van Gogh’s famous painting of a billiard-parlor at night.
In Scene Ten, as Blanche tries vainly to escape Stanley with her pretense of a soon-arriving suitor,
shadows and “lurid reflections move sinuously as flames along the wall spaces,” representing
both her increasing turmoil and the advancing threat.
Williams’s directions also indicate how lighting, and the use of scrim transparencies, indicate
setting changes that allow him to show action outside of the apartment as well as inside—at
times simultaneously.
The opening scene of the play and at least one instance when Blanche and Mitch are returning
from a date take place on the street outside of the building. The interior of the apartment is
hidden behind a screen, and the audience sees the exterior of the building. When Blanche and
Eunice first enter the apartment, the lights change so that the apartment becomes visible for the
first time, and the exterior details fade into darkness.
Similarly, in Scene Ten, immediately before the rape, the back walls of the apartment become
transparent so that the audience can see the seedy goings-on on the street as well as the violence
within the apartment.
Thus, Williams uses lighting and shadow, not only to establish mood, but also to indicate shifts
of location while maintaining a continuous flow of action.
MUSIC
Williams uses thematic music to very specific ends in Streetcar. The Varsouviana polka begins
to play whenever Blanche is reminded of her first husband the night of her discovery, and his
suicide haunts her and becomes a vital element in her psychological deterioration and ultimate
destruction. As her distress grows, the increasing intensity of the polka music clearly portends
the hastening approach of her mental collapse. The blues piano, which Williams describes
as “a tinny piano being played with the infatuated fluency of brown fingers,” is the sound of
New Orleans and “expresses the spirit of life” that occurs on Elysian Fields Avenue. The “Blue
Piano” is used both to create ambience and to punctuate scenes with its mournful notes. Seven
of the eleven scenes end with Blue Piano music. The “hot trumpet and drums,” an intensified
version of the Blue Piano, blare out Stanley’s conquest of Blanche at the end of Scene 10. (A
“hot” trumpet is one played with a mute.)
THEMES
Two major themes underpin the plot of A Streetcar Named Desire.
• The Old South cannot survive in an industrialized modern world
Blanche and Stanley, even more than specific personae, are largely symbols or archetypes.
Blanche, who clings to some highly-fantasized version of her past with her deceptions and
pretensions of gentility, is Williams’s personification of the Old South—a place of faded grace
and deep flaws, ruined by the “epic fornications” of its ancestors and its own refusal to let
go of that ruinous history. The brutal and sometimes violent Stanley represents an insatiable
industrialized urban society that must crush its rivals to survive.
The onstage conflict between Blanche and Stanley personifies this central theme, as Stanley gradually
strips away Blanche’s pretenses before destroying her.
• Desire leads to sorrow, loneliness and death:
With her opening lines, Blanche articulates the notion that desire inevitably leads to death.
Asked if she is lost, Blanche responds, “They told me to take a street-car named Desire, and then
transfer to one called Cemeteries and ride six blocks and get off at Elysian Fields!”
As the audience will gradually learn, Blanche has followed her desires, with their seductions,
losses, and addictions, to her own destruction. Physically, she finds herself in a grim little
apartment on Elysian Fields Avenue. Emotionally and spiritually, she is as bankrupt as the lost
Belle Rêve plantation.
Stella, who makes love to Stanley after he hits her, and chooses not to believe her sister’s
accustation of rape in order to be able to stay with her husband, is also trapped by her desires,
and the play ends on the ambiguous note of whether Stella’s choice will lead to her happiness
or her own destruction.
Lesser themes explored in the play include:
• Fantasy and reality are incompatible. Blanche lives in a world of her own creation in
which she is still beautiful and pure, where her past indiscretions either never happened
or can be ignored. When Mitch accuses her of lying to him, she insists, “Never inside, I
didn’t lie in my heart….” Ultimately, however, reality will overcome the fantasy. Blanche
cannot escape the Varsouviana playing constantly in her mind. Her past follows her to
New Orleans, and both Mitch and Stanley confront her with the truth of who and what
she is. This confrontation between the truth and “what ought to be the truth” ends in
Blanche’s emotional and psychological destruction.
• Human beings are animals. The men of Streetcar are louts, coarse, brutish creatures who
pursue their desires, as Blanche says, like apes, “in front of the cave, all grunting like
him and swilling and gnawing and hulking.” Stanley, the most brutish of all prevails. He
is the successful hunter who brings home the bloody meat and ruthlessly destroys the
threat to his home.
By the same token, however, the women are no less animals. Stella’s primary attraction to
Stanley is sexual, from the moment she lewdly suggests to Blanche that what distinguishes
him from other men “is not on his forehead and … is not genius.” Even after Stanley beats her,
and she retreats to Eunice’s apartment, she returns to him “with low, animal moans.” The next
morning, she lingers in bed, her face serene, her hand resting on her rounding belly. Blanche,
too, for all her pretensions, finds her comfort in physical pleasures—long, hot baths, alcohol,
and sex. She will not let Mitch see her in the daylight because she is afraid that, beyond her
fading beauty, she has nothing with which to attract him. It is significant that the moment of
her destruction is not the revelation of her deceptions but a physical assault.
MOTIFS
Light. Blanche avoids the light, just as she avoids scrutiny of her past. Her “delicate beauty
must avoid a strong light,” and so, just as she hangs a paper lantern over the naked bulb,
she tries to obscure her sordid past. Mitch complains that he has never had a “good look” at
Blanche. Light, here, comes to represent revelation and truth.
The moth. The playwright compares Blanche to a moth with her uncertain manner and white
clothes. She flutters and flits in her gauzy white dresses, like a moth. She is nocturnal, like the
moth. Her desires draw her, like the moth to the flame, into destructive traps. (“The moth to
the flame” is, after all, the cliché used to describe ultimatly fatal, yet irresistible, attraction.)
Bathing. Blanche’s frequent baths represent her efforts to cleanse herself of her past and to wash
off a distasteful present. She soaks in the hot tub to ease her nerves, an ironic metaphor for the
hot water she finds herself in. The baths are also practical devices that remove Blanche from
center stage and give the other characters the opportunity to discuss her. In Scene One, Blanche
tells Stella that she cannot be scrutinized until she has bathed. Scene Two begins with Blanche
in the bathroom, preparing for a night on the town. Blanche warbles from the bath, “If you only
believe in me,” from “A Paper Moon,” ironically as Stanley is telling Stella of her sordid past.
Even the final scene opens with Blanche in the bath, preparing for what she thinks will be a
vacation but is instead a one-way trip to the insane asylum.
Drinking. Blanche and Stanley are both hard drinkers. She tipples from his bottle in the first
scene and then denies it, symbolically encroaching upon his territory while also revealing her
dependence on alcohol. Blanche drinks to escape; Stanley drinks to celebrate his masculinity.
Too much alcohol and Blanche becomes pathetic; too much booze and Stanley turns mean and
violent. In this, as in all other aspects, the protagonist and antagonist are polar opposites.
first game defines the masculinity of Stanley and his pals and introduces Mitch to Blanche. In
Scene Four, Blanche decries the poker players as “this party of apes,” a slur Stanley overhears.
In the final scene, as Blanche is being led away by the kindly doctor, the men resume their
poker game at the Kowalski apartment, witnesses to Stanley’s triumph and Blanche’s humiliating
collapse. The final line of the play—“The game is seven-card stud”—punctuates Stanley’s
masculine conquest. The “stud” wins.
SYMBOLISM AND IMAGERY
Symbolism employs concrete objects, characters, colors, and music to represent abstract concepts.
Imagery uses descriptions and figures of speech to paint a picture. Both literary techniques are
used to convey meaning.
• Sexual symbols
Williams is well known for his repeated use of phallic and sexual symbols in his work. In the
opening scene, the raw meat tossed by Stanley to a laughing Stella symbolizes his “stone-age”
masculinity. Her laughing catch symbolizes her willing acceptance. To guarantee that his audience
will not miss the innuendo in this act, Williams has Eunice and the Negro woman emphasize it
with their laughter. In Scene Four, Blanche continues the raw meat motif, when criticizing Stanley,
she says, “Thousands and thousands of years have passed him right by, and there he is—Stanley
Kowalski—survivor of the stone age! Bearing the raw meat home from the kill in the jungle! And
you—you here—waiting for him! Maybe he’ll strike you or maybe grunt and kiss you!”
Critics also see phallic symbols in the white columns of Belle Rêve. (Stanley boasts of pulling
Stella down from those self-same columns.) The final line of the play, “This game is seven-card
stud,” is an overt comment on the domination of the stud, or sexual male.
• Animal imagery
Stanley has “animal joy in his being, implicit in all his movements.” He is “a richly feathered male
bird among hens.” Blanche disparages him as an ape, as a beast and as a sub-human creature. “He
acts like an animal, has an animal’s habits. He eats like one, moves like one.” Together, Stanley
and his poker pals are “a party of apes,” grunting, snatching, growling. Even the semi-sensitive
Mitch dances like a bear. When Stanley menaces Blanche, moving in for the rape, the audience
hears “inhuman jungle voices.” As he rips the broken bottle out of her hand, he calls her a tiger.
The women, too, are closely associated with animals. When Blanche first enters Stella’s apartment,
the offstage screech of a cat accompanies her furtive drink of whiskey. When Stanley is ransacking
Blanche’s trunk and examining her clothing, he comments on the “feathers and furs that she come
here to preen herself in!” After losing her home, she retreats to The Flamingo hotel. When Stella
returns to Stanley the night after the poker game, they “come together with low, animal moans”;
and when Blanche is taken away at the end of the play, Stella “sobs with inhuman abandon.”
• White
Williams did not choose the name Blanche for his protagonist at random. According to the
Oxford English Dictionary, blanche or blanch (derived from the Latin blancus) means “white,”
especially as a verb “to make white.”
White, ironically, is associated with purity. While Blanche herself is far from “pure,” she would
like to believe—and to convince Mitch—that she is. She tells Mitch that her name in French
means “white wood,” and she compares herself to a blossom-covered orchard in springtime.
Literally, however, the verb to blanche means to “make white” by heat or by chemical bleaching—
thus the sense of taking something dark and giving it the appearance of whiteness. To blanche
also means to make pale from an emotion like fear. The OED also includes a usage of blanche as
an intentional suppression of the truth. Thus, Blanche DuBois represents the stained soul with
the lurid past, trying to reclaim at least the appearance of wholesomeness and purity.
When a Coke fizzes up and spills on her white skirt, the stain symbolizes the fact that she will
not be able to hide the truth of her past for too long. By the same token, Blanche’s frequent
baths emphasize her futile attempts to blanche, or whiten, herself and her past.
THE TITLE
The title has both a literal and a metaphoric meaning. Blanche arrives at the Kowalski apartment
via the streetcar line “Desire,” but it is what Blanche calls “brutal desire” that propels all of the
characters toward the ultimate tragic conclusion.
In a New York Times essay, “On A Streetcar Named Desire,” published in 1947, four days before the
play opened, Williams recalls that he set out to write a play about a poker game, which he wanted
to title “The Poker Night.” That work evolved into A Streetcar Named Desire, but perhaps in tribute
to the original idea, Williams titled Scene Three—the only scene to be titled—“The Poker Night.”
Williams experimented with other titles on earlier versions of the play, including “The Moth”
and “Blanche’s Chair on the Moon,” as National Public Radio’s Debbie Elliott reported in a 2002
“Present at the Creation” episode about A Streetcar Named Desire.
THE PLAYWRIGHT
A Streetcar Named Desire, like most of Tennessee Williams’s work, contains bits and pieces of the
writer, references to his past and character traits drawn from family members. As much as any
playwright of the twentieth century, Williams mined his tumultuous youth and dysfunctional family
for inspiration, even as he recreated a world that was both gentler and more vicious than his own.
He was born Thomas Lanier Williams on March 26, 1911, in Columbus, Mississippi, to Cornelius
Coffin Williams, a traveling shoe salesman, and Edwina Estelle Dakin, a true Southern belle by
all accounts. With his father on the road most of his early life, the young Tom—the second of
three children—lived with his mother and siblings at the home of his grandfather, an Episcopal
minister. This life of refinement in the Deep South came to an unhappy end when Cornelius
Williams stopped traveling, went to work in a shoe factory, and moved the family to St. Louis,
Missouri. Biographers generally characterize the years following the move as poor and unhappy.
Williams’s father was overbearing, his mother pretentious and controlling. His beloved older
sister, Rose, was lovely and intelligent but mentally fragile. Dakin, whom Tennessee Williams
called “my improbable little brother,” would ultimately be the steady one and remain actively
involved in his brother’s tumultuous life and career until his own death at age 89 in 2008.
In St. Louis, Williams’s father forced the young Tom to work in the shoe factory, a job he
loathed and one that drove him almost to a nervous collapse. At the shoe factory, Williams
worked with a young, apparently heterosexual man named Stanley Kowalski. Donald Spoto,
one of Williams’s biographers, theorizes that Williams was attracted to Kowalski but maintains
that he found no evidence the two were lovers.
After a checkered academic career, Williams graduated from the University of Iowa in 1938
(at the age of 27). About the time of his college graduation, Williams changed his name to
Tennessee. Some critics have speculated that he wanted to distance himself from his earlier
works, which he considered inferior, while other biographers have surmised that he chose the
name because Tennessee was the home of his father’s family.
Throughout his early years, Williams wrote poetry and plays and won small awards. His
breakthrough came with the 1944 Broadway production of The Glass Menagerie, his most
autobiographical work. (Acknowledging that the controlling mother Amanda Wingfield was
so thoroughly based upon his own mother, Williams gave half of the profits from The Glass
Menagerie to “Miss Edwina,” as Dakin told The Mississippi Quarterly in a 1995 interview.)
The Glass Menagerie earned Williams the Drama Critics’ Circle Prize and the Sidney Howard
Memorial from the Playwrights Company and brought him overnight fame and wealth.
Four days before A Streetcar Named Desire debuted on Broadway, The New York Times published
an essay by Williams in which he mused about his sudden stardom and all the changes that had
come with it, some not for the better. In the essay, Williams wrote of his emotional rise and fall,
describing what modern psychiatrists would label a classic depression in which he lost interest
in almost everything and “felt too lifeless inside” to ever create another masterwork.
“Security is a kind of death, I think, and it can come to you in a storm of royalty checks beside a
kidney-shaped pool in Beverly Hills or anywhere at all that is removed from the conditions that
made you an artist, if that’s what you are or were or intended to be,” Williams wrote.
Williams would wrestle with his dark side and the trappings of fame for the rest of his life. Like
many of his characters, he drank and used drugs to excess and teetered precariously at times
on the edge of mental collapse. (Dakin drew the everlasting wrath of his older brother when
in 1969 he committed Tennessee to a mental hospital in St. Louis, most likely saving his life.)
Williams was openly homosexual at a time when most gay men and women lived closeted
lives to avoid public censure. Several of his plays include both oblique and overt references to
homosexuality. In Streetcar, Blanche’s young husband kills himself after she catches him in a
tryst with an older man and tells him, “I saw! I know! You disgust me…”
In Blanche’s pretentious Southern belle, critics and biographers see suggestions of Williams’s
own mother. However, in the 2002 NPR interview with Debbie Elliott, Dakin insisted, “Blanche
is Tennessee.” Comparing his brother to his infamous protagonist, Dakin said, “If Tennessee
would tell you something, it wouldn’t be necessarily true… And so, everything in Blanche was
really like Tennessee.”
Williams was one of the most prolific playwrights of the twentieth century, publishing more than
three dozen plays, movie scripts, and books, including short fiction and a memoir. His work
won numerous awards, including two Pulitzer Prizes for A Streetcar Named Desire and Cat on a
Hot Tin Roof (1955). Fifteen of his plays were made into movies. Among the most successful and
enduring of his dramas, in addition to the aforementioned, were The Rose Tattoo, Camino Real,
Summer Smoke, Orpheus Descending, Sweet Bird of Youth, and Night of the Iguana.
He choked to death on a medicine bottle cap, alone in a hotel room, after a night of drinking
and drugs, in February 1983, at the age of 71.
