UnB - IL - LET - Alunx mat. 14/0141235 - 2019/0 - profa.

Leide Rozane - A Streetcar

Named Desire - Tennessee Williams - an essay by Gabriela Saraiva

A Streetcar Named Desire is a 1947 play written by American playwright Tennessee

Williams that received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1948. The drama A Streetcar
Named Desire is often regarded as among the finest plays of the 20th century, and is
considered by many to be Williams' greatest work.
Thomas Lanier "Tennessee" Williams III (March 26, 1911 – February 25, 1983) was
an American play-writter. He studied at University of Missouri from 1929 to 1931. After
some short relationships with women, at his late twenties, he discovered his
homossexuality, and had long-term relationships with men since then. After years of
obscurity, at age 33 he became suddenly famous with the success of The Glass
Menagerie (1944) in New York City. It was the first of a string of successes, including A
Streetcar Named Desire (1947), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), and Sweet Bird of Youth
(1959). His drama A Streetcar Named Desire is often numbered on short lists of the
finest American plays of the 20th century alongside Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's
Journey into Night and Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman.
Much of Williams' most acclaimed work has been adapted for the cinema. He also
wrote short stories, poetry, essays and a volume of memoirs. In 1979, four years before
his death, Williams was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame.
The play A Streetcar Named Desire is mainly about conflicts between misogyny,
elitism, xenophobia, U.S.A’s culture and the rise of feminism in the 30’s and 40’s.
There are three main characters: Stanley Kowalski, his wife Stella DuBois Kowalski
and her sister Blanche DuBois. The story passes in a approximately 40’s New Orleans.
Blanche and Stella are from Laurel, Mississippi.
Blanche appears suddenly in New Orleans, by the sound of Jazz played by the black
musicians from the neighbourhood. She says that she was fired of the school where she
had teached English because of her nerves, what is shown in a first sight to be a lie, but
it’s becoming true as long people revealing (gossip) her private life, about her furtive
relationships, even with a 17 old year student, what caused her expulsion. She tries to
have a relationship with a Stanley’s colleague, Mitch, but people are poisoned by
Stanley’s misogyny, and Mitch tries to rape her, and at the end of the play Stanley do it.
Stanley every week plays poker with his car-mechanic coworkers. Stanley is the
archetype of the “alpha-men”, drinks a lot and he is abusive to his wife Stella, he strikes
her and flirts with her sister, Blanche, who seems to only be his friend. Blanche
sometimes offends him and even acts xenophobic calling him “ape, Pollack”, and Stella
calls him “pig” at the table when the three are eating, and he yells something
aggressive, but pertinent to critic even the social growth that came first only for men,
world culture’s misogyny: “Who do you two think you are? A pair of Queens? / I am
King, every man is King, And I’m the man in this house!”. Stanley is “brute” and
humiliates Blanche to have such things like a diamond crown, a fox fur coat, pearls etc.
and for the way she talks, acts, walks, very “feminin” - for being a woman, but this hate
shows up to be a desire - what brings him to one more violence against women, to rape
Blanche, what is very common in a rape culture society, that hates and desire (like a
thing) women at the same time.
Stella is the archetype of the “good-wife”, the “correct woman” - suffers, is beaten by
her husband, but stays because of desire /( in their vision, love,) and then because of
they’re going to have a son. She is the “perfect wife”, the saint woman, the good-sister.
Blanche, meanwhile, is the archetype of an ‘incredible woman’ (remembering she is
white - but even though, she is more oppressed than both black or white man). She is
soft, tender, sings a lot, uses fancy and delicate clothes, she became a widow very early
and was seen by her family like very romantic and sweet. But in the other side, society
don’t accept kindness in woman with their freedom - doing same things man do, only
living their lives, like making sex before marriage, laughing, - and in the end, Blanche
becomes psychotic because of the violence she suffered (like Pecola, the main
character in The Bluest Eye, written by afro-north-american woman Toni Morrison), and
go to a mental institution.
This situation where historically a lot of woman is put - the stereotype of “crazy, mad”,
suffering the same prejudice that mad people suffer, becoming “crazy” or not, maybe
author William was inspired by the fact that his sister, his all-life friend, Rose. She
became schizophrenic very young and lobotomized in 1949, and Williams himself fight
all his life with depression and alcoholism, but also criticizing misogyny because of his
homossexuality - and sometimes his boyfriends left him to marry some woman, or
betrayad a lot with other man, and the experience of couldn’t showing who he really was
because of society.
The play was written during the growth of feminism, and somehow, to the author
himself, a way to speak about gay rights, between the lines, of showing that violence
and hate between men and women. Tennesse Williams in this his most famous work
denounces domestic violence against women like few literature works done before.