A Streetcar Named Desire

July 2018 

A Streetcar Named Desire

Williams, Tennessee. A Streetcar Named Desire. 1947. New Directions Publishing Corporation, 2004. 

Cultures collide when a refined southern belle is forced to live with her sister in a lower class neighbourhood of New Orleans in the late 1940’s. Blanche is a broken woman, she has lost everything but her little sister Stella and is desperate for some sort of peace in her life again. But her plans are threatened by Stanley, Stella’s blue collar husband who doesn’t understand where Blanche is coming from and sees her only as a threat to his marriage. Streetcar Named Desire is American Realism at its best, showing complicated people in a gritty environment. Blanche is almost immediately unlikable as she tiptoes her way around everything and shows clear disgust for her sister’s lifestyle. Stanley seems to be the protagonist of the story - an all-American war veteran who is doing his best to provide for his wife and their unborn child, but as the play unfolds it causes the audience to question their allegiances and challenge assumptions. I see this play it is a warning against the popular assumptions that we have about what will “fix” our problems. Blanche was an upper class character, who carries herself with an air of authority, but she  is taken down by Stanley in an utterly violent and horrifying way.  It is clear that the ends do not justify the means in this case - which causes us to question when our desires take us down a darker road than we would have intentionally walked, and if there is any going back afterward.