context

• sexuality

  1970s onwards - more liberal views enabled

  1950s - disregarding of homosexuality
• nuclear family

  two parents - two children = perfect family - desired in the 1950s

  Maggie's repulsion and jealousy - Williams could explore himself in Maggie as he couldn't naturally have children due to his homosexuality

  counter culture - uses Brick and Maggie to explore that you don't have to be in a nuclear family
• McCarthyism

  McCarthy paranoid that soviets (communists) would gain supporters and have spies in America - he would interrogate people he thought were likely to do things like that - caused a lot of fear at the time - could link to fear of emotional vulnerability
• Great Depression


  father gave up job to work in show factory - moved from agricultural area to industrial
• taboo topics

  1950s America had so much stigma around certain topics that are seen as normal in contemporary society
• women

  1950s women didn't have equality - women were heavily sexualised and men only see women as things to have babies with
• masculinity

  men considered more superior and more powerful
• southern gothic

  typically includes supernatural elements, mental disease and the grotesque - some deals with disturbed personalities

  known for damaged and delusional characters (heroines)

  often brings the stock characters of melodrama (dramatic form - doesn't observe laws of cause and effect)

  plantation architecture (columns and imposing galleries)
• death of the old south

  next generation not caring about traditional values of the old south/American dream

  Big Daddy took over plantation from Peter Ochello and Jack Straw - he has no good inheritor

  Gooper - lawyer - represents growth of capitalism - passed to him he would likely sell it

  Brick - represents social birth of teenager - would struggle to keep the plantation together (alcohol addiction)