TENNESSEE WILLIAMS'S A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE: A Global perspective

Author(s): ROBERT REA

Source: South: A Scholarly Journal , Vol. 49, No. 2 (SPRING 2017), pp. 187-199
Published by: University of North Carolina Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/26432076

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 ro b ert r e a

tennessee williams’s
A streetcAr nAmed desire
A Global Perspective

A Small Place begins with Jamaica Kincaid greeting

a hypothetical guest on her native island of Antigua.
“If you go to Antigua as a tourist, this is what you Immigrant
will see,” she insists, “since you are a tourist, the
stories expand
thought of what it might be like for someone who
had to live day in, day out in a place . . . must never the range of
cross your mind” (Kincaid 3–4). The rest of the book the drama
records her angry response to the poverty and cor-
ruption that goes unnoticed by tourists who flock far beyond a
to the Caribbean for its powdery white beaches and city, region,
crystal blue seascapes. Tennessee Williams sets
New Orleans in A Streetcar Named Desire at a simi- or nation. The
lar angle from the audience’s point of view. A steady Kowalski family
flow of migrants, commerce, and culture dissolves
the borders that separate the South from the world. saga dissolves
Before turning to the long-range view, let us look the borders
closely at the racial conflict that remains at the heart
of the southern literary canon. The feud between that separate
Stanley and Blanche has stoked a debate about race the South from
in the play. George Crandell argues “the racialized
discourse spoken by Stella and Blanche serves to the world.
define Stanley as the Other, a sexual, cultural, and by
implication, racial alien” (Crandell 339). Then again,
Mary Brewer warns against too much emphasis on
“Stanley’s relation to Black masculinity,” though
she maintains Blanche “make[s] him appear to be
something less than fully White” (Brewer 74–75).
Crandell aligns immigrants with black Americans
in a wash of otherness, whereas Brewer overlooks
the racial terrain of New Orleans. In either case, the
racial barrier stands inside the conventions of the
187

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 immigrant success story, functioning as a major hurdle in the transi-
tion from foreignness to assimilation. The more self-conscious Stanley
becomes about race, the more we see how blackness and whiteness do
not offer neat conclusions about the identity he inhabits.
Williams, after all, gives Stanley a backstory that introduces the possi-
bility of a life across borders. His Polish heritage, the promise of assimi-
lation, and the hardscrabble condition of immigrant neighborhoods all
confront Stanley as he chases upward mobility. James Peacock, author of
Grounded Globalism, might well be understood as describing the global-
ism grounded in A Streetcar Named Desire:

When the national framework is replaced, relations within the nation,

including long-standing intranational conflicts, become less central
in one’s cognitive map. On a global cognitive map, regions such as the
South and the North appear smaller—no longer the elements of dual-
istic division but some elements among many within a much wider
horizon. (Peacock 7)

Immigrant stories expand the range of the drama far beyond a city,
region, or nation. The Kowalski family saga—unlike that of the DuBois—
steers the narrative away from the rivalry between the North and South
and, more importantly, toward the world. In doing so, Williams redraws
the map of southern literature on a scale that is global.
New Orleans occupies a romantic place in our cultural imagination.
Frederick Starr tracks its pastel-hued charm to a postbellum travel writer
named Lafcadio Hearn. Hearn’s vignettes appeared in Harper’s Weekly
and Scribner’s Magazine, drawing a national readership that, Starr claims,
“invented” the popular perception of New Orleans:

The titles of Hearn’s writings on New Orleans and Louisiana read like
an index to the main themes of literally hundreds of novels, movie
scripts, travel guides, tourist brochures, monographs, and disserta-
tions devoted to the region. Local and national writers and musicians
who make a profession of explaining the Crescent City to the uniniti-
ated tirelessly march through Hearn’s table of contents without even
realizing they are doing so. But it was Hearn who, more than anyone
else, identified the elements of what became the prevailing image of
New Orleans and commanded the literary skills needed to communi-
cate that composite to a large general readership. (Starr xxv)

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Hearn captivated readers with stories on Mardi Gras, voodoo, and other
slices of French Quarter life that still loom large as treasured icons. “At
the Gate of the Tropics” documented his first impressions upon arrival
in November of 1877. As the title suggests, he envisions New Orleans as
a gateway to the Caribbean.
A Streetcar Named Desire is set in a city that is neither here nor there.
Geographically, New Orleans belongs to the southern region of the
United States, but economically and culturally, it feels like the northern-
most point of Latin America. Williams describes the opening scene for
us in detail: “You can almost feel the warm breath of the brown river
beyond the river warehouses with their faint redolences of bananas and
coffee” (469). Bananas and coffee were integral to the development and
expansion of the New World economy. United States’ demand increased
after Guatemala, Honduras, and Belize pushed both products at the 1884
World Industrial and Cotton Centennial in New Orleans (Woodward 157).
Susanna Delfino and Michele Gillespie apply the term “global South” in
their discussion of the region in world economic affairs:

The word globalization is in common usage nowadays, but when

applied to the emergence of a ‘global South,’ the term . . . conjures
up in many ways the crystallization of distinctions of colonial origin
between centers and peripheries in the development of the world
economy, by which the latter become structurally dependent on the
former. (4)

As New Orleans became a major player in international trade, Latin

America was vital to the surge in economic growth. Crosscurrents of
money, labor, and power were uneven, of course; distribution and pack-
aging industries in New Orleans relied upon agricultural production
throughout Central and South America. The riverfront warehouses regis-
ter a local economy at the center of global South trade, meanwhile, trac-
ing the events to come onto a larger, Caribbean backdrop.
Tinkling keys from a “Blue Piano” greet the audience as the curtain
rises. The recurring tune drifts from the wings at key points during
the play. Williams goes into even greater detail about the sound that
“expresses the spirit of the life which goes on here”: “In this part of New
Orleans, you are practically always just around the corner, or a few doors
down the street, from a tinny piano being played with the infatuated flu-
ency of brown fingers” (469). The tradition of New Orleans piano players

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 is legendary in pop music. Jelly Roll Morton, Fats Domino, Professor
Longhair, and Allen Toussaint put New Orleans R&B on the map, with
hit singles that have since become standards and covered by countless
artists in a wide range of genres. What distinguishes the New Orleans
sound from other strains of R&B are the Afro-Caribbean rhythms. Ned
Sublette detects this same trademark in a considerably older piece by
a New Orleans pianist. A world-class composer by the age of ten, Louis
Moreau Gottschalk played a concert in Havana in 1853, where he discov-
ered a Cuban genre called the contradanza. In The World that Made New
Orleans, Sublette connects the dots from the Gottschalk composition “La
Bamboula,” to the contradanza, to the undocumented music by slaves in
Congo Square.

You can hear it in the contemporary music of Haiti, the Dominican

Republic, Jamaica, and Puerto Rico, to say nothing of the nine-
teenth-century Cuban contradanza. It’s Jelly Roll Morton’s oft-cited
“Spanish tinge,” it’s the accompaniment figure to W. C. Handy’s “St.
Louis Blues,” and you hear it from brass bands at a second line in New
Orleans today. (Sublette 124)

Sublette mounts a convincing—if somewhat circumstantial—argument

for Caribbean rhythms giving birth to jazz. More to the point, the notes
from the Blue Piano, like the smell of bananas and coffee, set the action
at the northern tip of the Caribbean rim.
Foodways from the play offer yet another window into the storied
traditions of New Orleans. On the night of Stanley’s poker game, Stella
treats Blanche to dinner at Galatoire’s. This French Quarter institution
was founded in 1905 by an immigrant family from Pardies, France and
is still revered for its creole cuisine. A street vendor hawks hot tamales
from a cart parked outside the Kowalskis’ apartment. Stanley and Stella’s
neighbor, Eunice, scolds her husband for coming home late and miss-
ing dinner: “I made spaghetti and ate it myself” (Williams 480). In some
ways Williams takes up the myth-making formulas pioneered by Hearn.1
To say that New Orleans food and music have seeped into the public
consciousness is not to say that these are mere legends and myths, for
as we have seen, both traditions are historically rooted in the culture of
New Orleans. Still, if an airbrushed image exists in the minds of aver-
age theatergoers, then food and music are two of the more recognizable
features.

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 From a literary standpoint, such well-trod ground amounts to a tour-
ist’s view of the city. Blanche is more or less an out-of-town guest. Stella
chills a “cold plate on ice” for Stanley so that she and her sister can dine at
Galatoire’s (483). Williams’s production notes, as David Savran observes,
“fracture dramatic continuity” and “decenter the scenic representation”:
“The force and violence of these intrusions and noises from elsewhere
create the impression that the scenes enacted on stage, despite their dra-
matic urgency, are just a tiny part of a much more extensive and extrav-
agant series of actions that constantly exceeds the bounds of theatrical
representation” (104). The elaborate stage directions and locally specific
dialogue evoke the romantic charm of downtown New Orleans. To tread
a path less worn, however, Williams pushes the myth-tinged scenery to
the outer edges of his dramatic world.
Instead, the audience gets a behind-the-scenes look at what it might
be like for a family to live day in, day out near the French Quarter. The
genesis of its nightlife began with a sixteen-block section of downtown
known as Storyville—the red-light district that was an early hotbed
for jazz and offered a future template for adult entertainment in New
Orleans. According to Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America,
the rise of red-light districts cleared a space for “masses of workers who
lived beyond the reach of middle-class genteel morality”:

A new geographic distance, born of innovations in transportation

such as the streetcar, separated social groups and magnified the sense
of danger with which the business and professional classes viewed
the working-class majority. In their own districts, immigrants, blacks,
native-born white workers, and even rural dwellers evolved marital
standards that reflected the conditions in which they lived. Large fam-
ilies, crowded living quarters, racial and ethnic tensions, economic
hardship, Old World cultural traditions, and other circumstances
all conspired to shape family forms that competed with those of the
more prosperous. (D’Emilio and Freedman 183)

The now-iconic streetcar line to Desire drops Blanche in an unfamil-

iar environment, clearly marked as a deviation from her notions—or
should I say illusions—of genteel morality. The impression we get from
the outset predicts the class struggle that will partially sustain the con-
flict. Stanley walks on stage dressed in “blue denim work clothes” and
a “bowling jacket” (Williams 470). He tosses a package of meat to his

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 wife before the couple exits for the bowling alley. Sister Blanche appears
soon after, wearing a “fluffy bodice, necklace and earrings of pearl, white
gloves and hat, looking as if she were arriving at a summer tea or cock-
tail party” (471). A look of “shocked disbelief” on her face offends her
new neighbor, Eunice. After Blanche thanks her for unlocking the door,
Eunice replies, “Por nada, as the Mexicans say, por nada!” (471).
The cramped quarters make life generally unlivable for everyone
involved. The interior design of the set consists of two rooms—a sin-
gle bedroom and a kitchen with a folding bed—split by a curtain. One
source of friction results from the inordinate amount of time Blanche
spends in the only bathroom. She confides in her would-be suitor, Mitch,
on their first date, “It’s really a pretty frightful situation. You see, there’s
no privacy here. There’s just these portieres between the two rooms at
night. [Stanley] stalks through the rooms in his underwear at night. And
I have to ask him to close the bathroom door” (526). Domestic life in
working-class districts departed from middle class “ideals of purity, ret-
icence, and a conjugal intimacy that rested on privacy” (D’Emilio and
Freedman 183). Inevitably, Blanche interrupts regular intimacy between
Stella and her husband. But when Stanley begs his wife to give her sister
the boot, he implies Blanche has not altogether stopped the couple from
having sex:

Stell, it’s gonna be all right after she goes and after you’ve had the
baby. It’s gonna be all right again between you and me the way it was.
You remember the way that it was? Them nights we had together?
God, honey, it’s gonna be sweet when we can make noise in the night
the way that we used to and get the colored lights going with nobody’s
sister behind the curtains to hear us! (538)

Stella’s pregnancy adds another strain to the already stressful conditions

of family life. At one point, Blanche admits, “If it weren’t for Stella about
to have a baby, I wouldn’t be able to endure things here” (525). To the
privileged classes, the private world of the working class was “nothing
but an alien, anarchic sexuality,” a disadvantaged place where “tenement
districts and urban slums saw families crowded into tiny apartments
with parents’ beds in sight of their children” (D’Emilio and Freedman
184). Immediately after Stanley lets slip that his wife is pregnant, the
Blue Piano reminds us just how close the Kowalski household sits to the
“spirit of life” in the French Quarter (Williams 491). Yet Eunice’s off-
hand remark in Spanish hints at another notch in the pecking order. As it
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turns out, there is more to 632 Elysian Fields than a disturbing glimpse
of urban poverty.
New Orleans in A Streetcar Named Desire is not just a city paralyzed by
race (though it is that, too); it is a dynamic place made up of a far-flung
cast of immigrants, all seeking a chance at a new life. Richard Campanella
writes that the number of immigrants in the inner city increased signifi-
cantly with improvements in public transportation.

As streetcar networks were installed, gentry departed the inner city

and resettled in what had previously been the inconvenient semirural
periphery . . . The exodus of the wealthy from the inner city, which
began as early as the 1830s–1850s but was mostly a postbellum trend,
opened up hundreds of spacious town houses in the inner city as
potential tenement housing for incoming immigrants. . . . The immi-
grant belt ran loosely from the lower French Quarter (Little Palermo)
and Faubourg Marigny (Little Saxony), through Faubourg Tremé
and the Third Ward (Chinatown), around Dryades Street (the Jewish
neighborhood), and toward the riverfront in what is now called the
Irish Channel. (708–709)

The neighborhood surrounding the Kowalski home captures a cross-sec-

tion of immigrant settlement. Given how Stanley’s ancestry raises
questions about identity and otherness, his view of himself can best be
gauged in his social life among friends and neighbors.
Drafts of the masterpiece-in-progress were titled “The Poker Night,” a
caption that Williams clipped instead to the scene where Stanley and his
friends gather to drink and gamble. Blanche and Stella begin the evening
offstage, eating at Galatoire’s and buying a paper lantern at “a Chinese
shop on Bourbon” (Williams 499). In the meantime, Stanley, Pablo,
Steve, and Mitch play a game of poker. The card players “wear colored
shirts, solid blues, a purple, a red-and-white check, a light green.” Their
clothing highlights the ethnic diversity among the men huddled inside
the kitchen. In front of them are “slices of watermelon on the table, whis-
key bottles and glasses” (492). The liquor bottles anticipate the brutal act
of violence that concludes the scene. A watermelon, though, conjures
stereotypes not of Polish or Latino immigrants but of African Americans.
“The Poker Night” recontextualizes the image as a cue that race is always
bubbling beneath the surface of everyday life.
Mitch sits out the first hand and pours Stanley a shot. As Stanley deals
the cards, Pablo suggests ordering takeout, “Why don’t somebody go
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 to the Chinaman’s and bring back a load of chop suey?” (493). Pablo’s
craving for Chinese food—but not the hot tamales sold on the corner—
unmoors otherness from an identity based purely on blood and birth-
right. More compelling than that, Mitch lands at the bottom of the social
scale, despite his untarnished racial credentials. Stanley needles his
coworker for worrying about his mother, “Aw, for the sake of Jesus, go
home, then! . . . Hurry back and we’ll fix you a sugar-tit” (493).4 Perhaps
a lurking sense of inferiority drives Stanley to ridicule others in front of
his landlord, Steve, who wins the first hand, “spade flush.” While dealing
the next hand, Steve tells a joke.

This ole nigger is out in back of his house sittin’ down th’owing corn
to the chickens when all at once he hears a loud cackle and this young
hen comes lickety split around the side of the house with the rooster
right behind her and gaining on her fast . . . But when the rooster
catches sight of the nigger th’owing the corn he puts on the brakes
and lets the hen get away and starts pecking corn. And the old nigger
says, ‘Lord God, I hopes I never gits that hongry!’ (493–494)

Blanche and Stella stop in from Bourbon Street, interrupting the game
momentarily, but what on the surface appears to be banter among friends
produces a startling dramatic effect. The joke rests on two assumptions.
The first presupposes black men have more sexual drive than animals
like the rooster. The second takes for granted that none of the men are
surprised or offended by the word nigger.5
“The Poker Night” renders precisely the system that reclassified immi-
grants along lines of color. Jim Crow gained a foothold in New Orleans
slightly later than other parts of the South. Once segregation finally did
take hold, it “symbolized the ascendance of the new order and acceler-
ated the submergence of ethnicity—both black and white—as a stark
racial dualism held uncontested sway” (Hirsch and Logsdon 190). As
racial identity replaced ethnic variation, identifying with those who had
all the advantages became central to assimilation:

For more than a half-century, an uncompromising philosophy had

placed all perceived or acknowledged African-Americans behind a
racial barrier that obscured previous distinctions based on shadings
of color, class, or culture. Such divisions among New Orleans’ non-
whites certainly did not disappear, but they were subordinated to an
overarching system of discrimination that paid them no heed. The

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 fundamental distinction between black and white had always served
as a powerful assimilative agent incorporating European immigrants
into the latter category, and the rise of segregation did not protect that
identity (it had earlier been openly breached and would continue to
be surreptitiously so) as much as it completed the process of forging a
black one. (Hirsch 263)

Caught between black and white worlds, Stanley and Pablo straddle both
sides of the color line yet belong to neither. The racist joke turns an ordi-
nary situation into a crucial moment in the story that forces both men to
pick a side—though, ultimately, marking all the players white.
In the meantime, “The Poker Night” continues to shake up our ex-
pectations of what it means to live in New Orleans. When the poker
game resumes, the two sisters move to the bedroom where Blanche
flips on the radio. “Turn it off!” Stanley shouts from the kitchen. But
then Pablo says, “that’s good, leave it on!” to which Steve adds, “Sounds
like Xavier Cugat!” (Williams 497). A Spanish-born Cuban, Cugat made
rumba widely popular with North American audiences. Steve and Pablo’s
mutual appreciation for Latin music debunks tidy definitions of other-
ness. Stanley, on the other hand, affirms his freshly minted whiteness
by storming through the curtain and tossing the radio out the window.
The dispute ends with Stanley striking his pregnant wife, not the target
of his anger, Blanche. Partway through A Small Place Jamaica Kincaid ad-
vises you, the tourist, not to let “that slightly funny feeling you have from
time to time about exploitation, oppression, domination develop into a
full-fledged unease, discomfort; you could ruin your holiday” (Kincaid
10). As a final touch to the shocking display of domestic abuse, the Blue
Piano underscores what dwells not too far off from the French Quarter.
In all likelihood, the audience at the 1947 premier of A Streetcar Named
Desire responded in much the same way as Blanche: “I’m not used to
such . . . violence!” (503).
And yet Williams does not simply replace the South’s difficult history
of race relations with a superficial layer of ethnic diversity. If “The Poker
Night” pegs Stanley as provisionally white, Blanche denies him this sta-
tus in the very next scene. She calls him “sub-human” and “ape-like”
(510), rhetoric that, as both Crandell and Brewer point out, is code for
blackness. But as the previous scene makes plain, Williams’s deft han-
dling of race involves more than just Blanche. Another pivotal confron-
tation takes place during her dismal birthday supper. Mitch is a no-show

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 after Stanley’s snooping confirmed suspicions about his sister-in-law’s
checkered past. To lighten the mood, Blanche shares an anecdote about
a foul-mouthed parrot that “knew more vulgar expressions than Mr.
Kowalski” (536). The parrot story reverses the effect of the rooster joke,
but Stanley pays no attention until Stella chides him for being aloof:
“Mr. Kowalski is too busy making a pig of himself to think of anything
else! . . . Your face and your fingers are disgustingly greasy. Go and wash
up and then help me clear the table.” He answers by flinging his plate
across the room:

That’s how I’ll clear the table . . . Don’t ever talk that way to me! ‘Pig,–
Polack–disgusting–vulgar–greasy!’–them kinds of words have been
on your tongue and your sister’s too much around here! What do
you two think you are? A pair of queens? Remember what Huey Long
said—‘Every man is a King!’ And I am the king around here, so don’t
you forget it! (he hurls a cup and saucer to the floor) My place is cleared!
You want me to clear your places?” (537)

The rhetoric of difference sets the terms for fulfilling the country’s prom-
ise to the huddled masses. Unwilling to sacrifice his self-respect, Stanley
lashes out again, “I am not a Polack. People from Poland are Poles, not
Polacks. But what I am is one hundred percent American, born and
raised in the greatest country on earth and proud as hell of it, so don’t
ever call me a Polack” (539). Not only does he shore up his white status,
here we see racial and national identity all of a sudden converge; that
is, to be American is to assimilate race as an ideology.6 And as much as
Stanley insists on justifying his Americanness, his fiery response belies
the marginal position he occupies in relation to the privileges conferred
on those at the center. No wonder Williams qualifies his description of
New Orleans as a “relatively warm and easy intermingling of races in the
old part of town” (469).
At this point, A Streetcar Named Desire becomes an even more com-
plicated drama about southern self-fashioning. Stanley quotes former
Louisiana governor Huey Long and his “Share the Wealth” program.
Marcia Gaudet, like Stanley, views Long as a kind of blue-collar folk hero:

Important to the ‘the folk’ were free school books and paved roads.
How [Long] got them was not of primary importance. Somewhat
like Robin Hood and other trickster heroes, oral tradition reflects

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 admiration for one perceived as taking from the rich to give to the
poor in ways they could understand, ways that made a real difference
in their lives—in education, public works, health care, and pensions
for the elderly. (Gaudet 232)

Right before the couple rushes to the hospital, Stanley reminds Stella of
his humble beginnings, “When we first met, me and you, you thought
I was common. How right you was, baby. I was common as dirt. You
showed me the snapshot of the place with the columns. I pulled you
down off them columns” (Williams 540). Although he identifies with
folk values, Stanley cannot simply be pigeonholed as a working-class
southerner. Peacock finds that “immigrants appear to identify first with
family and friends and then enlarge their identities to include both the
ethnic and the native community . . . [whereas] regional identity, if they
have one, is grounded in these local groupings and cut through with
national and global networks less evident among natives but not neces-
sarily absent” (94). Huey Long, in this case, is revered as a folk hero by
a later-generation immigrant whose ancestors were transplants. In the
closing moments, moreover, Stanley patches things up with Stella and
starts a new life as a father. The birth of Stanley and Stella’s son pushes
the multigenerational saga forward, continuing with the next chapter
in a story arc that begins halfway around the world and keeps moving
ahead in the South.
More often than not, the DuBois family hijacks the narrative for think-
ing about southern identity in Williams. Thomas Adler, for instance,
sums up “The Myth of the South” for us in his survey of American drama:

So the South in Williams, as in Faulkner, is home to the venal despoil-

ers of the land, its people, and its heritage. It continues to house a
deep-seated, unresolved sense of guilt over the region’s original sin
of slavery; and, if it no longer reels under the economic dislocation
of Reconstruction, it has not yet totally escaped its impress. It con-
tinues, as well, to promulgate a (mis)definition of women according
to the Cavalier myth, which perpetuates a double standard and an
idealization of womanhood that leads to victimization and depen-
dency. (133)

All this, despite the fact that Williams, time and time again, returned to
the immigrant figure during what was arguably the most fruitful phase of

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 his career. A Streetcar Named Desire, Summer and Smoke, The Rose Tattoo,
Baby Doll, and Orpheus Descending offer a far more diverse and complex
picture than the legacy of aristocratic decline and economic stagnation
Adler describes. A “global perspective,” Peacock explains, “can emanci-
pate at various levels, not only mentally, the way one thinks and views
the world, but also in . . . one’s sense of place” (7). Williams amasses
an oeuvre that urges the audience to view the South through the widest
possible lens, to glimpse the whole region as connected to many other
places, places both near and far. From this distance, the U.S. South in
Williams sits at the crossroads of the world.

NOT E S
1 Hearn’s book of creole recipes remains in print and is still considered an
authority on the subject.
2 In their introduction to Creole New Orleans: Race and Americanization, Arnold
Hirsch and Joseph Logsdon cite immigration as one factor that “helped both
to shape New Orleans into one of the world’s leading commercial centers and,
at the same time, keep it a bizarre and cosmopolitan outpost in the American
South” (96). In “Creoles and Americans” from the same collection, Joseph
Tregle submits that around the same time, “no longer could any part of the city
be legitimately called ethnically American” (164).
3 Inspiration for the character comes from the author’s personal life rather than
any factual knowledge of Polish immigration. Williams, according to biogra-
pher Lyle Leverich, befriended a “Polish fellow” named Stanley Kowalski while
working in a St. Louis shoe factory (130).
4 It is intriguing to think that Stanley picked up the phrase “For the sake of Jesus”
from a family member. Possibly the solecism is a mistranslation leftover from
steerage. If so, his assimilation to some degree remains incomplete.
5 Walter White, secretary of the NAACP, criticized this particular scene for its
gratuitous use of the word “nigger.” After Williams agreed to substitute the
word “farmer” in the dialogue, Elia Kazan restored the original text. Williams’s
agent, Audrey Wood, received daily telephone complaints until he finally set-
tled on the word “peckerwood” (Devlin and Tischler 152).
6 Crandell uses Toni Morrison’s Playing the Dark to tease out images of blackness,
but she writes more specifically about immigrants in What Moves at the Margin,
where she says, “America always means buying into the notion of American
blacks as the real aliens. Whatever the ethnicity or nationality of the immi-
grant, his nemesis is understood to be African American” (Morrison 146).

WO R K S C I T E D
Adler, Thomas P. American Drama, 1940–1960: A Critical History. New York:
Twayne Publishers, 1994.

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Brewer, Mary F. Staging Whiteness. Middletown: Wesleyan UP, 2005.
Campanella, Richard. “An Ethnic Geography of New Orleans.” Journal of American
History 94.3 (2007): 704–715.
Crandell, George. “Misrepresentation and Miscegenation: Reading the
Racialized Discourse of Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire.”
Modern Drama 40 (1997): 338–346.
D’Emilio, John and Estelle B. Freedman. Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality
in America. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1988.
Delfino, Susanna, and Michele Gillespie. “Introduction.” Global Perspectives
on Industrial Transformation in the American South. Ed. Susanna Delfino and
Michele Gillespie. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 2005. 1–13.
Devlin, Albert J., and Nancy M. Tischler, eds. The Selected Letters of Tennessee
Williams, Volume II: 1945–1957. New York: New Directions, 2004.
Gaudet, Marcia. “The Kingfish as Trickster Hero: Huey Long in Louisiana
Culture.” Louisiana Culture from the Colonial Era to Katrina. Ed. John Lowe.
Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2008. 231–244.
Hirsch, Arnold R. “Simply a Matter of Black and White: The Transformation of
Race and Politics in Twentieth-Century New Orleans.” Creole New Orleans:
Race and Americanization. Ed. Arnold R. Hirsch and Joseph Logsdon. Baton
Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1992. 262–230.
Hirsch, Arnold R., and Joseph Logsdon. “Introduction.” Creole New Orleans: Race
and Americanization. Ed. Arnold R. Hirsch and Joseph Logsdon. Baton Rouge:
Louisiana State UP, 1992. 3–11 and 189–200.
Kincaid, Jamaica. A Small Place. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1988.
Leverich, Lyle. Tom: The Unknown Tennessee Williams. New York: Crown
Publishers, 1995.
Morrison, Toni. What Moves at the Margin. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2008.
Peacock, James. Grounded Globalism: How the U.S. South Embraces the World.
Athens: U of Georgia P, 2007.
Savran, David. Communists, Cowboys, and Queers: The Politics of Masculinity in the
Work of Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P,
1992.
Starr, S. Frederick. “Introduction.” Inventing New Orleans: Writings of Lafcadio
Hearn. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2001. xi–xxvii.
Sublette, Ned. The World that Made New Orleans: From Spanish Silver to Congo
Square. Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 2008.
Tregle, Jr., Joseph G. “Creoles and Americans.” Creole New Orleans: Race and
Americanization. Ed. Arnold R. Hirsch and Joseph Logsdon. Baton Rouge:
Louisiana State UP, 1991. 131–185.
Williams, Tennessee. A Streetcar Named Desire. Plays: 1937–1955. New York:
Library of America, 2000. 467–564.
Woodward, Jr., Ralph Lee. Central America: A Nation Divided. New York: Oxford
UP, 1985.

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