Context

• TENESSEE WILLIAMS (General)


  Thomas Lanier Williams, born in 1911 Mississippi

  Abusive and bullying father, who was a hard-drinking travelling salesman called Cornelius Coffin Williams

  Highly strung + snobbish mother, Edwina, daughter of a clergyman

  Family moved a lot during his childhood- restless and unsettled throughout his adult life

  Studied journalism at the University of Missouri- his friends there nicknamed him 'Tennessee' because of his Southern birth

  Nervous breakdown after three years of working as a clerk at the shoe factory where his father worked (forced to drop out of college for the job)
• TENESSEE WILLIAMS (Rose)


  Sister, Rose, was diagnosed with dementia praecox (schizophrenia) when she was 18 + received a pre-frontal lobotomy before being consigned to a mental institution until her death in 1996

  Margaret Bradham Thornton says that "the shadow of what happened to Rose stayed with him; she would be the model for more than fifteen characters, and Williams would give her name to many others"

  Williams referred to Rose's decline into madness by saying, "We have had no deaths in our family but slowly by degrees something was happening much uglier and more terrible than death"

  Traumatised with guilt at what he saw as his failure to protect Rose
• TENESSEE WILLIAMS (Career)


  Graduated from the University of Iowa in 1938 at the age of 27

  Bohemian and peripatetic existence

  Overnight theatrical sensation in 1944 because of 'The Glass Menagerie'

  'A Streetcar Named Desire' opened three years later

  Major plays included 'The Rose Tattoo' (1951), 'Cat on a Hot Tin Roof' (1955), and 'Sweet Bird of Youth' (1959)

  Margaret Bradham Thornton says, "this prodigious output took its toll on Williams, and while his plays were winning awards and being made into films... Williams was losing his way"
• TENESSEE WILLIAMS (Decline)


  Private life bordering on the chaotic and disastrous

  Frequent bouts of clinical depression

  Relationship with secretary Frank Merlo when homosexuality was still considered immoral and shocking by mainstream society- Merlo died in '63 and Williams spun out of control

  Critical reputation went into sharp decline- of his later work, only 'The Night of the Iguana' (1961) was well-received

  His brother Dakin had him temporarily committed to a psychiatric hospital in 1969 due to his alcoholism and drug addiction- lonely death in a New York hotel room in 1983

  "I still find it somehow easier to 'level with' crowds of strangers in the hushed twilight of orchestra and balcony sections of theatres than with individuals across a table from me. Their being strangers somehow makes them more familiar and more approachable, easier to talk to"- Williams, 1976
• THE AMERICAN CENTURY AND THE AMERICAN DREAM

  Ideologies fully rooted in the cultural landscape of the post-war era

  USA representing a Good Samaritan helping other countries to achieve democracy, progress and economic security- "all of us are called, each to his own measure of capacity, and each in the widest horizon of his vision, to create the first great American Century" (Henry Luce)

  Various different groups of immigrants who came to the US in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries united to create a cohesive national ethos through the American Dream- "We hold these Truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal, that they are endowed, by their Creator, with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness" (Declaration of Independence)
• THE AMERICAN CENTURY AND THE AMERICAN DREAM

  (Immigrants + the American Dream)

  "A dream of being able to grow to fullest development as a man and woman, unhampered by the barriers which had slowly been erected in the older civilizations, unrepressed by social orders which had developed for the benefit of classes rather than for the simple human being of any and every class"

  'Melting pot' nation- welcoming immigrants of all races and religions to a new life of freedom and opportunity

  Immigrants often escaping from poverty, oppression and conflict- America a blank slate upon which they could create their vision of a land of freedom and opportunity

  Success becoming dependent on hard work and courage instead of birth or privilege

  "Give me your tired, your poor/Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free/The wretched refuse of your teeming shore/Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me/I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"- Emma Lazarus, inscribed on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty
• THE AMERICAN CENTURY AND THE AMERICAN DREAM (Death of the American Dream)

  Did it die, or was it an illusion to begin with?

  Writers questioning whether the mythic totem of popular culture actually made people unhappier, more competitive and more insecure

  Responsibility for personal success or failure falling squarely upon the individual- harder to blame one's lack of success on other people

  Essential theme of great tragic dramatists like Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller and Eugene O'Neill- questioning cultural values which the vast majority of their contemporaries held dear

  'The Great Gatsby' (Fitzgerald, 1925), 'Of Mice and Men' (Steinbeck, 1937), 'Death of a Salesman' (Miller, 1949)
• THE AMERICAN SOUTH AND NEW ORLEANS

  (The Antebellum South)

  Cultural melting pot- mix of Native Americans, European settlers and imported African slaves

  Southern 'Confederate States' (Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee etc.) fought in the American Civil War (1861-1865) to defend their rights to keep slaves- defeated by the Northern 'Union' States

  Industrialised North grew more politically and economically powerful than the agricultural South

  Abraham Lincoln assassinated by fanatical Southern actor John Wilkes Booth for abolishing slavery

  White southerners perpetuating the enduring nostalgic mythic representation of the South as a haven of peace, prosperity and chivalrous gallantry- built on the foundations of the misery of the black slaves (e.g. Belle Reve, 'Tara' in 'Gone with the Wind')

  Belle Reve is Blanche's object correlative for her identity as a Southern Belle
• THE AMERICAN SOUTH AND NEW ORLEANS

  (New Orleans)

  Multicultural and multilingual heritage- birthplace of jazz

  Spanish-style architecture, Mardi Gras parades, soul food, extreme poverty

  'The Big Easy'- hot and humid, surrounded by water on three sides so flooding's a constant threat

  After Hurricane Katrina in 2005, 80% of the city's 225,000 inhabitants had to be evacuated following a flood- feeling that the federal government would have acted more decisively if rich, white northerners had been affected as opposed to poor, mainly black southerners
• THE AMERICAN SOUTH AND NEW ORLEANS

  (Old South vs New South)

  Blanche embodies the values and culture of the Old South/Stanley represents the workers of the New South

  Stanley is go-getting, practical, down-to-earth and materialistic, while Blanche is fey and delusional

  Stanley is a second-generation immigrant industrial worker + war hero (appropriate that he lives in 'Elysian Fields')/Blanche is "a last dying relic...now adrift in our unfriendly day" according to Elia Kazan

  Stanley decides to destroy Blanche in order to destroy the threat she poses to his brave new world

  Stella's caught between the "beautiful dream" of the past, as embodied by Blanche and Belle Reve, and the brash and thrilling immediacy of her new life in New Orleans

  Stella's decision to stay with Stanley shows the shifting social power structures of the new America

  According to Smith-Howard and Heintzelman (2005), Stanley "is happy in the loud, harsh and dirty world of the Vieux Carre of New Orleans, whereas Blanche prefers finer accommodations, the bucolic setting of hundreds of acres of land and large white pillars on a grand veranda that provide lounging quarters out of the midday sun"
• GENDER ROLES

  World War II- women fill men's roles in the workplace, more freedom and financial independence

  'Streetcar' acts as a sharp critique of the way the institutions and attitudes of post-war America affected women's lives (so does rivalry between Maggie and Mae in 'Cat on a Hot Tin Roof')

  Williams' female characters psychologically trapped in the cultural pragmatics of the Old South- Blanche and Stella's dependence on men exposes attitudes to women during the transition from old world to new + even Eunice sees her male companion as her only means to achieve happiness

  Women dependent on men for both economic and psychological reasons

  Blanche in a submissive and dependent role- throwing herself on the mercy of Shep Huntleigh

  Doctor is gentlemanly to Blanche when he escorts her to the asylum
• INTERTEXTUALITY

  (Southern Gothic)


  Molly Haskell- "the attraction of the Lost Cause mythology- we were grander, purer in defeat than were those crass, winner-take-all Yankees with their greedy industrial culture"

  Williams overhauls and deconstructs the traditional stereotype of the demure Southern Belle as he unravels Blanche DuBois- tragicomic desperation of the Southern experience

  Williams once described Southern Gothic as allied with "an underlying dreadfulness in modern experience"

  Adopted 'Tennessee' as a nickname- acknowledgement of his conscious commitment to dramatizing the culture, values and conflicts of his native land

  Flannery O'Connor- "Anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic"

  Williams dramatizes with both humour and pathos the apparent inability of the genteel gracious gallantry of the mythic antique Old South to survive amid the brash consumerist confidence of booming post-war America

  Blanche + Stanley- binary opposites, future and past

  Blanche's collapse- apocalyptic meltdown of an entire semi-mythological culture
• INTERTEXTUALITY

  (Hart Crane (1899-1932))

  Epigraph to 'Streetcar' is the fifth stanza of Hart Crane's poem 'The Broken Tower'

  Williams admired and identified with Crane- both had difficult relationships with their parents, struggled with alcoholism and were homosexual in a time of intense social and cultural stigma attached to their sexuality

  Crane committed suicide at a young age- 'Broken Tower' was his last poem/last will and testament

  Gilbert Debusscher said- "among the few permanent possessions Williams took with him on his constant peregrinations were a copy of Hart Crane's collected poems and a framed photograph of the poet"

  Williams had the epigraph printed in the theatre programmes

  Poem shows love as a transitory illusion or gambler's 'desperate choice', strongly suggestive of Blanche's experiences of love in a 'broken world
• INTERTEXTUALITY

  (Romanticism)


  European cultural phenomenon encompassing literature, art, music, politics, philosophy, science and religion

  Radical change in which traditional social, religious, economic and political beliefs were challenged and reinterpreted- rebelled against age of Enlightenment

  Originality, imagination and freedom prioritised over reason, self-restraint and order

  Artists should seek the essential truth about life and mediate that truth through their own personal experiences

  Byronic hero- anti-Establishment outcast who hovers on the margins of mainstream society, questioning its values, conventions and ideas

  Lord Byron's wandering exile symbolic of the Romantic quest for freedom, mobility and space in a harsh and unsympathetic world

  Williams was an artistic and cultural outsider, 'a poet in a practical world, a homosexual in a heterosexual society' (Nancy Tischler)- misfit whose imagination and poetic spirit left him out of tune with the pragmatic mores of his contemporary society

  Williams regretted the loss of the South's traditional creed of elegance, beauty and gallantry- his characters are often romantic dreamers driven to use sex, alcohol and drugs as a means of compensating

  Lush, sometimes grandiose visions woven in with grimy reality of ordinary life- hallmark of Williams' writing

  Stanley vs Blanche= pragmatism vs romanticism
• INTERTEXTUALITY

  (Parallels with 'Cat on a Hot Tin Roof')

  Williams' ideas of history, family, religion, community + deconstructs traditional Southern stereotypes

  Maggie + Blanche are archetypal demure Southern Belles pining for chivalrous beaus viewed through distorted lenses (Brick + Shep Huntleigh)

  Family and inheritance- deeds to Belle Reve and Big Daddy's $10-million-dollar fortune to be left in his will

  Blanche and Brick prefer to live in the past, before the suicide of the homosexual characters they loved and lost (neither Alan nor Skipper appear onstage)

  Blanche and Brick use alcohol to numb their emotional pain and retreat to the bathroom in times of stress

  Both plays metaphorically link death and desire ("the stork and the grim reaper are running neck-and-neck" in 'Cat on a Hot Tin Roof')

  Blanche and Brick clash violently with Stanley and Big Daddy- romantic ruin is offset with brute strength and vigorous vulgarity
• PERFORMANCE CONTEXT

  (Vivien Leigh and Marlon Brando)

  Vivien Leigh- Hollywood celebrity who won an Academy Award for playing Southern belle Scarlett O'Hara in 'Gone with the Wind' (1939)- Scarlett is a beautiful, flirtatious and innocent belle who is the quintessential pattern of young womanhood among the aristocracy of the doomed Old South

  Parallels between Scarlett and Blanche- Blanche is "what would have become of Scarlett when she had aged and her beauty faded" says John Russel Taylor

  In casting Leigh as Blanche, Elia Kazan was intrigued by the idea of watching Scarlett O'Hara go mad

  Jessica Tandy portrayed Blanche on stage, but she wasn't a big enough name or box office draw to head a movie version

  Marlon Brando was a ground-breaking new talent, trained in the 'Method' school of acting and inspired by Stanislavski- actors tapping into the psychology of their characters in order to inhabit them more fully

  Fundamental contrast between Brando and Leigh as practitioners of their craft- Brando 'Method' and Leigh classically trained in Britain

  Vivien Leigh said "I had nine months in the theatre of Blanche DuBois. Now she's in command of me"- the role had "tipped me over into madness"

  Vivien Leigh, Kim Hunter and Karl Malden all won Oscars, but Brando did not
• PERFORMANCE CONTEXT

  (Changes from Stage to Screen)

  What was acceptable to an elite, sophisticated, minority Broadway theatre audience was unacceptable in a mainstream, conservative Hollywood film production context

  R. Barton Palmer- Hollywood "was committed to banishing from significant representation or often mere mention the themes Williams found so compelling and unavoidable"

  Films had to be "structured by the central principle of nineteenth-century melodrama: evil was to be punished and good rewarded, while any sympathy for wrongdoing should be eliminated by compensating moral value (such as the unlikely reform in the last five minutes of hitherto enthusiastic sinners")

  'Streetcar' was problematic because it dealt with alcoholism, promiscuity, rape, homosexuality and madness

  "Suffering for a less-than-virtuous female main character did not violate the then-acceptable notions of a poetically just ending"

  Cuts of several close-up shots which overtly emphasised sexual passion between Stanley and Stella

  Changes to the rape scene, making it implied rather than obvious

  Cuts to several references to Blanche's promiscuous past

  Stella leaves Stanley at the end of the film because Stanley had to be shown to be punished for the rape of Blanche
• CRITICAL APPROACHES

  (Feminist Criticism)

  Interested in how women are represented in literature, challenging dominant traditional attitudes and ideas about how female characters feel, act and think

  Challenges patriarchal assumptions- attitudes, ideologies and interpretations

  Unpicking gender stereotypes + exploring how such stereotypes can be undermined and resisted

  'Streetcar' includes feminist themes, like childbirth, homemaking, sex and work

  Blanche, Stella and Eunice are all vividly drawn, interestingly problematic and highly convincing

  Male-female relationships analysed and dissected in forensic detail

  'The Laugh of the Medusa' (1975) by Helene Cixous- talks about écriture feminine and the challenges women face to find a way of expressing female difference in texts- language is not neutral, but forces women writers to communicate in a 'male' voice

  Challenging assumptions about gender and exposing both the sexual stereotyping embodied in a text and the way in which such stereotypes might be subverted- describe and interpret women's experience as depicted in literature

  'Streetcar' has feminist sympathies- sexual double standards and misogyny of its time
• CRITICAL APPROACHES

  (Political Criticism)

  Literary texts are products of a particular set of socio-political circumstances from which they cannot be divorced- informed by a range of cultural preoccupations and anxieties

  Karl Marx (1818-83), founder of modern communism: "the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles"

  Arthur Miller recognised that Williams was engaged with the warp and weft of contemporary American society

  Blanche DuBois heavily politicised- representing waning social, political and economic authority of the Old South

  Cristopher Bigsby said Williams was a "profoundly conservative" writer: "What he wanted above all was for the individual to be left alone, insulated from the pressure of public event...even if his radicalism is better viewed as a celebration of the outcast or the deprived, a sympathy for those discarded by a society for which he anyway had little sympathy, his work reveals a consistent distrust of the wealthy and powerful, a suspicion of materialism"

  Arthur Miller defining what still attracts us to tragedies: "...the underlying fear of being displaced, the disaster inherent in being torn away from our chosen image of what or who we are in this world"

  Blanche and Stanley clashing over money shows increasing consumerist and materialistic nature of the American Dream- human relationships inevitably distorted by forces of capitalist social and political system (Marxist)

  Blanche's struggle is pathetic, not tragic, because she has no chance of winning the battle
• CRITICAL APPROACHES

  (Psychoanalytic Criticism)

  Literature like dreams- significance of the subconscious as a means of exploring the representation of character

  Theories of Sigmund Freud- exploring effects of dreams, fantasies, unconscious desires and aspects of sexuality

  Blanche's flashbacks and nightmares, linking of sex and death, overtly sexual nature of the imagery

  Two sexual traumas destroy Blanche's fragile hold on sanity (discovering Allan's homosexuality, and her rape by Stanley)- tries to repress memories of the past by taking refuge in art, music and literature, as well as lots of illicit and unauthorised sex

  Streetcar which "bangs through the Quarter, up one old narrow street and down another"- graphically blunt metaphor for the sexual act itself

  Phallic symbolism of the poker game ("one-eyed jacks are wild," "seven-card stud")

  Polarised streetcar destinations of Desire and Cemeteries- humans motivated by two conflicting desires, which are eros (creative, life-producing driving sexual passion and love) and thanatos (the death instinct, willing us towards calm, oblivion and death)
• CRITICAL APPROACHES

  (Queer Theory)

  "History of the oppression of gays, lesbians, and practitioners of sexualities other than those deemed normal by the dominant heterosexual group...and countercultures of gay and lesbian writing that existed in parallel fashion with the dominant homosexual culture"- Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan

  Debate about whether a person's sexuality is part of their essential self or socially constructed

  Questioning ways in which heterosexuality is presented as "normal" and focusing on "non-heteronormative" sexual behaviour

  As a gay man, Williams was forced to disguise his challenging ideas about licit and illicit sexuality by focalising them through a female heroine

  "Since Williams is the poet of the unauthorised, the unsanctioned, the outlawed, it seems logical that he should choose a form which more easily releases its pluralism of meanings"- Christopher Bigsby

  "If only because he came up at a time when homosexuality was absolutely unacknowledged in a public figure, Williams had to belong to a minority culture and understood in his bones what a brutal menace the majority could be if aroused against him...Certainly I never regarded him as the sealed-off aesthete he was thought to be. There is a radical politics of the soul as well as of the ballot box and the picket line. If he was not an activist it was not for the lack of a desire for justice, nor did he consider a theatre profoundly involved in society and politics...beyond his interest"- Arthur Miller on Tennessee Williams
• CRITICAL APPROACHES

  (Performance Criticism)

  How the form of dramatic texts is determined by their basis in theatrical practice- looks at the essential elements of drama such as words, movement, sound, costume, setting and staging

  Theatre is an essentially collaborative and ephemeral medium

  Felicia Hardison Londre said there is no doubt about "the centrality of A Streetcar Named Desire in his dramatic canon as well as in the American cultural consciousness"- "Whether or not A Streetcar Named Desire is Tennessee Williams' 'best' play or even his most performed play, it is probably the one most closely associated with the dramatist, and it is certainly the one that has elicited the most critical commentary"

  Academy-Award winning greats eager to work with Williams, strongly suggesting that his plays were seen to offer immense challenges and possibilities in performance terms"- symbiosis between Williams and major actors shows his significant impact on American cinema as well as American theatre