'A Streetcar Named Desire' Themes and Quotes
- Created by: emily_clark07
- Created on: 10-06-19 16:41
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- 'A Street Car Named Desire' Themes
- Fantasy/ Illusion
- Blanche lives in her own illusion, her fantasy is her protection against others and herself
- They come from her weakness to confront the truth
- She is quixotic- seeing the world as it ought to be
- Her world is contrasted with Stanley's realism, and in the end it is Stanley's view that wins
- Stella also resorts to her own illusion, as she forces herself to disprove Blanches allogations against Stanley
- This in many ways reflects the little power that women would have had during the 1940s
- The Old South and the New South
- Stella and Blanche come from this dying world
- Their plantation has been 'lost' and the sisters are the last living members of their families and symbolically, their old world of cavaliers and cotton fields
- It was not conquered by General Sherman's Army, but instead over time, just as the beauty of 'Southern Belle' Blanche fades as well
- Blanche attempts to live in the past but as the end of the play reveals, this is impossible
- Stella only survives by changing her attitudes, moving to New Orleans and marrying Stanley
- Cruelty
- Blanche despises deliberate cruelty
- Stanley's final assault against Blanche is a merciless attack to an already destroyed Blanche
- Whilst Blanche is dishonest, she never does it out of hatred
- Her cruelty is unintentional
- Range of cruelty throughout the play as Williams attempts to show the many ways to hurt someone
- Blanche's well-intentioned deceits
- Stella's self-deceiving treachery
- Stanley's deliberate, unchecked malice
- The Primitive and the Primal
- Stanley represents a very unrefined manhood, a romantic idea of a man untouched by civilisation
- Stella cannot resist him, whereas Blanche often describes him as ape-like and primitive
- His unrefined nature is a terrifying amorality- he has no qualms about driving his sister-in-law to madness
- In Freudian terms, Stanley is pure id, Blanche represents the super-ego and Stella the ego
- The balancing between is not found only by Stella, but in the tension within Blanche herself
- She is so terrified of Stanley that she hides within herself
- The balancing between is not found only by Stella, but in the tension within Blanche herself
- Stanley represents a very unrefined manhood, a romantic idea of a man untouched by civilisation
- Desire
- Central theme in the play
- Desire is one of Blanches driving motivations; but her desire ends up driving her out of town
- She is either trying to suppress her desire or attempting to pursue it with abandon
- Physical desire is at the heart of Stanley and Stella's relationship
- Loneliness
- Blanche's companion to her desire is her loneliness
- She desperately seeks a companion and protection from strangers
- She has never recovered from her tragic and consuming love for her first husband
- Desire vs Cemeteries/ Romance vs Realism
- Parallels between lust and death, tension between romantic and realistic
- Blanche takes streetcars 'Desire' and 'Cemeteries' which symbolise her final destination
- All of Blanche's previous sexual encounters are tangled with death, relates to the actual names of the streetcars
- Quotes
- "They told me to take a street-car named Desire, and transfer to one called Cemeteries, and ride six blocks and get off at- Elysian Fields!"
- Scene 1
- "Whoever you are- I have always depended on the kindness of strangers."
- Scene 11
- "I want to be near you, got to be with somebody, I can't be alone."
- Scene 1
- "Something- ape- like about him... Thousands and thousands of years have passed him right by, and there he is- Stanley Kowalksi- survivor of the stone age!"
- Scene 4
- "I don't think I want to marry you anymore... You're not clean enough to bring in the house with my mother."
- Scene 9
- "I am not a Polack. People from Poland are Poles, not Polacks. But what I am is one hundred percent American, born and raised in the greatest country on Earth."
- Scene 8
- "You need somebody. And I need somebody too. Could it be- you and me, Blanche?"
- Scene 6
- "They told me to take a street-car named Desire, and transfer to one called Cemeteries, and ride six blocks and get off at- Elysian Fields!"
- Fantasy/ Illusion
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