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EQ: EXPLORE HOW WILLIAMS PRESENTS VALUES
OF THE OLD WORLD, AGAINST NEW,
HETEROGENEOUS WAYS OF LIVING
Tennessee Williams’s play “A Streetcar Named Desire” outlines the stark contrasts between
conflicting worlds in order to morally challenge the audience and their conventional
perspectives of life in a heavily divided 1940s society
...
Although “Streetcar” is most overtly about gender roles in post-World War II New
Orleans, a case can be made for a metaphorical interpretation that would comment upon
the relationship between the southern and northern states at the time of and immediately
following the Civil War
...

In this essentially Southern play, Williams explores the phenomenon of the “Southern Belle”; a
figure that rests on a cultural and social personification, legitimising a certain interpretation of
femininity, inferiority and subordination
...

Hence, the character of Blanche DuBois appears to perfectly embody this tragic Southern
Belle who has become accustomed to a certain level of wealth, and has been left adrift in
the modern world
...
Her “daint[y]” demeanour and
“delicate beauty” becomes “incongruent”, failing to harmonise with the rowdy New Orleans
atmosphere which is saturated with sharp contrasts; old French architecture and new rhymes
of jazz, an old world refinement mixed with the grit of poverty and modernity, decay and
corruption alongside a regenerative power of desire and procreation
...

We soon learn that Blanche was brought up in an ancestral plantation home with great big
“white columns” called “Belle Reve”, a name that comes to translate to “beautiful dream” –
something beautiful, yet intangible
...
Hence, Blanche, in her fragility towards the
blaring of a flame, remains prisoner of the traditional notions about women of the old cavalier

world, where they were taught attractiveness, virtue and gentility led automatically to
happiness
...
Williams presents Stanley as the villainised embodiment of the,
then, present-day, progressive values individuals held in a radically changing society
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Stanley lives in a basic, fundamental world which allows for no subtleties
nor refinements, as Williams embeds within this literary device the corrupted, patriarchal
effect of the new world’s fatal flaws; he is bestial, brutal and determined to destroy that which
is not his
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The passionate men who dominated the 1940s soon gave way to the idealized 1950s father
figure as the dominating view of masculinity; at a time where there were no acceptable
alternatives to society’s norms, any attack on a man’s masculinity left him scrambling to
defend himself in any way possible, even if that defence was deemed unashamedly
aggressive
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In its form of betting and bluffing, this seemingly incessant game of poker
in the Kowalski’s apartment appears to mirror the contest between Stanley and Blanche as
they trade who has the upper hand
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On one hand, Blanche prefers the world of illusion and strategic
misrepresentation, “I don’t want realism, I want magic! […] I try to give that to people
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I don’t tell the truth; I tell what ought to be truth
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Hence, the public man’s world of poker
stands as an unconquerable outpost in the romantic illusory world of Blanche’s
creation
...
The “social leveller” which Stanley sees himself as, quickly comes
to fuel his degenerate nature towards Blanche herself, and is evidently recognised by the
audience after he rapes his wife’s only sister
...
The wrongfulness of this representation, Williams
highlights, ironically calls into question society’s decision to ostracise Blanche in her blind
decisions and reluctance to settle her waning aristocracy in the cruel reality bringing a certain
degree of success to Stanley’s own conforming lifestyle
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