Abstract
Tennessee Williams has achieved superior status in the realm of American theatre. With A Streetcar Named Desire, he immediately gained world fame. Williams’s milieu is the south, a tense and un-reconstructed locale typical only of an environment we all inhabit. His theme is the plight of an individual trapped by his environment, the loneliness and lack of communication between human beings unable to reconcile flesh with the spirit. In essence, Streetcar is not a play driven by a social agenda, a challenging of gender roles, or a well defined structure of tragedy; it is instead a story driven entirely by human nature and a distinctly American nature.
Keywords: Status, disintegration, victimization, woman, Human sensibility, modern Life
Discussion
Williams’s women characters are among some of the finest ever portrayed. They are also among the most complex and anti-stereotypical. Blanche is both a villain and a victim, the cause of her husband’s suicide and the suffering widow as a result of it. Williams’s sympathy, by and large, lies with the women.
Looking at A Streetcar Named Desire from a feminist perspective proves enormously complicated. This is a woman’s story. Blanche, the key character, whose point of view dominates the story, is a woman; her problems are distinctly women’s problems. In addition, the character who is faced with deciding between the warring parties, Stella, is another kind of woman. Yet her choices are also peculiarly female choices.
The ultimate act of violent male domination occurs when Stanley rapes Blanche. The setting for A Streetcar Named Desire is Post World War II, when the American South was steeped in sexist views. Williams indicates that Stella is clearly a sad victim in a relationship that she thinks is within the boundaries of normalcy.
Conclusion
Tennessee Williams masterfully presents women’s oppression in male patriarchal society in A Streetcar Named Desire. He relates to the male other through his own experience as a marginalized segment of society as a homosexual. In Streetcar Named Desire, the dramatist is attacking those disruptive forces in modern life that disturb the women.
Works Cited
- Adler, Thomas P. A Street Car Named Desire: The Math and the Lantern. Boston: Twayne, 1990.
- Chapman, John. “Streetcar Named Desire Sets Season’s High in Acting, Writing.” Miller, Twentieth Century Interpretations of A Street Car Named Desire, 29-30.
- Kolin, Philip C. Williams “Streetcar Named Desire”. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
- Millett, Kate. Sexual Politics. New York: Avon, 1970.
- Nelson, Benjamin. Tennessee Williams: The Man and His Work. New York: Obolensky, 1961.
- Thompson, Judith J. Tennessee William’s Plays: Memory, Myth and Symbol. New York: Lang, 2002.
- W.J. Cash. The Mind of the South. New York: Vintage.