Where Taxis Fear to Tread

" They told me to take a street-car named Desire." - Blanche DuBois

Brutal, dark, nightmarish, a vision of a world without hope, these are the things critics of A Streetcar Named Desire would have readers and audiences believe about the play. And they're right. In 1947, author Tennessee Williams penned an ugly, sordid tale of disillusion and self-destruction, setting it in the desultory heat of New Orleans and challenging audiences and readers alike with his frank discussion of abuse, violence, and madness. Though the play is bitter and shadowy, it is also one of the shining lights of American drama. A stunning portrait of surprising depth, Streetcar well deserves its reputation as one of the great works of American theatre.


The Characters

"…I am the king around here, so don't forget it!" - Stanley Kowalski

Blanche DuBois: A Belle in the grand tradition of declining Southern gentry, Blanche is beautiful, fragile, vivacious and intelligent - all the things a proper Southern lady should be. Williams refers to her as "moth-like." Overly proud of her faded heritage, Blanche is somewhat mercurial, preferring to live in a world of her own creation and smoothing the rougher edges of life with lies, half-truths and illusions. With her refined manners and aristocratic airs, Blanche represents a time in our history that's long gone, and incompatible with modern society.

Stanley Kowalski: Blanche's brother-in-law, Stanley is a boisterous, brawling, working-class common man who tolerates nothing but the facts. A domineering man by nature, he views women in general as weaker and less capable than men, and women of Blanche's ilk as particularly lacking. Representing the modern world's worst aspects of vulgarity, abrupt rudeness and disillusionment, Stanley cannot abide Blanche's pretensions, and so sets out to destroy her.

Stella Kowalski: Blanche's sister and Stanley's wife, Stella's life is a study in compromise. Though she shares an illustrious (if somewhat dustily so) background with Blanche, Stella gave up her remaining privileges to share a life and a bed with Stanley in the tenements of New Orleans. She succumbed some time ago to Stanley's dictatorial tendencies and became a mouse of a woman. Passive and pliant, Stella must choose between her husband and her sister, as well as the worlds they represent.

Harold "Mitch" Mitchell: Stanley's friend and fellow war-veteran, Mitch lives with his mother. A certain sensitivity allows him to connect with Blanche and to appreciate the world in which she envelops herself. Though he begins the story as Blanche's love interest, it is his later rejection of her (thanks to Stanley's interference) that begins her downward spiral into madness.

Minor characters include: Steve and Eunice Hubbel, the Kowalski's landlords and friends - they, too, have marital difficulties, Pablo Gonzales - one of Stanley's poker buddies, Negro woman - another neighbor, A Young Man, A Mexican Woman, A Doctor and A Nurse.


The Plot

"I'm sorry, but I haven't noticed the stamp of genius even on Stanley's forehead." - Blanche DuBois

Blanch DuBois is a genteel Southern lady with an aristocratic pedigree. Unfortunately, she's also promiscuous, and her sexual habits cause her to lose her job as a schoolteacher. She was married at one point, but her husband died tragically some time ago. Blanche loses her ancestral home, Belle Reve (in Laurel, Mississippi), as well, and so is left destitute and alone. She travels to New Orleans to stay with her married sister, Stella, and to try to build a new life.

Arriving at Stella's apartment in a seedy residential district near the French Quarter, Blanche is horrified at the living conditions. The cramped quarters offer no privacy, and the dinginess of the place offends her delicate senses. Yet, as she refuses to go to a hotel (because she cannot abide solitude), Blanche settles in for what becomes an extremely overextended stay.

An aging alcoholic, Blanche continually looks to Stella for praise and support while counseling her sister to leave her boorish husband. Stanley, who didn't much care for Blanche anyway, recognizes the threat Blanche poses to his marriage and determines to stop her meddling at any cost.

Meanwhile, Blanche has been cultivating a relationship with one of Stanley's friends, Harold "Mitch" Mitchell, and hopes to marry him. She tells him the tragic story of the suicide of her first husband, and plays the wounded, fragile widow for him. Mitch, a sensitive and protective man by nature, is drawn in, and things begin to look serious. Until, that is, Stanley interferes by telling Mitch of Blanche's promiscuity, alcoholism and perpetual lies. Mitch, shocked and angry at being duped, rejects Blanche, dashing her last hope for a respectable life and causing her grasp on her sanity to loosen.

Warning, spoilers ahead.

Blanche discovers that Stanley caused the rift and decides to confront him. Months of anger and resentment, always simmering on the back burner, boil to the surface during the argument that ensues, and Stanley brutally rapes Blanche, permanently severing her tenuous link with reality. Blanche later confesses the ugly scene to Stella, but Stella cannot believe her without destroying her own world, and so turns her back on her sister.

Soon Stella and Stanley have Blanche committed to an insane asylum. It is the faux solicitousness of the doctor and nurse who come to take her away that prompt Blanche to utter her famous, pathetic line, "I have always relied on the kindness of strangers."

End spoilers


A Bit of Background

"We've had this date with each other from the beginning." - Stanley Kowalski

Born in 1911 in Columbus, Mississippi, Tennessee Williams did not lead a happy life. During his childhood his home was constantly fraught with tension, causing his parents to erupt into frighteningly violent arguments. Williams' father, Cornelious, was an alcoholic, a compulsive gambler and a wife-abuser. His mother, Edwina, was codependent and controlling. Williams briefly attended the University of Missouri before being forced by his father to drop out of college and work at a shoe factory. He did eventually return to school and graduated from the University of Iowa in 1938. Williams is largely thought an autobiographical playwright - drawing on his family and friends for characters and stories. Elia Kazan, who directed the first film version of this play, said of him: "Everything in his life is in his plays, and everything in his plays is in his life." With inspirations like this, it's small wonder that a sense of oppressive desperation pervades most of Williams' work.

Sometime in 1945 Williams was struck by a vision of a woman sitting alone in a chair. Surrounded by moonlight, she had just been jilted by her fiancé. Compelled to write her story, he named the woman Blanche DuBois and thus gave the American theatre one of its most powerful and enduring dramas. First produced for the stage in 1947, Streetcar won the Donaldson Award, the New York Drama Critics Award, and the Pulitzer Prize. Though adapted for both film and TV, the most well known production is probably the movie starring Vivian Leigh as Blanche and Marlon Brando as Stanley.

The New Orleans Railway and Light Company opened the Desire Streetcar Line in 1920. Originally providing service from Canal and Bourbon, down Bourbon, Esplanade, Decatur, Elysian Fields, Chartres, Desire, Tonti, France and Royal to Canal streets, the Desire - thanks to Williams' play - became the most famous streetcar in America. With a route through the French Quarter, the Royal Street shopping district, and the residential areas known today as Bywater and Faubourg Marigny, the Desire serviced some of the seedier areas of New Orleans (though they've since been drastically cleaned up to attract tourists). The streetcar ceased operation in 1948, and was replaced by a bus named Desire. Somehow, the poetry is not the same.


Impressions

"I couldn't believe her story and go on living with Stanley." - Stella Kowalski

The play is both naturalistic, in terms of dialog and presentation, and symbolic. As briefly noted in the character description above, both Blanche and Stanley serve as symbols for something much greater than themselves. Blanche represents a certain aristocratic mindset, a society of manners which, in 1947, had been fading out of existence for some time. The genteel Old South, full of began to topple even before the American Civil War, but some vestiges of the lifestyle and value system persisted, clinging tenaciously to debs and beaus, and hoping for a resurrection. Embodied in Blanche are the dual aspects of this society: culture and decadence. A dichotomy is also present in her childlike helplessness and romanticism, her dreamy waifishness and mannered pretension - all at odds with her drastically reduced circumstances, her age and her position.

Stanley, with his forthright manner and rough edges, represents the new Industrial Age and its total incompatibility with what Williams saw as the more refined life of the past. Practical, pragmatic, abrupt, boorish, loud and brutish as a character, it is painfully apparent that this new age disgusted and possibly frightened the author. At one point, Williams did confess an autobiographical bent to Blanche, so Stanley's physical and emotional domination of her becomes more than just a man subjugating a woman, more even than an Age surpassing an Age, for Stanley's Industrial Age is overpowering the author himself, and driving him even further into his self-destructive tendencies.

Sex and its consequences are a major theme of the play. Sexual repression, aberration, promiscuity, frustration, betrayal, all are present here and condensed into a thick, muddy soup. Any action that could arguably be said to be the cause of the finale is, in some way, associated with sex. Blanche finds her first husband in bed with another man and is disgusted. He commits suicide. She becomes promiscuous, losing her job and her home as a result, and consequently makes the move to New Orleans. Blanche counsels Stella to leave Stanley because she (Stella) is pregnant and her husband is abusive, giving Stanley solid grounds for his hatred. Blanche plays at attracting Mitch while flirting with Stanley and kissing young men. Mitch rejects Blanche because of her promiscuity, and Stanley rapes her in the argument that ensues. Stella never leaves Stanley, not even after he arranges to have Blanche committed, at least in part because she enjoys their sexual relationship, and sex without marriage is what got her sister Blanche into this mess in the first place.

More than anything else, however, the play is about illusion and disillusion, the ways in which we lie and are lied to, and the ways in which those comforting lies can be jerked like a carpet from under our feet. It begins with simple things, Blanche lying about her age and using paper lanterns to soften the light around her. She fudges the number of drinks she has a day. From there the illusions become grander and larger scale, her husband's suicide becomes an accident, her sexual history is obscured. Finally, Stanley's act of rage and violence rips her illusions away. Confronted with the world in all its unvarnished ugliness, Blanche cannot function and so slips away into a world of her own devising. Stella, too, succumbs to illusion, thought not one quite so glaringly evident, as do Stanley and Mitch. It seems Williams thinks the plain, unvarnished world too much for any of us, and he may well be correct.

Just as Arthur Miller wrote of the negative effects of the American Dream on regular Americans, so too did Williams. Whereas Miller's works, however, were realistic depictions of average family dysfunction, Williams wrote of grand, almost Shakespearean, tragedy in an expressionist style. The scale of the tragedy is possibly what makes Williams so difficult for many readers to stomach - the fact that everyone dies or goes mad (or both) in Hamlet or Macbeth is palatable because the characters are so largely written, so far removed from us as modern people, but Williams writes about our next door neighbors, our friends, our relatives. How can we possibly enjoy such complete and unflinching misery so close to home?

This play isn't nice, it isn't hopeful in any way; those looking for a drama that holds out hope of redemption should try Miller's The Crucible. A Streetcar Named Desire is all of the awful things people have said about it - it is brutal, dark, nightmarish, a vision of a world without hope. But, while it is certainly disturbing, Streetcar is also one of the most popular plays in American theatre, penned by one of its most respected authors, a brilliantly constructed masterwork filled with gripping characters and absorbing dialog - and absolutely worth the read.