A Streetcar Named Desire (New Directions Paperbook)

by Tennessee Williams

Book Overview

It is a very short list of 20th-century American plays that continue to have the same power and impact as when they first appeared--57 years after its Broadway premiere, Tennessee Williams' A... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0811216020
• Release Date: September 2004
• Publisher: New Directions
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 0.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.0" x 0.6" x 5.2"

Customer Reviews

Desire

The fact that a life can be ruined by a series of unfortunate events becomes realistic, as Blanche becomes a victim. At first, I despised her because of her promiscuity, but afterwards I noticed that her actions were rooted from her inescapable past. During the 1940's and after the World War II, many people were in desperation trying to find jobs and create a better life. However, as a result of this mindset, some did not succeed and ended up living in a life of disaster. Such calamity resulted in not only financial misfortune, but also social and mental failure. Everyone seemed to scramble to quickly find a great life, but little did they know, the truth of the reality was that not everyone could succeed at the same time. As a result, many hoped for too much, plunging in a world of delusion. Avoiding reality, several other were just assuming fortunes would find them, creating self-fulfilling prophecies. In A Streetcar Named Desire, Tennessee Williams wants to depict exactly that tragedy resulted from constant escapades to fantasy by employing Blanche as the typical woman who just lost her grip on reality. Blanche has lost control ever since she found out that her husband was homosexual. Unable to cope with that reality, she just drifted onto another world. She refused to believe that fact and continued to fulfill her desires elsewhere. Everywhere she went, she looked out for ways to satisfy her sexual pleasures. In one instance, she had an affair with a student, as a schoolteacher. Such activity was frowned upon by society, but she did not mind, because she was looking for a way out. After moving to her sister Stella's house, she quickly spots a male named Mitch. In hopes of finding her knight in shining armor, she tried to woo him into getting married. However, Stanley quickly disclosed all Blanche's dirty, stained history in order to stop Blanche and Mitch from going any further. Afterwards, Stanley decides to rape her, and even then, Blanche seems to be lost in world of fantasy. She is unable to stay compose and cope with reality. Everybody seems to think she is crazy, including her sister Stella. At the end of the play, she admits to the doctor she is too gullible and trusting of everyone, assuming everyone would make her life better, creating a false reality that would only make matters worse, revealing the notion that the escape to fantasy would only ruin one's life. Tennessee Williams argues that fantasy is only a false depiction of the world in its most rudimentary image, which causes one to lose control of the complications of reality, inevitably resulting in a disaster. Despite the mature content, this book should be read, because it exposes an intriguing take on life.

An eternal tragedy in our modern world

Tennessee Williams probably signed there his best play, at least the one that is best-known. It is entirely centered on a woman who flees from Mississippi to New Orleans to live, for a while, with her married sister. The two sisters were born in the Southern aristocracy that got bankrupt by not being able, or even refusing, to get into the new flow of time. One went away and married a working class immigrant who is in many ways uncultured and rough, even violent at times. But desire is stronger than that violence and love survives a row from time to time, provided truthfulness and some sensual sincerity exist. But that is only the secondary theme to which Blanche, the other sister, is confronted and this brings back her real drama that is burried in her memory. She married very young. Her husband was also very young and a poet. But she discovered that he also was gay and she could not accept it due to her southern aristocratic principles. He was an abomination and she told him so one night and he went out and killed himself. She never overcame her guilt and she delved into a more and more dissolute life with any man that could come along, till she went back to a substitute of her dead husband, a 17 year old boy. The family protested and she was expelled from the school system (she was a teacher) and from the city. Confronted to the life of her sister and husband, she regresses into southern sophistication. She comes across a man, Mitch, who could and even would like to marry her. But her sister's husband, wanting to get rid of her, exposes her lies about her past to his friend Mitch and his wife. He destroys the dream and Blanche sinks into some psychotic nightmare that becomes a complete breakdown when her brother in law, on the very night when his son was born, rapes her. The end is a lesson about the savage and wild world in which we live and in which life must go on, or, as actors say, the show must go on. Her sister has to come to terms with this sad event, accept it or rather negate it not to be broken up by the event, and sister and husband have to get rid of Blanche. Only one solution : to have her institutionalized. The play is an extremely strong exposure of that simple fact that one has to follow the trend and change along with the world, no matter how hard it may be to adapt, to survive and remain balanced and sane in an insane and completely incomprehensible world. It also exposes that one is in a way one's own victim when one is not able to accept the world the way it is and imposes rules from the past onto it. This is probably the worst crime because it leads other people into suffering or even death, and you into guilt. So what is the desire that is at stake on such a play ? Sexual desire ? Maybe. Sentimental desire ? Maybe. But first of all the desire to survive by paying the price you have to pay for it. It thus becomes the exposure of a society in which feelings, sentiments, sexual impulses are nothing but secondary emotions an

A Piece of America

Tennessee Williams' Pulitzer Prize winning masterpiece has been the source of controversy since it was written five decades ago. It is the story of the fallen Southern belle Blance Dubois, whose desperate illusions of grandeur are rent to shreds by her earthy and realistic brother-in-law, Stanley Kowalski. Touching on issues of prejudice, sexual codependence, mental breakdown, and rape, A Streetcar Named Desire is at times disturbing in its brutal honesty. Readings of this sultry play have found it to be anything from a critique of the conflict between the North and South in post Civil War America, to a subtle commentary on the struggles of Williams' life as a homosexual. The image of Stanley bellowing drunkenly to his wife Stella, as well as lines such as Blanche telling how she has "always depended on the kindness of strangers" have become so much a part of the American consciousness that they are recognizable even to those who are unfamiliar with Williams' work itself.

A Humble Literary Criticism of A Streetcar Named Desire

Tennessee Williams utilizes sounds and music throughout A Streetcar Named Desire to change the mood, to foreshadow the future events, and to reveal the inner workings of the character's minds. The use of music, especially the use of polka music, dictates the mood of the play. The rushed, pounding polka inspires a sense of insanity in the reader, and even more so from a person watching the play. The reader can tell that Blanche is slowly going insane just because of the powerful polka music. The music even shows what could have been, such as when, in the beginning of scene nine, Mitch saves Blanche from the tortuous polka. This symbolizes that Mitch could have saved Blanche from her ultimate insanity. The other major music in the book is the "Blue Piano." This music is often in the background when Stanley and Stella are acting like they are in love. This music almost seems to entice the two lovers into an even deeper state of loving each other. In the first scene, the "Blue piano" plays, and the married couple are flirting and having a good time with each other. This musical symbol is very powerful and important, enough so to be the subject of the final stage direction in the play. The play's "happily ever after" ending is characterized by "the swelling of the 'blue piano' and the muted trumpet." Without this symbolism, Stanley and Stella's love for each other would not be as evident, and scenes like the end of scene three would be much more confusing if the music was not being played. These two major pieces of music serve as translators for the reader and film patron; the music foreshadows, interprets character's thoughts and emotions, and changes the mood of the play.