A Streetcar Named Desire

• Poor boy's sandwich


  • Food closely associated with New Orleans, believed to have originated from the Martin brothers of the 1920s, former streetcar drivers who supported drivers' strike by handing out these sandwiches
• New Orleans Athletic Club

  • Real venue in New Orleans, the second-oldest athletic organisation in the US, founded in 1872
• Huey Long

  Governor of Louisiana in 1928, then went on to become a U.S. Senator in 1932, championed the rights and living standards of the poor white population, put into action a wide program of road and bridge construction, widened state university facilities and created a state hospital, affording these measures through heavier inheritance and income taxes, largely maintained his power through intimidation
• Huey Long: '"Every Man is a King!"'
• Edgar Allen Poe

  • Poe's 1847 poem, "Ulalume", which details the narrator unwittingly returning to the grave of his lost love
• Arabian Nights


  • Series of Middle Eastern folk stories, first published in English in the early 18th century
• La Dame aux Camélias


  • 1848 play by Alexandre Dumas fils, details the tragic love between a courtesan and a middle-class man
• The disparity between Blanche's cultural allusions and those of any other character make evident the different beliefs and lifestyles she has from the residents of New Orleans
• Race and class


  • Inherent themes in A Streetcar Named Desire
  • Displayed through social and relationship dynamics
  • Demonstrative of larger cultural forces at play in 1940s America
• Blanche du Bois


  • Caricature-like embodiment of the fading south
  • Place of traditional values and huguenot heritage
  • Place papering over the cracks of moral corruption on which its basis was founded
• Belle Reve


  • Plantation where Stella and Blanche grew up
  • Demonstrates the romanticism of the South and the hiding of the ugly truths of the slave trade
• Blanche's personal transgressions of promiscuity

  Mirror the secretive truths behind a fading beautiful exterior
• Blanche's family's wealth and status were directly formed by monopolising off the oppression and racism of slavery
• Stanley Kowalski


  • Child of immigrants
  • Views himself as more American than those with a legacy
  • Representation of emerging new American values
  • Uneducated working class with equal opportunity to fulfil the American dream
• Stanley's lack of sophistication

  Warrants instant rejection of Blanche's ostentatious advances
• Blanche repeatedly refers to Stanley as a "polack" and a "pig", dehumanising him
• Blanche's reference to "casting her pearls before swine"


  Initiates a sudden switch in atmosphere and tone from relatively jovial to violent and dangerous
• Stanley's weakness is the apparent insecurity and defensiveness that he feels in relation to his cultural identity, and he copes through violently forcing Blanche into submission
• New Orleans


  • Geographically part of the 'Deep South' but had a very diverse population and accepting, open environment
  • Home of jazz music and relaxed in terms of etiquette or family history
  • Managed to keep its own way of life separate from the racism and discrimination in neighboring Southern states
• After the Civil War, the South became very separated from the rest of America and formed its own identity, viewed as a place of extreme racism and poverty
• Southern Belle


  A stock character created in the period before the Civil War, depicting a young, beautiful woman from the upper socio-economic class of the Deep South who was meant to marry a rich, respectable young man, raise a family, and practice southern hospitality with a flirtatious yet chaste demeanor
• The character of Blanche best captures the qualities of the classic Southern belle archetype
• Tennessee Williams


  • Had a strained relationship with his parents and was very close to his sister Rose, who suffered from mental illness
  • Was homosexual in a time when it was widely unaccepted and seen as a mental illness
  • Negative experiences throughout his life greatly influenced his plays and the themes within them, such as alcoholism and mental illness in A Streetcar Named Desire
• The Daily Picayune, New Orleans (1851): '"Everyone in this good city enjoys the full right to pursue his own inclinations in all reasonable and unreasonable ways."'
• Henry Bradshaw Fearon, Sketches of America (1919): '"To all men whose desire only is to be rich and live a short life, but a merry one, I have no hesitation in recommending New Orleans."'
• Lura Robinson: It's An Old New Orleans Custom (1948): '"Through pestilence, hurricanes, and conflagrations, the people continued to sing. They sand through the long oppressive years of conquering the swampland and fortifying the town against the ever threatening Mississippi. They are singing today. An irrepressible joie de vivre maintains the unbroken thread of music through the air."'
• Plastic Theatre


  • Use all elements of theatre to convey a character's perception of the world, albeit not naturalistic but to gain a closer approach to the truth
• Setting, music, sound and visual effects


  • Must combine to enhance the action, theme, characters and language
• Set in the real world but something fake


  Psychological, shadows, gunshot
• Argues it is how Blanche sees the world
• Inner reality a closer approach to the truth
• The Poker Night


  • Expressionism
  • Van Gogh – distortion and expressionism
  • Light green – perhaps Mitch?
  • Coloured shirts: blue, purple, red and white check
  • Watermelon – 'manly' fruit, bright colours
• Music


  • Polka tune
  • The Polka tune is reminiscent of circus, clowns and madness
• When the Polka appears

  1. Scene 1 – "You were married once, weren't you" – polka = faint

  2. Scene 6 – "A few moments later – a shot!" – polka stops abruptly

  3. Scene 11 – "That man isn't Shep Huntleigh" – polka = distant – filtered into weird distortion, accompanied by the cries and noises of the jungle
• Parrot story


  • Light (day & night)
  • Isolation – bird in a cage
  • Parrot who swears à Stanley
  • Old maid à Blanche
  • Parrot represents her determination to delude herself – he knows the day couldn't have ended
• 'Paper Moon' by Ella Fitzgerald


  • Paper moon – circles/endless continuum
  • Paper – thin
  • Cardboard/canvas – artificiality/variation of paper
  • It wouldn't be make believe if you believed in me – If people believed in her then it would be a lie
  • Muslin – white
  • Penny arcade – Circus/polka (Barnum and Bailey)
  • Phony – fake
  • Canvas – can be painted – Scene 1 setting
  • Without your love it's a melody played in a penny arcade – gambling – corruption
• Blanche has a paper thin fantasy
• "I'll tell you what I want. Magic! Yes, yes, magic! I try to give that to people. I misrepresent things to them. I don't tell the truth. I tell what ought to be truth. And if that is sinful, then let me be damned for it – Don't turn the light on!": 'Blanche'
• Blanche refuses to accept the hand fate has dealt her


  As she explains to Mitch in scene 9
• Stanley


  • An example of brutal physicality
  • He hates Blanche's fakery and does everything he can to unravel them including the rape at the end of the play