Tennessee Williams’ Characters Examples Of Distorted Minds

CONTENT

Tennessee Williams’ Characters: Examples of distorted Minds

Blanche Dubois

Stanley Kowalski

Stella Kowalski

Essential Motifs and Symbols

The South

Insanity

Light

Staging A Streetcar Named Desire

First scenery of the play

Stage production

Comparison play – movie

Tennessee Williams’ Characters: Examples of distorted Minds

Blanche DuBois

“A Streetcar Named Desire” features a gradual descent into madness, brought about by loss, depression, financial ruin, and the cruelty of others. At first, this so-called "madness" is just an attempted escape from reality – an altered self-image and a polished persona that doesn’t accurately reflect the character below. As the play progresses, however, this self-deception intensifies and deviates further and further from reality. By the play’s conclusion, the main character can no longer distinguish between her fantasies and the world around her.

“A Streetcar Named Desire” is the joyous culmination of Williams early period, since the conflict the play dramatizes marks a natural line of development from “Battle of Angels to You Touched Me” to the two Alma plays, “Summer and Smoke” and “Eccentricities of a Nightingale”. In each play, a panting, high-strung woman is pitted against a prodigiously sensual man. In Streetcar the combatants are more of a match for each other than any of the other antagonists. For all his bravado, his peacock plumage, and his lord of the manor authority, Stanley is threatened by Blanche's airs and titillated by her disgust with his commonness.

And for all her upper crust refinement, Blanche is drawn to Stanley's emphatic virility at the same time that she is petrified of his brutish aggressiveness. Almost unconsciously, she goes to work on her brother-in-law, coyly spraying him with her perfume, teasing him with the tickle of her furs. Sniffing warily, flexing like wrestlers warming up for the bout, these two don't need much time to understand each other. In the deadly sex war that ensues, Stanley has the edge since he is on home ground and he is confident of the appeal of his athlete's muscles.

But Blanche is “a cagey fighter, armed with the well-practiced defenses of Southern charm and aristocratic decorum” (F. Hirsch, p.39). Williams has said recently that “Blanche was much stronger than Kowalski. When he started to assault her, he said, Tiger, tiger”. She was a tiger, she had much more strength than he, and she surrendered to him out of desire. A stubborn opponent, a challenge to Stanley’s domination of his wife Stella, Blanche is a menacing intruder who must be expelled. The dramatist himself wrote about Blanche DuBois: “She was a demonic character; the size of her feelings was too great for her to contain without the escape of madness.”

Blanche Dubois is the female protagonist of "A Streetcar Named Desire" written by Tennessee Williams. As the play progresses, she undergoes a falling of social status. While she was young she was considered to be a southern belle, but immediately became less beautiful as the years passed. She has lost her husband who had a male lover and also had committed suicide: she has lost her job as a school teacher because of an affair with a student; her ancestral home was taken from her because of the debts, everything ending up with the loss of her reputation.

Her family had lived at the plantation in Laurel called "Belle Reve" and after losing it, she had to move in a big city, New Orleans, where she finds herself as a stranger. When she goes to live with her sister, Blanche is trying to reshape her life, without even knowing of all the suffering her lies and also her brutal brother-in-low will cause her. Her past and present mistakes are horribly punished by Stanley Kowalski.

Blanche is a woman with a checkered history. While she was on the honeymoon with her husband, she found him in a compromising situation, while he was in the companion of another man. Later that night, while they were dancing at a casino called Moon Lake Casino, Blanche finally confronts him, moment in which Blanche tells her famous line "you disgust me"… After the confrontation, he ran. Immediately after, Blanche heard the shot of his death. The sorrow and quiet determined by the tragic event had become a traumatic memory in her life. As she said:

"And then the searchlight which had been turned on the world was turned off again and never for one moment has there been any light that`s stronger than this-kitchen-candle” (Scene 6).

One possible interpretation may be that she never recovered from the rejection followed by her husband, who decided to seek love in the arms of another man, not even a woman. While being an English teacher, she had begun to have some sexual encounters with young soldiers being considered by the society to be a proper school mistress and at the same time the town tramp.

She even had the lack of decency to become sexually involved with a student. Once she had lost her family estate and was fired from the school, she decides to go to her sister`s house. As she arrives to New Orleans, she is overwrought and verging on hysteria (Patterson, p.45). She becomes desperate for having lost her prestigious position as a school teacher, her last hope of emotional recovering being a new life spent together with her sister and her husband.

Despite all of her humiliating past, she is still a proud woman, determined, but at the same time frenetic. She does not want anyone in her new life to find out of her past and acts as an innocent romantic girl in order to attract men. She even hides her age and also her sexual appetites. "Part of the Southern mystique of the lady is her purity of mind and body". (Patterson Nancy, p. 46)

From the moment she steps foot in her sister`s house, she is appalled by the looks of it, even decorating the place in order to benefit her own self. Because of her desperation, she dates Stanley`s friend Mitch, a man who she considers to be inferior but at the same time may help her. When Stanley exposes her, Blanche`s last hope of salvation it is ruined and she has a breakdown. As the action evolves, she is depicted as being addicted to long baths, cigarettes, young men and strong drinks. "She commands center stage by her outrageous behavior, but she also commands it by her eloquent speech and her occasionally insightful vision of reality"(Paterson Nancy, p. 46).

She may not be the most educated character, but she certainly is the most courageous, deciding to start a new life, giving herself a second chance, despite the fact that she continues to lie, willingly or not.

The moment Blanche arrives at her sister`s house, her first words express ambivalence and also confusion. "They told me to take a streetcar named Desire". When speaking to her sister, she does not tell her the real reason of her arrival, but in her weakness, she tells her sister in scene 1 "I want to be near you, to go be with somebody, I can`t be alone".

She is unable to distinguish between what is real and what is not. When telling Stella that she has lost Belle Reve("beautiful dream"), she blames her without taking responsibility for her acts "but you are the one that abandoned Belle Reve, not I". Even Stanley questions her about her estate, Stella telling him:

"I know I fib a good bet. After all, a woman`s charm is fifty per cent illusion, but when a thing is important, tell her the truth and this is the truth: I haven`t cheated my sister or you or anyone else as long as I have lived” (Scene 2).

Tennessee writes about Blanche, referring to her uncertainty and confusion:"there is something about her uncertain manner…that suggests a moth". The moment when, as usual, Blanche changes her mind from an idea to another, she does not seem to be drown by light, but rather shuns it, as well as she does with the truth.

In an effort to escape the misery of her life in Laurel, Blanche drinks and has meaningless affairs. She uses alcohol as a way to stop the polka music, which reminds her of Allan`s death and also as a way of avoiding the truth of her life. While living with her sister, she continues to drink in order to forget everything. She is a living dead, observing, irresponsible with the other`s people life unable to reach.

Regarding Blanche`s relationship with Mitch, she never loved him and wanted to marry him because she feared a lonely life. When Stella asks her about her relationship "Blanche, do you want him?” she replies:

"I want to rest! I want to breath quietly again! Yes. I want Mitch … very badly! Just think! If it happens! I can live here and not be anyone’s problem…" (William 517).

Mitch is only a thing for Blanche, because she only needs him, but her apparent future marriage is only an illusion. Beikman states that Blanche never had any emotional, intimacy with her husband, but in fact,"… there never existed a marriage between them, in which Allen could come to her in full trust and explicit need (Bleikman, p. 1). Blanche describes the beginning of their romance by using poetic expressions:

" it was like you suddenly turned a blinding light on something that had always been half in shadow, that is how it struck the world for me”(Williams, p. 527), “unsuccessful relationship is the most common reason to activate a person`s psychological defense mechanism"(Kuncaite, 2009, p. 4).

Despite being guilty of many sins, she always wears white as a symbol of her fake innocence. She uses the dark, hiding in it, condemning it, a way of concealing her flows. Blanche is also affected by the bright light, always covering the light bulb with paper lantern, maintaining her fake image of perfection and always wanting to be complemented for what she does, not represent in this way creating an illusion of youngness.

She also lies about her age, using the lie as a way to escape the harsh reality. She uses the paper lantern as a protection against the violent world:

”she cries out when the lantern is torn off the light bulb, because there is no longer a space between the violence she experiences and the image of violence, the inner and the outer world fuse"(Fleche, p. 5).

Stanley is the first to see the real Blanche in scene ten:"not once did you pull any wool over this boy`s eyes"(Williams, p. 552). Stanley is not the only one who broke Blanche’s world of illusions. Mitch, influenced by Stanley`s cruelty, exposes her to the bright light, in this way destroying the protection represented by darkness. Once finished, Blanche says:"I don`t want realism… Yes, yes, magic! I try to give that to people, I misrepresent thing to them. I don`t tell the truth, I tell what ought to be truth…"(Williams, p. 545).

Blanche lives in an imaginary world, one of lies, which she believes to be true, and expects the others to believe it too. ”illusions bring to her magic, escape from reality, the image of the life she would like to lead, and not the one she is leading now"(Kuncoite D., 2009, p. 5). The critic William Hawkins considers that Blanche can “make a great deal of a little”.

In destruction, she creates a facade of pathetic glory out of “baths and secrets and shabby finery and paste jewelry” (27). She uses the baths in order to wash away all the shady reality and feels” like a brand new human being” (William, p. 486). Her obsession for physical cleanness is a symbol of her desire for a new life, a new beginning. While bathing, she feels that her body and soul become pure. Another way of escaping reality is consuming alcohol.

Alcohol is the mean of coping with stress and escaping reality. She even has the audacity to tell Stanley that she rarely drinks, but afterwards sustains that “some people rarely touch it, but it touches them often” (Williams, p. 481).

When in scene five, Stanley exposes her about her past she reaches for a drink. The drink manages to calm her down, but later as a result of her illusions, she sees a young man ringing the doorbell. While being cme people rarely touch it, but it touches them often” (Williams, p. 481).

When in scene five, Stanley exposes her about her past she reaches for a drink. The drink manages to calm her down, but later as a result of her illusions, she sees a young man ringing the doorbell. While being confronted by Stanley, she admits to have stayed at the flamingo hotel, a warehouse. She also admits to have had many relationships, but only as a way to treat her broken:

“Yes, I had many intimacies with strangers. After the death of Allen- intimacies with stranger was all I seemed able to fill with my empty heart with. I think it was panic, just panic, that drown me from one to another, hunting to some protection-here and there, in the most-unlikely places-even, at last, in a seventeen-year old boy”(Williams).

The fact that she was with many men, looking to a fake protection is a sign of her insanity. Because of her track round in honesty, her sister Stella does not believe her that Stanley had raped her. The final words that Blanche says are a sign that she has lost all senses of reality. “Whoever you are – I have always depended on the kindness of strangers” (Williams).

When she sees the doctor, she considers him to be the savior that she has been waiting for ever since she came to New Orleans. Not only are these words ironic, but they also grave her insanity. Blanche`s dependence on other people, especially man, has caused her so much problems. Her final words indicate her detachment from reality and eventually, regard the world as she wishes to.

Do to all of her actions, she must be put away before hurting herself physically or emotionally. Illusions helped Blanche “to accept a position of powerlessness” (Hovis, p. 177). Her last salvation was the imaginative millionaire from the South. She even describes him as having “spouting gold in her packets”, “act-wells” and “convertible Cadillac” (Williams, p. 507).

She is confident that the millionaire will offer her stability and security. Once again, Stanley is the one to wake her up to the brutal reality. “There is not a goddom thing, but imagination” (Williams, p. 552).

Everything in her mind is destroyed, even the walls “have become transparent” (553), and she finally recognizes her helplessness. “Her vulnerability is revealed at the end of the play, as all her defenses are broken down and she is left at the mercy of the others”( Kuncaite D., 2009, p.7). Despite her defeat, she leaves the house through the front door, without turning back, as if she is going to start a new life. She finally admits that she needs help and decides to give a chance to trust strangers.

In conclusion, Blanche, while coming to her sister, she looks for stability, safety, offering herself a second chance to start a new life, living the past behind. The plans do not go as expected because her brutal brother-in-low, Stanley, who represents the realistic point of view of the story, shatters Blanche’s illusions. Blanche uses her illusions as a way to forget the past, her position and the powerlessness of her real life. Although Blanche is put in a psychiatric institution and criticized by the society, she still has dignity and shows that she is a powerful woman.

Stella Kowalski

Stella Kowalski, Blanche`s sister, is a character worth evaluating. Through the play she is divided between her possessive, cruel husband and her insane sister. Stella is “trapped in the middle of a war between gentrified society represented by Blanche, and the rugged practical world of the working class, personified by Stanley” (Heintzetman and Haword, p. 273).

Even though Stella loves her husband, he treats her badly, showing no respect, considering that the duty of a woman is to obey her husband and accept all of his bad treatment. When she does not agree with his actions, disobeying his orders, objecting, she is bitten. In her marriage, domestic violence is a common practice. When Stanley hurts her physically, he immediately apologizes insincerely, and feels the need to have his sexual desires satisfied by Stella. Stella confesses to her sister, after being abused by her husband, that Stanley “was as good as a lamb when I came back and he`s really very, very ashamed of himself” (Williams, p. 157).

No matter his actions, Stella always finds an excuse for his behavior. She reaches the point of which she justifies the physical abuse on his drunkenness which made him loose control of his actions and behavior. She considers that “men and woman have to get used to each other’s ways of life” (Kotoria, p. 31).

After marrying Stanley, she immediately forgets about her past life, the prestigious one, and becomes accustomed, even satisfied with her new, simple life. “She, unlike her sister, does not oppose or struggle against the New in America but is able to mix up and indulge with the modern” (Duyvenbade, p. 212). The moment when Blanche tells her sister to leave her husband because he beats her, Stella tells her “You` re making too much fuss about this… it wasn`t anything as serious as you seem to take it” (Williams, p. 157).

She does not see or does not want to see that something is wrong in her marriage. Despite this fact, upon Blanche`s arrival, Stella warns her sister that her husband is not a southern gentleman that she likes, but a vulgar man.

But even though she knows her husband well, she cannot and does not want to leave him, and also refuses to let anything come between her and him. Stella seems to be attracted by Stanley`s vulgarity and also violent nature. Because of these two negative features, she commenced the relationship with Blanche. Blanche is unable to understand her sister`s actions. Stella tells Blanche:

“Stanley`s always smashed things. Why, on our wedding night –soon as we came in here –he snatched off one of my slippers and rushed about the place, smashing the light bulb with it” (Williams,p. 157).

While Blanche seems to be frightened by this fact, Stella further tells her “I was sort of thrilled by it” (William, p. 157).

Despite being a cruel and violent man, who made Stella angry in certain situations, Stella admires him because it shows his masculinity” (Aubrey, p. 216). Their relationship seems to be based on a sort of enormous physical attraction. Even though he beats her, there are moments in which she defends him and also justifies his acts, always experienced a sexual satisfaction after a confrontation. “But there are things that happen between a man and a woman in the dark- that sort of make everything else seem unimportant” (Williams,p. 162).

Stella is unable to act, always being completely depended on her husband, Stanley is the one that controls and arranges everything. “She is aware of her husband`s importance for her and she says that he knows what the best is for her and that he can take care of her” (Ismael, p. 117). Not only her husband controls her, but also her sister, who treats her like a maid. When Blanche comes to her sister`s house, she greats her with orders like” stand up” and “you heard I said stand up” (Williams, p. 122).

Stella is a passive woman and obeys her sister`s stupid orders. Blanche critics her dress and hair style: “You messy child, you, you, you`ve spilt something on that pretty white low collar. About your hair- you ought to have it cut in a feather bob with your doing feathers” (Williams, p. 122). Stella simply obeys the orders without saying anything. She even feels content in being her sister`s inferior, saying “ I like to wait on you, Blanche. It makes it seem more like home [Belle Reve, Mississippi] (Williams, p. 170).

She confesses to live being in a submissive position. Blanche was the first to subdue her and that may be the case why she does not reject Stanley`s attitude and behavior.

If Blanche is idyllic, Stella is more realistic. Despite all her husband`s flows, she decides to stay with him at the end of the play. This fact “emphasizes her realistic and practical view towards life” (Ismaell Z., p. 116). She is not discontent by the fact that she lives as the wife of a factory worker. She is happy and does not want to change her life. She abandoned her past life in order to marry Stanley.

Stanley is the representation/ projection of her future and security, despite being a brutal man. Stella defends her sister, but in the moment when she accuses her husband of several harassments, she cannot believe her, deciding to put her faith on Stanley: “I couldn`t believe [Blanche`s] story and go on living with Stanley” (Williams, p. 217). Susan Koprince predicts that Stella`s life with Stanley in the future will not be a happy and settled one:

“Stanley`s violence against her will continue- and escalate – and there will be no way out for her. Trapped in a cycle of domestic abuse, Stella Kowalski will be alone and at risk, unable to leave the husband who abuses her, unable to count on social remedies- unable to depend perhaps even on the kindness of strangers”(Koprince, p. 59).

Unlike Blanche, Stella knows what she wants from her life. She admits to admire Stanley`s drive (496). Despite Blanche`s criticism, Stella embraces him “fiercely” (511) to show that she is not affected by Blanche`s insults.

Stanley Kowalski

Stanley Kowalski was an only child of a family of immigrants. He was born in 1918 in the USA. Despite having all the opportunities needed, in order to make a decent living, his family struggled with money. The family had both financial and domestic problems. His father was an alcoholic, who used to abuse him and his mother every time they had problems with money. When he was 20, he joined the army and soon became a sergeant. After participating in World War II, he met his soon to be wife Stella DuBois.

In Tennessee William`s work “A Streetcar Named Desire”, mainly all the characters are physical, but the focus is on Stella Kowalski. He is a brutal, domineering man, who resembles the characteristics of an animal behavior. He is especially brutal with his wife Stella, treating her badly. He reaches the point to which he even beats her and speaks rude to her in front of unknown people and even friends. The only moment in which he acts nicely to her is when he wants to make love to her. An example of his brutally is portrayed at the poker scene:

“- Stella: How much longer is this game going to continue?

– Stanley: Till we get ready to quit…Why don’t you, woman, go up and sit with Eunice?

– Stella: Because it is nearly 02:30 AM… [A chair scrapes. Stanley gives a loud whack of his hand on her t-shirt].

– Stella: [Sharply]. That`s not fun, Stanley.(to Blanche). It makes me so mad when he does that in front of people “(20, 26-27).

Stanley Kowalski is the main male character of Williams’ play and he represents the macho of the play. He is also identified as a batterer, having all the characteristics needed. According to Russell, a macho performs sexual intercourse to establish masculine power and create female submission (236). In the scene number 8, Stanley talks to his wife about their past sexual life, after the arrival of Blanche at their house:

“Stanley: When we first met, me and you, you thought I was common. How right you are, baby. I was common as dirt. You showed me that snapshot of the place with the columns. I pulled you down off them columns and how you loved it, having them colored lights going! And wasn`t we happy together, wasn`t it all okay, tell she [Blanche] showed here? (Stella makes a slight movement. Her look goes suddenly inward as if some interior voice had called her name. She begins a slow, shuffling progress from the bedroom to the kitchen, leaving and resting on the back of the chair and then on the edge of a table with a blind-look listening expression. Stanley, finishing with his shirt, is unaware of her reaction. And wasn`t we happy together? Wasn`t it all ok? Till she showed here? Hoity-toity, describing me as an ape” (Williams, p. 123-124).

This scene presents the fact that Stella and her husband had a happy sex life before the arrival of Stella`s sister, and also the fact that Stanley is aware of his sexual virility, of the intensity of their sexual life and also he reminds Stella that she is in a submissive position.

Stanley notices that “her look goes suddenly inward as if some interior voice had called her name” and this fact affects Stella. Stanley wants to emphasize the fact that sex is a crucial element ingredient in their relationship. It is possible that his wife’s reaction can be interpreted as a submissive agreeing, reaction which is in contrast with Stanley`s status as a superior macho in their relationship.

According to Russell,“[The macho’s] talent or rape and family violence” (226). This is the reason why Stanley hits Stella at the poker game in the 3rd scene and finally rapes Blanche at the end of the play. “These two actions confirm the aforementioned stereotypical features of a macho and support the assumption that Stanley can be categorized as one” (Bauer, p. 20).

Russell identifies other characteristics of the typical macho in Stanley`s attitude and behavior, “verbal and physical aggression seen as mainly behavior also as means of expressing dominance over men” (226).

In the third scene, Stanley, raping, throws the radio out the window, just because Blanche was listening to her favorite music on it. The stage directions portray perfectly this brutal scene: “Stanley stalks fiercely though the portieres into the bed room. He crosses to the small white radio and snatches it off the table. With a shouted oath, he tosses the instrument out of the window” (Williams, p.58).

Another moment of violence happens in the 8th scene, when after being called a piss by Stella after eating with his fingers instead of a fork, he decides to ragingly destroy the plates.

“- Stella: Mr. Kowalski is too busy making a piss of himself to think of anything else!

– Stanley: That`s right, baby.

– Stella: Your face and your fingers are disgustingly greasy. Go and wash up and then help me clean the table (he hurls a plate to the floor).

– Stanley: That`s how I`ll clean the table! (he sites her arm). Don`t ever talk that way to me! Piss-Polack-disgusting-vulgar-greasy!” them kind of words have been on your tongue and your sister`s too much around here!” (Williams, p. 118).

He is violent in his speech but also physically, seizing Stella`s arm. The 2 scenes mentioned above depict his physical can verbal aggression. He tries to impose his strength, dominance though violence. He is not only violent against woman, also against his friend. This fact is depicted at the poker scene when his friends try to stop him from beating Stella. Stanley “is forced, pinioned by the two men, into the bedroom. He nearly throws them off” (Williams,59). Stanley possesses on enormous physical strength and fights against everyone who stays in his way.

During the fight scene, Stanley, “all at once subsiding and giving in”, asks after some moments in a “dully” way “what`s the matter, what’s happened” (Williams, p. 59).

She seems to be unaware of his actions and afterwards, cries because Stella has left him and has gone to one of her neighbor`s apartment in order to seek protection. This is the moment in which Stanley shows signs of weakness, feeling that he cannot live without Stella.

His physical appearance supports the idea of a macho man. In the first scene, while entering the kitchen, he is described as” strongly and compactly built” (Williams, p. 25).

“Animal joy in his being is implicit in all his movements and attitudes. Since earliest manhood, the centre of his life has been pleasure with women, the giving and taking of it, not with weak indulgence, dependently, but with the power and greed of a richly feathered male bird among hens. […] his heartiness with men, his appreciation of rough humor, his love for good drink and food and games, his car, his radio, everything that is his, that bears his emblem of the gaudy seed-bearer. He seizes woman up at a glance, with sexual classification, crude images, flashing into his mind and the way he smiles at them (Williams, p. 25-26).

Koprince also categorizes Stanley as a batterer and claims that “Williams makes use of his personal knowledge of domestic violence, creating in the character of Stanley Kowalski the image of a prototypical batterer”(56). She summarizes the prototypical batterer as being:

“hyper masculine, using aggressive behavior as verification of manliness, believing in male superiority, seeing woman as sexual objects to be dominated, being extremely jealous and possessive”(80).

Stanley Kowalski also represents the stereotype of the warriors. His hot temper, which embodies his violent and aggressive character, is typical for the warrior type. He often uses violence to solve his problems. He is the perfect representative of the alpha male, always in central of everything, always the leader. Stanley is described as an attractive male.

Stanley is dressed in “roughly dress in blue denim work clothes” suggesting the fact that he is a labor worker. Stanley is always direct in what he says and uses monosyllabic utterance such as “catch” and ”bowling” and always says what he wants straight forward. Stanley represents vital force, being loyal to his wife, intimately, passionate with Stella and cruel, both mentally, physically and verbally to Blanche.

Having Polish blood, he represents the New American man. He regards himself as a social leveler and wants to ruin Blanche`s life and aspirations. He does not believe Blanche`s lies and has no patience with her. Unlike Blanche he does not have ideals being a degenerate and also proud man.

Essential Motives and Symbols

The South

In Tennessee’s drama, “A Streetcar Named Desire”, the author provides us with the dissimilarities between Old and New South about multiple life aspects. A very important matter that should be mentioned is the author’s exaggerated accent on the characters’ characteristics in order to differentiate the two periods.

First of all, highly important would be to distinguish the Old South from the New South, the Old South referring to the Southern Americans’ culture before the Civil War, the main characteristics being  the social status, the traditions and also daintiness and willingness of living conditions, in comparison to the New South, which refers to the postwar and the post-Industrial Revolution period (W: 1815-1914; Am:1820-1870), these two highlighting the arrival of the industrial period and the beginning of a new era.

Blanche DuBois is a pattern sample of the Old South woman, all the characteristics that describe her out-look have as a conclusion a person with high social standing, having also a high society background behavior. Her physical appearance, a striking and glamorous figure, is being described in the beginning of the play, where she appears all dressed in white, in comparison to a later scene, where she comes out of the bathroom in a satin robe. Moreover, she continues on launching all sorts of questions towards her sister, aiming for compliments about her astonishing looks, fact that enlightens the obvious and enormous importance of the physical appearance for her.

The exchange of lines between the two sisters that takes place at Stella’s house: “Why didn’t you let me know?”, Stella replies: “Tell you what, Blanche?”, and Blanche answers: “That you had to live in these conditions!” underlines the fact that Blanche wants to demonstrate her social superiority, addressing her sister all kinds of critical remarks about her house, developing the reader’s conclusion as to be a terrible place to live.

Blanche, before arriving at her sister’s house, used to work as a teacher in Laurel, but she hides the truth from her sister saying that due to her nervous breakdown, the high school superintendent suggested that she should take a leave of absence, when actually she was fired because of her promiscuous behavior and especially because of the fact that she suffers from alcoholism.

All in all, wishing to hide the truth about her disastrous life, she takes excessive care of her and her physical appearance and as well of her behavior. Until the end of the play, Blanche continues on living a double life. Hoping until the last minute that everything will turn out to be well and that she will end by enjoying a happy life, she keeps on expecting a gentleman to appear, but instead arrives a psychiatrist.

Through the fact that even in the end she refuses to accept reality, we can conclude that this is a main characteristic of people from the Old South, having a general disorder in adapting to change. Even more, her inevitable downfall is more evident along with the doctor’s arrival.

Stanley Kowalski is the main representative of the New South in the play, a Polish originated man, through his origin being making an allusion to the migration occurred after the Revolution. His first appearance in the play is described by a man roughly dressed in blue denim work clothes, which make us believe that his financial and social circumstances aren’t so favorable since he belongs to the working class range.

Beating his wife once in a while denotes his brutality and savageness. Also getting undressed in front of Blanche, which he eventually seduces, expresses an uncivilized and ill-mannered behavior, his only activity except work being playing poker regularly with his friends, towards he displays loyalty.

One of the Old South’s representatives is also Blanche’s ex-husband, which does not have an important and visible appearance in the drama. After he reveals his homosexuality, in order to preserve his dignity, he commits suicide, referring to a pre-eminent code of honor in the Old South.

The Old and New South could never cohabit with each other. As a proof, we have the wretched relation between Blanche DuBois and Stanley Kowalski. The unreasonableness and ridiculousness of the characteristics of the Old South to the gentry of much more modern ages can be based on, as previously mentioned, in Blanche’s comportment which is seen as objectionable and disquieting by all the other characters in the play.

That is to say, an Old South woman discovers herself in the New South society and therefore she miscarries to keep rational and even get mental disorders in such circumstances.

With such an overbearing drama line, Tennessee Williams not only highlights an amount of basic features of both periods, but also demonstrates that Blanche was banished from the society in comparison to the Old South, which was turned down.

Taking into consideration all the upper evaluated aspects of Blanche’s downfall story, we can conclude to a wonderfully vivid delineation of the clinch of the Old South.

Insanity

Along the years, madness has been analyzed by many critics in literary analysis, feminist theories and even in modern musicological operas. In Tennessee’s “A Streetcar Named Desire” drama, Blanche can be perceived as many things: the accursed operatic heroine, the other, the madwoman.

As an argument to define madness, Foucault suggestively states:

“It takes the false for the true…it needs no external element to reach a true resolution. It has merely to carry its illusion to the point of truth… in madness , equilibrium is established, but it masks that equilibrium beneath the cloud of illusion.” (Foucault, Madness and Civilization, p . 33-34).

Also Marilyn Yalom justifies it more briefly as “an imprecise, nonmedical term for a variety of abnormal mental states characterized by major impairment of personality functions, loss of reality testing and marked disorders of mood”. No matter which critical explanation is chosen, madness results as an emotive term which is used to categorize, divide and dissever “the different”.

The endowments of madness being its social construction, feminist theories have female dementia as a result of misogynistic or patriarchal social fundamental laws. As Ussher stated, “the concept of madness is used to maintain the dominant order”, tagging as “insane” was to maintain women’s condition as outsiders within patriarchal community: (Ibid, p. 167)

“Misogyny makes women mad either though naming us as the “Other,” through reinforcing the phallocentric discourse, or through depriving women of power, privilege and independence. Or misogyny causes us to be named as mad…Labeling us mad silences our voices. We can be ignored. The ratings of a mad woman are irrelevant. Her anger is impotent.”(Ussher, Women’s Madness, p. 7)

In order to protect male society from depth inquiry, labeling women’s anger or misery as madness was considered an easier solution.

Throughout history, madness has been reckoned as a female disorder, an occurrence of highly leveled feminine sexuality. During the Enlightenment, many healthcare professionals considered that women had the disability to differentiate reality from the harvest of their own imagination: they were “enflamed by the hot vapors of the womb” (“hysteria” literally means “of the womb”) (Charles Ford, p. 153) and that women were more susceptible to insanity than men “because the instability of their reproductive systems interfered with their sexual, emotional, and rational control.” (Showalter, The Female Malady, p. 55)

Tennessee Williams mirrors the total mental breakdown of Blanche DuBois, her complete recantation from reality and submerging into a fantasy world being seen as a result of her elaborate illusions about herself and about the world.

In the beginning of the play, the withered Southern Belle has lost all her “beautiful dream” (Belle Reve), after enduring a lot of suffering caused by the death of her family members.

In order to “fill (her) empty heart (T. Williams, p. 188), she immerses into a plentiful life of imprudent “intimacies with strangers”, after witnessing a mass abandonment as she sees all these deaths, as well as her young, homosexual husband, Allan. This ordure causes not only her discharge from the professorship for enticing a seventeen year-old student, but as well to her sequel evacuation from a decrepit hotel for unchaste behavior. Eventually, the haven she searches for, finds it at her sister’s place in New Orleans, which also grinds Blanche’s last speck of sanity, where she is awestruck by Mitch, her admirer’s refusal and held by the sexual violence Stanley, her brother-in-law,.

Joseph Riddel persuasively and precisely drafted Blanche’s character, highlighting her inner struggle between illusion and reality:

“Blanche, as her name implies, is the pallid, lifeless product of her illusions, of a way of life that has forfeited its vigor… Her life is a living division of two warring principles, desire and decorum, and she is the victim of civilization’s attempt to reconcile the two in a morality. Her indulgent past is a mixture of sin and romance, reality and illusion, the excesses of the self and the restraints of society… Blanche lives in a world of shades, of Chinese lanterns, of romantic melodies that conjure up dream worlds, of perversions turned into illusory romances, of alcoholic escape, of time past – the romantic continuity of generations to which she looks for identity”(Joseph N. Riddel, p. 25).

Blanche admits her mental illness condition in the beginning of the play (“I was on the verge of – lunacy, almost!”)(Williams, p. 21); and although she is on the verge of her breaking point, she reaches New Orleans, her brother’s-in-law reckless behavior challenges her collapse even more, as she predicts in Scene 6 : “The first time I laid eyes on him I thought to myself, that man is my executioner!”(Ibid, p. 93).

The relentless conflict between Blanche and Stanley throughout the play represents Blanche externalizing her inner struggle between reality and illusion. Scene 10 (Mitch’s confrontations and Blanche’s rape) depicts truculent reality’s conquest of a woman’s entire being overlying in fantasy’s hoarding.

Tennessee Williams enlightens Blanche’s fear of loneliness and abandonment, the most evident characteristics of her insanity.

Her promiscuity is somehow explained by her impeachment over her “sexual failure” with Allan, as if was trying to retrieve with strangers what she erred with him, as in Scene6:

“I’ve been – not so awf’ly good lately. I’ve run for protection… from under one leaky roof to another leaky roof – because it was storm – all storm, and I was – caught in the center… People don’t see you – men, don’t – don’t even admit your existence unless they are making love to you. And you’ve got to have your existence admitted by someone, if you’re going to have someone’s protection”(Williams, p. 515).

Through her line “That’s why I’ve been – not so awf’ly good lately”, Blanche takes responsibility for part of the behavior she has gilded from Mitch so she could have a more permanent sort of refuge from the world. Stanley’s subsequent discovery about her past and Mitch’s further rebuff are two of the final actions to shiver her thread of sanity.

Another proof of Blanche’s shredded mental state in illustrated by her obsession with physical appearance.

Sahu claims that “fear is occasioned by…the inevitable decay of youth,” and, as Blanche ages, she snuggles desperately to delusions of daintiness – pretty clothes, eccentric jewelry, perfumes – shaping a totally new world in which she can hide (Sahu, p. 222).

Laurilyn J. Harris depicts Blanche’s state and ensues that:

“Individuals tormented by fragile egos and minimal self-confidence need constant positive reinforcement from others. Their self-esteem rises and falls according to the image of themselves they see reflected in the eyes of those emotionally or spatially close to them. …Blanche’s preoccupation with how she “looks” does not spring from narcissism or vanity, but from her crumbling sense of self-worth. As she grows more and more unstable under the pressure of Stanley’s unrelenting contempt and his awareness of that part of herself she most wishes to hide, she frantically seeks to create a romanticized, reassuring self-portrait that she can study endlessly in the living” ( Laurilyn J. Harris, p.86).

Blanche’s affected retention to physical beauty is expressed through glass mirrors. Immediately after Mitch collates Blanche with her past sexual affairs, she looms a conversation with imaginary beaus in which she recognizes the true version of herself in a hand mirror and “slams the mirror face down with such violence that the glass cracks” (Scene 10, stage directions)(Williams, p. 122), the splintered mirror anticipating the impending disintegration of her consciousness.

In this light it can be seen Blanche’s true identity menace as time, which can only be conquered by casting away the general groundwork from which it diverts its meaning: reality (Nada Zeineddine, p. 117).

As an addition to mirrors, Blanche’s fictitious universe requires the outside attendance of soft lighting and Williams uses his characters’ dismay of bright lights as salient way to elucidate her mental decay. Withered lighting conceals physical needles of aging, but it also has a further and more meaningful significance, expressed by Mary Ann Corrigan: “just as bright lights must be turned off or shaded, so every sordid reality must be cloaked in illusion” (Mary Ann Corrigan, p. 87).

Scene 3 captures Blanche asking Mitch to overlay the bedroom light bulb with a paper lantern which she bought from Bourbon Street, she stating: “I can’t stand a naked light bulb, any more than I can a rude remark or a vulgar action” (Williams, p. 55).

Blanche’s equipoise of the dishabille light bulb with roughness and the paper lantern with softness entails the comparison between the reality she cannot face and the ravishment she wishes to devise. At the very moment when Mitch enforces viewing Blanche under the bare light appurtenance in Scene 9, she says:

“I don’t want realism. I want magic! Yes, yes, magic! I try to give that to people. I misrepresent things to them. I don’t tell 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!”(Ibid, p. 117).

Mitch proceeds in removing the paper lantern and Blanche is compelled to face the true reality that triggers her mental malady. Blanche is as sensitive and dainty as a paper lantern and cannot swerve the harsh light of Stanley’s realism.

Williams also binds light images to Allan, Blanche’s only true love. Blanche first equalizes her late spouse with light in Scene 6: “It was like you suddenly turned a blinding light on something that had always been half in shadow…” ( Ibid, p. 95).

After narrating his rash act, she states:

“the searchlight which had been turned on the world was turned off again and never for one moment since has there been any light that’s stronger than this – kitchen – candle.”(Ibid, p. 96).

After his doom, Blanche’s subsistence immersed into the symbolic darkness yielded by the kitchen candle; since her miserly Allan was as glowing as a blinding spotlight, all her squalid sexual romances with strangers are represented by the gloomy, glimmering kitchen candle- wizened displacement for the real thing.

Another evidence of Blanche’s threatening insanity is her increasing reliability upon alcohol. Medical specialists attune that many factors are liable for women to become alcoholic, these factors often leading to doldrums. Much evidence shows that significant quantity drinking is immediately followed by depression as a standard strategy.

Thus, Blanche’s permanent and frenzied search for alcohol in Kowalski’s apartment, as well as her further debauch, emerge on her emblematic journey with the Desire and Cemeteries streetcars towards Elysian Fields (her sister’s residence), where in classical mythology lodgers drank of the Lethe river to overlook their past lives (Griffin, p. 50).

Light

Throughout the drama “A streetcar Named Desire”, the prime symbol which is used to illustrate the characters’ insecurities and fears is a lampion, also known as a Chinese paper lantern, which, despite the expectations, in fact represents the mirroring of Blanche’s true inner hidden feelings , who is considered to be the overweening and mysterious sister .

As well as its primary usage, the Chinese paper lantern is now attributed the role of a metaphor as a coverage, which Blanche uses in order to be able to deal with the unpleasant and unappealing things she doesn’t like about herself and which she tries to burry under the appearance of trite clothing hoping she would become somehow appealing to those around her.

For Blanche as the main character, the lampion plays such an important part because it simply reduces all her flaws to an ordinary shed of paper, as much as it takes for the common light bulb to become extraordinary just by covering it with a colorful, common paper sack and all of a sudden, the place acquires a whole new appearance.

As Stanley’s quote says “and lo and behold the place has turned into Egypt” (10; 2241), a quote which acts as base for the symbolism of the lantern because it surprises the way that Blanche tries to play fool on everybody who surrounds her by playing the Saint Marry, who is really just a selfish hooker who eventually gets exposed by Stanley and is in the end shown her real self.

To Blanche, being one hundred percent honest all the time it is not always a necessity, she coping better with the idea of telling the truth only by half. She agrees with the idea of appearing like something she is not only to raise up to the others’ standards and if the only way to get her there is by lying, she won’t have any impediment in doing it.

Although at the beginning of the play, the lantern enters just as a prop, it gets to a point where it becomes the element with the deepest meaning of “A Streetcar Named Desire”.

At its origins a lantern is an object, a little light bulb surrounded and protected by a case whose material could vary from plastic to metal or glass, but in this case Blanche buys a lower-priced lantern called a Chinese paper lantern which is normally very fragile, is made of paper and has a sphere or cylindrical shape which may come in a vast palette of colors and whose only purpose is decorative.

If questioning why she purchased it, the answer is “I can‟t stand a naked light bulb, any more than I can a rude remark or vulgar action” (3; 2207). To Blanche, the lampion represents the embodiment of the power, power which she also thinks she has over how people see her and over what she chooses to beautify and sometimes overdo. But the only abnormality is that not only she chooses to transform a banal light bulb into something more fashionable by dressing it up, but she chooses to live her life following this “rule”, constantly changing into something new and adapting to the standards of the society.

This continuous change could go on forever. But what happens when the paper lantern becomes fragile and eventually breaks, dispersing its glamour in the blur of the moment? Blanche breaks down as well and in a matter of seconds she is left exposed, vulnerable and confused by the person she really is because she can’t relate to this “new” person at all and is left bewildered by the turn of events that had just taken place.

Right now, that small, brittle light bulb is much more alike Blanche than she would ever think. With every move her whole world shakes and at any moment she could be blown away by the reality and even worse: become a wreck so she needs to find a quick way to invent something that would make her less ordinary, less boring and more interesting and worth attention.

Even if she tries to explain her constant need of the lampion, there is still left the mystery of the symbolism, which she later learns about. Barely after she hears some rumors about no one else but her, just like any other time, she decides to explain herself trough the paper lantern, building a scheming plea with its aide:

“I never was hard or self-sufficient enough. When people are soft—soft people have got to shimmer and glow—they’ve got to put on soft colors, the colors of butterfly wings, and put a — paper lantern over the light. . . . It isn‟t enough to be soft. You’ve got to be soft and attractive. And I—I’m fading now! I don’t know how much longer I can turn the trick”(5; 2217).

For one moment, maybe unconsciously, Blanche resembles herself to a light bulb, being easyly breakable, needing to be protected by a paper lantern as an armour. She finaly self-acknowledged her double-sided personality and the way she uses it to manipulate and fulfill people’s standards.

Blache confronts her inner self and decides to show to the world a person she isn’t, instead of showing her real self. So, exactly like a hot-short light bulb, she is shinny and glowing but at the same time, extremely breakable and very sensitive. Also, beliveing that in order to be liked and apreciated by the society you have to constantly have something new ,she gets to the point where she starts making up interesting and long-lasting lying stories in order to appear more attractive to the society.

Blanche’s beliefs are that it is the outside that matters and that the beauty does not lie underneath people’s appearance or in their character, but on the outside , based on the way you look, dress and behave. So, when questioned by her sister about her extreme vulnerability when it comes to the age, she responses : “Because of the hard knocks my vanity’s been given. What I mean is—he thinks I’m sort of prim and proper, you know! [She laughs out sharply.] I want to deceive him enough to make him—want me . . .”(5; 2218).

Rather than choosing to be her true self , to let her real personality come into the spotlight and to find a way to create her own persona and style, she uses the lapion as a metaphor to look like someone more in their youth and with a much more powerful personality.

So just like the cover of the Chinese paper lantern masks the banality of the small light bulb with its colorfoul, big and grandiose geometricaly shaped paper, Blanche is hiding underneath her stylish, fashionable clothes and makeup, just like she would hide behind a curtain for the people not to discover her real age. This subject is a tabuu, one between her and Mitch, her newly soon-to-be lover, she not wanting him to find out her real age.

Blanche’s high range of self-consciousness and low level of self-confidence makes her take the decision to stay hidden in the dark and continue with the storyline of her already told lies. Even when Mitch, her crush, is willing to take the time to discover her true personality step by step, she stays firm on her position telling him “I like it dark. The dark is comforting to me” (9; 2235).

Even if it is damaging for her, Blanche would rather remain in the dark side where she is covered up and protected from everyone and everything including Mitch. Blanche, by staying in the dark and not taking a chance to show herself to Mitch, does not give him the opportunity to see her aging appearance, her true self, her imperfections and her normality, which she totally rejects.

Hearing the rumors about Blanche, Mitch’s curiosity grew bigger and bigger and he now wanted to get to know her and bring her into the spotlight, both by her appearance and her inner self. But when he tries to playfully light up the lampion, Blanche exclaims : “I don‟t want realism, I want magic! [MITCH laughs.] Yes, yes, magic! I try to give that to people. I misrepresent things to them. And if that is sinful, then let me be damned for it!—Don’t turn the light on!” (9; 2236).

The real Blanche remains an enigma for all those people around her thanks to the manner in which she likes to transform herself, adjusting her behaviour in order to fulfill everyone’s wishes. Although it is intriguing how she still drives Mitch’s attention uppon this so called young and ingenuous lady, she simultaneously allows herself to admit her pleasure for florishing things a little bit, beliveing that all she is actually doing is fooling everyone just by playing a sinless game and slightly diverting from the reality.

But, instead, she put up a little storyline for every single person who she met when spending time with her sister. So better said, Blanche’s lampion is all colorfull, can have whatever shape she wishes for and can either be a simple or detailed one, just like her capability of transforming herself to reach the rolemodel everyone thinks of.

While trying to explain herself to Mitch when it comes to her never-the-same-self, she comprims everything in just a short line: “I’m very adaptable—to circumstances” (3; 2207). Then again, she proves her willingness to change according to other’s preferences, acting just like the flexible Chinese paper lantern. Being able to fit in any situation, wether planned or spontanuous or in any circumstances given at the time, and by whatever kind of antourage she’s surrounded, she always follows a plan that makes her longed for at any time and by anyone.

What is at the same time astonishing but expected is the fact that she sees nothing abnormal about her self perception and she is utterly amazed when people blame her for behaving that way, finding it easy to defend herself by saying : “A woman’s charm is fifty per cent illusion. . .”(2; 2200). She won’t try to deny the fact that, when it comes down to gaining something, she is capable of using every possible solution to get what she wants, especially the attention coming from partners of opposite gender.

She also admits that she could stop any minute if she would be facing a serious matter. “When a thing is important. . .” (2; 2200), Blanche considers that showing your true personallity and acting like yourself around a man isn’t necessary. Being fake is no mistake.

She prefers the idea of having a few guys hovering over her and trying to get her heart to melt, rather than having just one guy attempting to know and like the real her, also her qualities and her imperfections and not only her flawless self.

With all the effort that Blanche is putting into making everyone accept her, Stanley, her brother-in-law, manages to effortlessly see right through all her diversion, making all her tryouts to be universally accepted seeming pointless.

All the way through the drama „A Streetcar Named Desire” , Blanche, seeing herself as a naked, fragile light bulb shadowed, but simultaneously sheltered by the fancy shaped paper, as eccentric as that seems, Stanley sees the reality clearly as daylight. Following that, he confronts Blanche and demands some explanations :

”I’ve been on to you from the start! Not once did you pull any wool over this boy’s eyes! You come in here and sprinkle the place with powder and spray perfume and cover the light-bulb with a paper lantern, and lo and behold the place has turned into Egypt and you are the Queen of the Nile! Sitting on your throne and swilling down my liquor! I say—Ha!—Ha! Do you hear me?—Ha—ha—ha! [He walks into the bedroom.]”(10; 2241).

Trying to discover the reason behind all the masquerade, Stanley, overwhelmed by all the lies swirling around Blanche, sorroundind him also, confronts her about her strategy of manipulating everyone, walking around with an image that shows nothing but a false persona who is all glittered up in order to look fancy.

Stanley considers that Blanche’s way of thinking is defectuous, he denying all these cover-ups who end up destroying a person’s real character. Instead, he pleads for the embodiement of people’s real figures coming into the spotlight.

While Stanley agrees with people who choose to be the same ones in all the circumstances, Blanche is standing for the existance of a so-called mask. For the ability to cope with every situation differently by becoming another person, she hopes her strategy would mark Stanley and his wife also. Protecting her from being busted, still, the plan ends up being a failure and she is now unprotected and exposed to everyone’s opinions.

As the play approaches its end, Blanche finally shows off her real self and this way sends the lampion in the shade of the dark, decision which is seen as bad luck for our protagonist. It actually swings her in the middle of a tragedy-she is taken advantage by her brother-in-law, action that gets her even closer to the edge of having no confidence at all. Thus, this makes the brave and mysterious Blanche seem like she never existed, Blanch is now displayed as a secluded and confused woman.

While Blanche accepts the idea of leaving her sister’s appartement in order to go to a reahability center destined to her abnormal way of acting, she continues sustaining the fact that she must have left something behind by mistake. Just then, Stanley catches up with her and tells her : “You left nothing here but spilt talcum and old empty perfume bottles—unless it‟s the paper lantern you want to take with you. You want the lantern?” (11; 2247).

He then brutally tears up the colorful paper until he reduces the lampion to a simple, easily breakable light bulb. Afterwards, he hands the remains of something that was once flawless and full of life to Blanche to cradle and defend. While she cries her eyes out upon what is now left of her life once doubtfully perfect, she mirrors herself in the leftovers of the chinese paper lantern.

Right now, Blanche is seen exactly like the now worn out lantern. She is acting just like a lively decorative object, who on the inside covers just a trivial, a worthless source of light which is torn apart by someone and left there standing bare and vulnerable to the world around him.

Assigning such a big role in a drama to a thing as fragile and easily overcoming as a chinese paper lantern is a risky pathway to follow. Since at its origins the lantern is used during a celebration, when it is used in such a good way that it perfectly correlates with a being’s way of acting, it is imagined to have some kind of secret meaning underneath its appearance. This could be considered an easy way for a simple object to tie a tight knot with a person’s personality.

Picturing Blanche in the portrait of a chinese paper lanter, she is acting just the same way as the lampion. She puts out a stone-hard image, but only to defend a fragile and weak interior, behaving the only way she knows, by designing a character who would fit in all the society’s charts and who could please anybody, changing itself after people’s preferences. The only time someone manages to see behind her imaginary wall is the moment when Stanley, her brother-in-law, makes the mistake to reveal her private, real self, leaving her free to become a prey for the world’s prejudices.

Blanche folded her true personality in a beautifully and painstakingly made portrait which was supposed to have the same effect upon both Blanche and the lampion. Putting behind her most self-conscious flaws, she is incapable of stopping the inevitable to take place. The aging becomes more and more proeminent on her physical image once the time goes on.

Her plan gets screwed up when Stanley makes his appearance in the picture, he succiding in his process of distroying his sister-in-law little by little, step by step.

Staging “A Streetcar Named Desire”

First Scenery Of The Play

“A Streetcar Named Desire” is a play written by Tennessee Williams for which he was awarded with the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1948. On December 3, 1947 it was opened on the Broadway stage  and closed on December 17, 1949 in the Ethel Barrymore Theatre. Elia Kazan was the Broadway production director, the principal characters being starred by Marlon Brando, Kim Hunter, Jessica Tandy, and Karl Malden. In 1949 the London production was opened with Bonar Colleano, Vivien Leigh and Renee Asherson, being directed by Laurence Olivier.

Tennessee Williams classes ”A Streetcar Named Desire” very clearly, pointing out explicit directions about staging the play:

“The exterior of a two-story corner building on a street in New Orleans which is named Elysian Fields and runs between the L & N tracks and the river. The section is poor but, unlike corresponding sections in other American cities, it has a raffish charm. The houses are mostly white frame, weathered grey, with rickety outside stairs and galleries and quaintly ornamented gables. This building contains two flats, upstairs and down. Faded white stairs ascend to the entrances of both”(13).

As the story goes by, he pictures the ideea of the contact in between an outward wall and the alley, quoting :

“Depending on the location of the action, the audience sees either the inside or the street and outside of the house: A light goes on behind the blind, turning it light blue. Blanche slowly follows her into the downstairs flat. The surrounding areas dim out as the interior is lighted” (16).

It is substantial for the reader to comprehend that ,while at some times, we are able to see the outside sorroundings of the house, such as the road, at certain moments a wall of the house breaks down and so we are able to see the interior:

“When the lights fade on the gauzy, shimmery exterior and rise on the inside two rooms of the apartment, the contrast from the beauty—even beauty in decay—is startling. Here the colors, though still dingy with age, are primary, greens and yellows, rather than muted—a fitting reflection . . . of the wilder side of the Quarter” (Adler, p. 24).

The sprinkle of elegance found in the atmosphere reminds everyone of the paradox in which her habitants live. Another hint drives us back to Belle Reve’s native elegance, the DuBois family plantation (Adler, p. 24).

The playlist and the ambiance, also have an important contribution in the making of the mise-en-scène. Williams incorporates them in his contemplations about the set saying :

“It is first dark of an evening early in May. The sky that shows around the dim white building is a peculiarly tender blue, almost a turquoise, which invests the scene with a kind of lyricism and gracefully attenuates the atmosphere of decay. You can almost feel the warm breath of the brown river beyond the river warehouses with their faint redolences of bananas and coffee. A corresponding air is evoked by the music of Negro entertainers at a barroom around the corner. In this part of New Orleans, you are practically always just around the corner, or a few doors down the street, from a tinny piano being played with the infatuated fluency of brown fingers. This “Blue Piano” expresses the spirit of the life which goes on here”(13).

“The spirited yet sometimes dissonant jazz music—the recurrent blues piano, trumpet,and drums—heard during the play [reflecting] . . . the wilder side of the Quarter” (Adler, p. 24) starts as the play begins with Stanley and Mitch entering on stage, and never ends. Williams refers to it as the “perpetual ‘blue piano’” in the stage direction at the start of Scene Two (82).

There is an obvious relationship between the musical ambience and the characters. “The nightclub music and the Varsouviana (a polka melody played when Blanche’s husband died that haunts her at stressful times throughout the play) convey the emotional states of the characters at each stage of the action” (Corrigan, p. 59).

Blanche DuBois is a woman who has lost her color, but is still an appealing Southern Belle, who adheres to high-toned Southern customs of decorum. Her requirements for virtue and culture only mask her alcoholism and the other problems.

Her sanity is part of a person who she presents to shield her reality form the others, but also makes her always still attractive to men. Blanche arrives in her sister’s house, Stella Kowalski, on Elysian Fields Avenue in the Faubourg Marigny neighborhood of New Orleans; she manages to get to her sister’s place by taking a streetcar called "Desire". The wreaked, urban ambiance of Stella's home represents a shock for Blanche's nerves. Stella, being affraid of her husband’s, Stanley, reaction, welcomes Blanche with a warm reception, but also with some trepidation.

As Blanche explains that " due to the "epic fornications" of their forbears their ancestral Southern plantation, Belle Reve in Laurel, Mississippi, has been "lost, her veneer of self-possession begins to sleep. Blanche relates Stella that her supervisor allowed her to take some time off from her workplace as an English teacher because of her problems with nerves, but the truth was that she got fired for having an affair with a 17-year-old student.

A short marriage busted by the discovery of her young husband, Allan Grey, having a homosexual relation and his subsequent suicide has led Blanche to retire into a world in which her fantasies and illusions are confused with reality.

On the other hand she was mentally shut down because of her pretentious, intrusive refinement and because of her sister Stella and her husband’s behavior, Stanley Kowalski, who is a sensual but in the same time, brutish worker. He and Stella live a real love story and a passionate sexual relationship. Stella overrides his primal behavior, which is part of what she found attractive at him for the first time.

Their relationship is volatile and easily based on a powerful, sexual chemistry, something difficult to understand for Blanche. Stanley shared Stella's pregnancy to Blanche, who has already blessed it. It is suggested that Stella was frequently leaving Stanley’s place, going upstairs to spend time with a friend, always coming back.

Blanche's arrival always cut up rough the relationship between her sister and her brother-in-law. Stella's preoccupation for her sister's well-being stimulates Blanche to hold court in the Kowalski apartment, infuriating Stanley and leading to a conflict between him and Stella. Blanche and Stanley are on a prang course; Stanley's friend, Blanche's would-be suitor, Harold "Mitch" Mitchell, inadvertently joins Stanley onwards, destroying Blanche.

Stanley digs and discovers Blanche's past with the help of a co-worker who travels to Laurel quite often. He confronts her with the things that she has been trying to input, partly out of objects that her character’s flaws may be prudish to others as they were in Laurel and partly out of frustration and tiredness with her pretense.

His tests to make her accept her past are cruelly direct, Blanche not being aware of the events happening in her mind. While Stella has the baby, Stanley and Blanche are left alone in the apartment. In their final mental fight, it is strongly implied that Stanley rapes Blanche, resulting in her psychotic break. Stanley and his confinement, Stella, have her closed in a mental institution.

The character of Blanche had a real story based on Williams' sister, Rose Williams, who had mental problems.

Stage Production

The first Broadway production was directed by Irene Mayer Selznick. It opened at the Shubert Theatre in New Haven for a short time before moving to the Ethel Barrymore Theatre on December 3, 1947. 

Mayer Selznick first wanted to cast Margaret Sullavan and John Garfield as main characters, but settled on Marlon Brando and Jessica Tandy, who were just unknown actors at the time. Brando was given car price list to Tennessee Williams' home in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where he not only gave a divine reading, but did some house improvements as well. Tandy was chosen after Williams saw her performance in another production of his one-act play “Portrait of a Madonna”.

The opening night cast also included Kim Hunter as Stella and Karl Malden as Mitch. In spite of its shocking scenes and petrified dialogues, the audience was delirious and applauded for half an hour after the end.

After all, Uta Hagen took the place of Tandy, and Anthony Quinn replaced Brando. Hagen and Quinn went to the show on a national tour and then came back to Broadway for additional performances.

At the beginning of the year, when Brando broke his nose, Jack Palance replaced him. Ralph Meeker also took the part of Stanley both in the Broadway and also touring companies. Tandy received a Tony Award for Best Actress in a play in 1948, sharing the honor with Judith Anderson's portrayal of Medea and with Katharine Cornell.

Brando portrayed Stanley with an overt sexuality combined with a boyish affection that made his portrait of Stanley, and especially the moment where he howls "Stella!" for his wife, into cultural limits.

Uta Hagen's Blanche on the national tour was directed not by Elia Kazan, who had directed the Broadway production, but by Harold Clurman, and it has been referred, both in interviews by Hagen and ideas by contemporary critics, that the Clurman-directed interpretation moved the focus of audience sympathy back to Blanche and away from Stanley.

Beginning with 19th century, theaters began to replace melodrama in their plays. More and more, they started using a style of acting called dramatic naturalism. By the time “A Streetcar Named Desire” was written and produced, melodrama was present in its last stages and Blanche DuBois's memorable personality used it to illustrate exactly how knavish melodramatic acting could be.

Endless sighs, aimless screams of distress and fluttery hand gestures are all employed by Blanche throughout the play. Dramatic lines about needing somebody to rescue are an internal part of Blanche's working. They tissue her true personality (that of a sick, unbalanced woman) and allow her to play with men like Mitch, who falls for her histrionics and becomes confident that he will be her savior.

With the 20 century's arrival came dramatic naturalism, based on Constantin Stanislavski's method-acting system. Unlike melodrama, dramatic naturalism focused on realistic acting, where actors were asked to use their memories to help them emote realistically during scenes, as per Stanislavski's method. 

The play's first director, Elia Kazan, put in her job a Stanislavski reading on every play he worked on and his notes on “A Streetcar Named Desire”, describing not a melodramatic wretch Stanley Kowalski, but a defensive, wrong and relatable Stanley, whom Marlon Brando portrayed very well.

On the other hand, the biggest example of dramatic naturalism is Blanche's opponent, Stanley, who in the first production of “A Streetcar Named Desire” was played by Marlon Brando. After his exemplary performance as a wanton yet need Stanley, American theater saw in him a significant shift away from melodrama and toward dramatic naturalism. Brando has been greeted as the father of theatrical stars like other big actors: James Dean and Jack Nicholson.

Tallulah Bankhead, whom Williams was thinking when writing the play, starred in a 1956 New York City Center Company, production which was directed by Herbert Machiz. The production, which was staged at the Coconut Grove Playhouse in Miami, was not well received by audience. The first Broadway rebirth of the play was in 1973. It was directed by the Lincoln Center, at the Vivian Beaumont Theater, and the main characters were played by Rosemary Harris as Blanche, James Farentino as Stanley and Patricia Conolly as Stella.

Another great test of screening takes place in 1992 with Alec Baldwin as Stanley and Jessica Lange as Blanche. It was put on scene at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, the same theatre that the original production was staged in. This production had such a great impact that it was filmed for television. It advised Timothy Carhart as Mitch and Amy Madigan as Stella, as well as future “Sopranos” stars: James Gandolfini and Aida Turturro. Gandolfini was Carhart's standby.

The 2005 Broadway revival was directed by Edward Hall and produced by The Round, about Theater Company. They had used John C. Reilly as Stanley, Amy Ryan as Stella, and Natasha Richardson as Blanche. The production was for Natasha Richardson, the final appearance on Broadway in honor of her death in 2009 in a skiing accident.

In winter of 2009, an African-American production of “A Streetcar Named Desire” was premiered at Pace University, produced by Steven McCasland. The production starred Lisa Lamothe as Blanche, Stephon O'Neal Pettway as Stanley, and Jasmine Clayton as Stella, and recommended Sully Lennon as Allan Gray, the ghost of Blanche's dead husband.

The first all-black production of "A Streetcar Named Desire" was maybe the only one performed by the Summer Theatre Company at Lincoln University in Jefferson City, Missouri in August 1953 and produced by one of Williams' former classmates at Iowa, Thomas D. Pawley, as noted in the Streetcar edition of the "Plays in Production" series published by Cambridge University Press.

The Sydney Theatre Company started the production of “A Streetcar Named Desire” first on September 5 and ran until October 17, 2009. This play was directed by Liv Ullmann and starred Cate Blanchett as Blanche, Joel Edgerton as Stanley, Robin McLeavy as Stella and Tim Richards as Mitch.

From July 2009 until October 2009, Rachel Weisz and Ruth Wilson starred in a biggest appreciate revival of the play in London's West End at the Donmar Warehouse directed by Rob Ashford. The 2010 Writers' Theater of Chicago production of “A Streetcar Named Desire” was held in Glencoe, Illinois. The last performance of this play was on August 15, 2010.

In 1951 the movie was adapted to the play, directed by Elia Kazan, with Marlon Brando, Malden and Hunter starring and was joined by Vivien Leigh in the role of Blanche. The movie was awarded by the Academy Awards, including three acting awards (Leigh for Best Actress, Malden for Best Supporting Actor and Hunter for Best Supporting Actress); was the first movie who won three out of four acting awards (Brando was nominated for Best Actor but he lost).

Jessica Tandy was the only actor from the original Broadway production not to appear in the 1951 film. References to Allan Grey's sexual orientation are essentially time of the part, due to Motion Picture Production Code Restrictions. But the reason for his suicide is metamorphosed to a general "weakness".

Pedro Almodóvar's 1999 Academy Award-winning film, “All About My Mother”, peculiarities Spanish-language version of the play being performed by some of the sustaining characters. Anyway, some of the film's dialogue is taken from the 1951 film version, not from the original stage version.

It was confirmed by many critics that the 2013 Woody Allen film, “Blue Jasmine”, had common points with “A Streetcar Named Desire” and is most likely to be a loose adaptation. They have a very similar plot and characters, although it has been appropriately updated for modern film audiences.

Comparison Play – Movie

Like the first play, “The Glass Menagerie”, produced only two years earlier, “A Streetcar Named Desire” represented a huge success and stabilized Williams’ position among the most respected playwrights in modern theater. “A Streetcar Named Desire” was his first production who was turned into a movie and because of the highly emotional plot and the good actors it became a success on the “big screen”.

Williams had a great audience to New Orleans, the place where the relationship of Blanche DuBois, her sister Stella and her brother-in-law, Stanley, took place. The next look on the similarities and differences between the play and the film version will give an insight to the essential points, while it is by no means the most part an interpretation.

“A movie based on a Tennessee Williams play is a Tennessee Williams film”, said Forster Hirsch. One can only agree with this account, its evidence is indisputable. More than all, he adds that “The Williams films retain the spirit of the original play, especially, as in the case of “A Streetcar Named Desire”, when Williams himself worked on the screenplay.

His personality still dominates the film version“. Williams was one of the dramatists who would go to every repetition of his play and sit there just to see what the audience feel and be close to watch how the things went. He never interfered a great deal, because many directors had their own way of interpreting the plot.

Contrary to all expectations, he found in Elia Kazan an excellent director who was not only inclined, but was indeed dependent on the cooperation of the playwright. “A Streetcar Named Desire” was their first production together and that is why they did become very good friends.

The play had been a great success on the stage, earning many awards, including others-the Pulitzer Prize and the Drama Critics Circle Award- the movie was a box-office success and won several Academy Awards for best actress, best supporting actress and actor and many more.

In 1947 Tennessee Williams had seen Elia Kazan’s production of Arthur Miller “All My Sons” and he was impressed by what he has done to the drama that he wanted him as director for Streetcar. At first, Kazan didn’t like this idea, but his wife, an old friend of Williams’, read the play and was impressed and she convinced her husband to stage it.

The casting of the two leading actors was difficult. Kazan sent the twenty-three-year-old Marlon Brando to Cape Cod to read the part of Stanley, where Williams was living for the summer. Brando was in Kazan’s "beginners" class because he never had an important role to play. But as soon as Williams got to meet him, three days later, Brando had immediately received the role of Stanley Kowalski:"I never saw such a raw talent in an individual", Williams wrote afterwards.

The opposite role of Stanley, Blanche DuBois, was occupied by Jessica Tandy, who had been playing “Portrait of A Madonna”, a one-act play also by Williams, which was directed by her husband Hume Cronyn. Later, he recalls in his memoirs that "it was instantly apparent to me that Jessica was Blanche" (Williams, p. 132). The other two most important roles were casted, Williams telling Kazan he should take care of the other parts as he wished.

Kim Hunter as Blanche’s sister, Stella, and Karl Malden as Mitch, were chosen without any doubt. With one exception, most of the original members of the stage production remained on the positions and had to repeat their roles in the film version of “A Streetcar Named Desire”, directed also by Elia Kazan. The change made in the cast was the role of Blanche, which was originally taken by Jessica Tandy.

Vivien Leigh, who had been playing Blanche in London, directed by her present husband, Laurence Olivier, had received the vote to star in the screenplay. The movie was made in a short period thanks to all of the actors, who had been performing their roles countless times on stage.

Kazan later remembers that "it was difficult to get involved in it again, to generate the kind of excitement which I had had from the first time around. The actors where fine – but for me it was marrying the same woman twice; you know that there won’t be any surprises this time"(Phillips, p. 229).

At first, Leigh had misunderstandings with Kazan; she told him that her role of Blanche, intended by her husband, differed from the one she had imagined, but he unmistakably made clear that she was either to follow his lead or leave. She agreed and became enthusiastic and impatient (Williams, Dakin, p. 179).

Although Leigh was a British actress, she was to take again the role of a southern gentlewoman, just as about ten years before, in “Gone With The Wind” and decidedly the southern twang suits her well. Her interpretation of Blanche made a strong impression on critics and it won her the Oscar for best female in a leading role. Brando was the perfect counterpart and he submitted his explosive feelings from the stage to the screen.

Accidentally, he lost the Academy Award to Humphrey Bogart, staring on the side of Katherine Hepburn in “African Queen” that year. However, it was the beginning of the road to success for Marlon Brando. He never went back to the stage, but gave his big performance four years later in “The Wild One”, which finally made him a movie star of that time.

As already mentioned, Elia Kazan and Tennessee Williams became close friends over the years. They worked together on other important productions like “Cat On A Hot Tin Roof”, to name just one. Elia Kazan was awarded an Oscar for his lifetime realizations, but critics were divided into two sides, one eulogizing his tribute to modern theater and film and the other insinuating his doubtful involvement in anti-communistic affairs during the McCarthy Era. In any event, his work as a director is consecrated.

If doing a parallel between the words in the play and in the movie, one could easily recognize that they are – with a little exception– almost identical. We can say the same thing about the plot of the movie, which closely follows the structure of the play. The play’s eleven scenes represent the perfect script for the stage, as well as for the screen.

Kazan tried to follow the original production as much as possible, although he thought about opening up the movie for the “big screen”, which is usually a good approach adopted. He turned down this approbation after repetitions scenes which took place outside New Orleans, which showed Blanche leaving Belle Reve and moving into the city. Kazan said:

“I filmed the play as it was because there was nothing to change. I have no general theory about opening out a play for the screen; it depends on the subject matter. Streetcar is a perfect play. I did consider opening out the play for the screen initially, but ultimately decided to go back to the original play script. It was a polished script that had played in the theater for a year and a half” (Phillips, p. 225).

The depressing state of Kowalski’s apartment was moved from the stage to the screenplay with the help of a trick. “What I actually did”, Kazan explains, “was to make the set smaller; as the story progressed, I took out little flats, and the set got smaller and smaller” (Phillips, p. 227). Even if the characters are being called to another places, which are only mentioned, but not staged in the original production, the scenery looks similar to the one described in the stage directions of the play.

Williams always accounted his plays and movies as highly personal affairs and that is exactly where some critic founded censorious; they denied the author’s right to write, being involved in his work and accused him of using too much of his own experiences and background. He always wanted to be sure that his production would be considered his own work, replying to critics: “all true work of an artist must be personal, whether directly or obliquely, it must and it does reflect the emotional climates of its creator” (Williams, Tennessee, Memoirs, p. 188).

On the other hand, the name of Oscar Saul appears in the credits of “A Streetcar Named Desire” for the adaptation of the play to the screen, even if he had to rewrite only a few lines. Words that were essential to the story and had to be changed due to reasons we will learn more about onwards, were left to Williams himself. That way the plot was left intact in its entirety.

The movie takes the audience to places which are in one word referred to in the play, e.g. the bowling alley, or places not specified at all, like the pier of a dance casino, where Blanche tells Mitch about her husband’s death. Another location change shapes Mitch’s shock and disbelief of Stanley’s revelations about Blanche’s dopy past, taking place in the factory where the two of them worked together. The noise of the machinery in the background expresses the shock that Mitch has just received.

All the accumulated differences can be considered of an insignificant interest which they do not relate to vital parts of the play. But there were bigger changes on the very importance of “A Streetcar Named Desire” made, as we will see later on.

The changes mentioned in cast, the replacement of Jessica Tandy by Vivien Leigh, have already been mentioned before. Leigh’s success on the screen is approaching Tandy on the stage, but as the movie’s purpose it to a larger audience, the stardom is unlikely bigger.

Kazan tried to keep the camera always moving and shot the actors from a lot of angles in order not to keep the static atmosphere of a stage setting. He used the close-up on the actor’s faces to see their feelings in a rough state and with all their dramatic power. Instead, the theater’s audience never had this opportunity to take a close look at Blanche’s face when Mitch says: “I don’t think I ever seen you in the light” and tears the paper lantern off the light bulb. The camera discovers all the ageing signs, every detail of her face being observed in broad spotlight.

Aside from the use of light compared with zoom, Kazan let the camera move throughout the whole construction. Again, the movie was allowed to see places which could never be laid out on stage. The poker scene is the cause of the cutting back and forth between the Kowalski and the Hubbell apartment, where in the first one the men play their game, while in the other Eunice browbeat to pour boiling water through the floor boards to break up the bustle.

In reality the scenery is like a wall around Blanche, although appears in several places than in the stage production, already making reference to Kazan’s many changes as the story progresses. Shadows, walls and even the furniture seem to peril Blanche in the trap of the apartment; her only way out is through madness and by this, with the help of doctor. This end is different from the conclusion that the movie gives us, but why and how will be discussed in the following.

To continue the look on the many differences, we will focus on things which are of a lesser importance to the meaning of the play, this leading to contrasts that might not be recognized immediately, but need explanation in the matter of what those differences are and why they were made.

The beginning of the movie itself is the first different thing from the original plot of the play. The location is the New Orleans central station, where Blanche at once steps out of a steam-cloud evaporated by one of the trains on the track. Her entrance and appearance reminds the entry of an angel, all dressed in white, descending from heaven.

But it is not far from being a heavenly creature as we learn in the progress of the story. Kazan keeps the words to open up the movie with its main character: “They told me to take a street-car named Desire, and then transfer to one called Cemeteries and ride six blocks and get off at Elysian Fields”.

This is the first point which marks the development of Blanche DuBois throughout the production. The play, instead, uses an almost unspectacular entrance of Stanley as an opener, Stanley being the character who opened the play, he throwing some meat towards Stella, this being the first difference, because there is no “meat” in the movie. The film opens with Blanche at the train station, going to the apartment with a streetcar.

In the following scenes of the movie, we can’t see or hear any differences to the play, with few exceptions: the change of the scenery, namely the bowling alley, which is only referred to in the play, plot and words stay unchanged in comparison to the original.

As the important changes have been explained above, there are only some minor cuts in words that need to be made for a closer look: in the movie Blanche is telling the young man that she wants to kiss him once, softly and sweetly on the mouth, which in scene five had to be cut out because the demands of censorship wouldn’t express such a direct expression of sexual desire. In the same manner, another indisputable change was made.

Toward the end of the story, after Mitch has found out the truth about Blanche, he comes to Kowalski’s apartment to see her. He talks about her being “straight” and she answers that “a line can be straight or a street as the heart of a human being”. These directions the ambiguous meaning of the word straight, in sense of straight as a line and on the other hand straight referring to the colloquial term as a substitute for being heterosexual, of course pointing again to her husband’s sexuality.

In the play, Blanche, talking only about the streetcars, put the audience in a situation which did not have an introduction. Kazan tried to follow the same line in the movie, similar to the one in the play. We can observe changes in some phrases – an interaction to emphasize Blanche’s accent – it is a difference between Blanche DuBois and the principal character and also can be underlined a change about the man who was collecting money for the newspaper.

The same thing differs in Scene 5: Blanche and the young man, who collects money for newspapers, are flirting. Every time the young man tries to leave the room, Blanche invents new excuses, wanting to keep him for a long time near her.

At the end of the scene she kisses him but he can’t give her a response. Blanche suffers a shock and gets scared when she tries to approach the young man. There also exist some stage directions which explain his clutter:”The young man clears his throat and looks yearningly at the door”.

In the same time, in the movie, he can’t stop looking at Blanche. When Blanche wants him back, the stage directions indicate that:”she crosses toward him”, but in the film version this part doesn’t exist. When she tries to approach him, he moves to her and they meet in the middle of the room, not at the door.

This incident repeats before the kiss, when he accepts her and doesn’t try to stop her. But Tennessee William’s stage directions state:”Without waiting for him to accept, she crosses quickly to him and presses her lips to his”. Even if the theme was changed it wasn’t a problem for the audience, but for the persons who know the real play, a possible eventual confusion interfering. In the play the young man is scared and naïve, but in the movie he really enjoy his fate.

The film technique which was used represented a real help for the audience to visualize the movie. Kazan used different lighting effects, the movie being made black and white. The light coming from outside puts Blanche in a trouble because she doesn’t know when the young man enters .

The darkness in the room creates a big shadow, thing which increases her interest in him when she realize that he was a young man. She can’t stop staring at him when he steps into the light.

In the movie she is never put in the spotlight so it cannot be deduced her real age or how she actually looks. In the play, not being given enough details, is very hard to realize how Blanche actually looks. Only when Mitch turns the light on Blanche is described, the stage directions indicating that:”he tears the paper lantern off the light bulb”. In the movie the things are changed, being easier to see how Blanche depends on the light. She is in a partly darkened spot everywhere she is seen. In the movie are used a lots of lighting effects to hide Blanche’s real look and to create an appropriate atmosphere for the scene.

In the particularly scenes the camera is at close range. In a scene when Blanche speaks, the camera moves and gets closer in order to capture a good image of her interest in the young man. This is another difference between the movie and the play, with the purpose of creating confusion.

The audience may have not realized that his appearance in the movie differs from his appearance in the play because Kazan has used medium shots of him.

In the play the director he does not use special sound effects because are very difficult to realize. On the other hand, the usage of music in the movie is important, the director using the music of the Four Deuces to create a blue mood.

The music is used according to the status of the characters; so when Blanche is sad and depressed, the music is sad, but when she is with the young man and her state is in a continuous change, the director uses a childish music. The music helps the audience to have a correct opinion about Blanche’s state and about the difference of age between her and the young man.

Elia Kazan’s film version of „A Streetcar Named Desire” is interesting but in the same time confusing for those who have read the play, of course the film techniques having a lot of benefits because help to entertain the audience and emphasize the dramatic situations between the characters.

In the play, Blanche Dubois is outlined as a tragic figure – she is out of time and place, is confused, is lost, lashing in her own world. The director of the movie controlled the sympathy Blanche inspires – its nature, proportion and source and the public perception of Vivien Leigh was one variable in their calculations.

The development of Blanche’s character in “A Streetcar Named Desire” is made by comparing and contrasting the portrayal of Blanche as a punished woman. Kazan uses a lot of techniques to create a “Blanche” who is more delicious in the movie, in comparison with the play.

“A Streetcar Named Desire” is without a doubt one of the most staged and appreciated plays in this century. Its influence on modern drama and movie is obviously evident as it marked the beginning of the successful careers of Tennessee Williams and Marlon Brando. Hollywood had a new direction; movies that followed “A Streetcar Named Desire” were seen in a different way in regard to censorship.

Many other plays were turned into movies beginning with this example, fifteen of them also by Williams, many of them award winning blockbusters. Names like “Cat On A Hot Tin Roof”, “Night of the Iguana” and “Camino Real” featuring Paul Newman, Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton and Al Pacino, are just a few examples of those performances.

But Williams had a different view on his rising success, which did not only give him the financial independence and freedom he needed as an artist, but trapped him in the machinery of having to deliver one hit after another. He sometimes could not stand the excitement people would make about his person.

In an essay which appeared four days before the New York opening of “A Streetcar Named Desire”, Williams asked to what good is the success he has experienced, answering himself with the words: “Perhaps to get an honest answer you will have to give him [the one who has also experienced the kind of success he has] a shot of truth-serum but the word he

will finally groan is unprintable in genteel publications.