A Streetcar Named Desire: A Level York Notes

In tragedy the hero or heroine has to be basically noble, yet be destroyed by a combination of fate and a personal failing. This seems to be true of Blanche, although she is driven mad rather than dying as in a tragedy like ‘Romeo and Juliet’. She is a refined and delicate woman who admits to being ‘soft’ and to putting on ‘the colours of butterfly wings ... to pay for – one night’s shelter’. We know that she appreciates literature too. She refers to a story by Edgar Allan Poe and recognises a poem by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Her sister Stella is also quite refined, but lacks Blanche’s appreciation of poetry. Possibly she has played this down in order to live with Stanley. Her reading a comic book in Scene Four shows this. Even Eunice, though a notch or two below the DuBois family, as we can see in her speech, is kind-hearted, as when she welcomes Blanche, and later brings her a gift of grapes.

Even though the women are therefore at least partly ‘noble’ in character, it would be very unbalanced to make the men just ‘despicable’. Stanley does some cruel things – the most unforgivable being the rape at the climax. However, some critics, especially in the twentieth century, have justified his behaviour. The director Elia Kazan, for example, did this, and some audience members actually cheered when Stanley carried Blanche off to rape her. Nowadays few critics would go this far. However, Stanley has to be seen in perspective. He is a working-class man in the 1940s who is most at ease in a man’s world (like the army). He believes, like Huey Long, that ‘Every man is a king’. He says he is ‘unrefined’, but he resents Blanche’s attitude towards him when she calls him an ‘ape man’ (Scene Four) and later when she and Stella seem to gang up on him, Stella calls him a ‘pig’, and he smashes the plates. Also, Blanche stays in the Kowalski apartment for around eight months, which must cramp their love life – which is something Stanley values, as does Stella.

Mitch seems like a weak version of Stanley at times, but he is a good man in some ways. He is sympathetic to Blanche, realising that she finds it hard being in the apartment during the poker game, though his judgement on Stanley’s violence is too mild: ‘Poker should not be played in a house with women.’ Blanche recognises Mitch’s sensitivity, like when he shows her his cigarette case, and when he ‘clears his throat’, showing his emotion about his mother. We cannot sympathise with him when he will not listen to Blanche when she tries to explain her behaviour at the Hotel Flamingo. However, when he tries to have sex with her, this is really a half-hearted effort, and not quite an attempted rape as some critics claim.

Blanche is her own worst enemy. She might be a symbol of the defeated South and Stanley of the victorious North. She was so upset by the suicide of her husband that she still hallucinates polka music, and the gunshot. But her behaviour goes beyond just being damaged. For example, we see her flirting with the young man at the end of Scene Five, even though she is about to meet Mitch for a date. It is as if she just cannot help herself, as with the schoolboy who got her fired.

Williams uses different techniques to make us sympathise with Blanche. There is the symbolism of her baths (guilt), her paper lanterns (trying to make magic in her life), and the ‘lurid’ shapes and jungle noise sound effects in Scenes Ten and Eleven. There is also the the way she often seems helpless, as in her final line in Scene Three, ‘I need kindness now’ which looks forward to her final line in the play. She ends up a broken woman, lost in a fantasy about dying at sea, then fearfully trying to escape. It could be that she achieves tragic dignity in the final scene, and that the poker players stand up because they recognise this.

Instead, Williams makes us have sympathy with the men as well as the women. Blanche grows to become dignified, and Stella shows how much she cares about her sister. If all the men were just despicable, the play would not be nearly so good. The women do have the moral high ground, but the men are three-dimensional characters who are products of their time.