A Streetcar Named Desire
by Tennessee Williams
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Book Summary Information
Author: Tennessee WilliamsIntroduction: Arthur Miller
Edition: Paperback
Published: 2004-09
ISBN: 0811216020
Number of pages: 224
Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation
Book Reviews of A Streetcar Named Desire
Book Review: The Kindness Of Strangers
Summary: 5 Stars
When I was 13 I unearthed two pieces of interesting horror from digging around in the family secrets. This is what we learn at 13. That box we look to open in knowing who we are, find partially locked by time and hands we cannot know, we search for answers we often cannot handle learning. Pandora. The first revelation was my mom's "first marriage" and the subsequent re-making of her in my mind awaits a real telling ( ah the necessity of fiction to tell the truths), the second was while reading letters that Tennessee Williams wrote and then instantly I realized we were actually family, my own life was as connected as I suspected reading his works. His works were so familiar as to be like lines from the song "Telling my life with his words, killing me softly." He was climbing the family tree in the letters, within the text, it's my family tree. And as it turned out we both sprang from this mutual beginning in the Seviers of the then State of Franklin frontiers. I'm not sure why this wasn't a part of rich family telling, why they left it out ( for me to read in books I absorbed) until I asked about him specifically with my Grandmother Axie Sevilla McIntosh, and to my father who fully admitted the connections as nothing so spectacular, to have it acknowledged as true, when story and relative is so entrenched in the dialogs of East Tennessee and this had never come up seemed so odd, perhaps because of his devolving Key West life. Perhaps because he spared nothing really, he opened up family to be seen in light of day with no illusions what so ever.
First, actually, I saw the Glass Menagerie in a made for TV production at 11 and knew the book from collections of Southern writers that my mom kept( Mom loving O'Neill too, and especially "Strange interlude"), but reading Streetcar with a progressive English teacher in high school and re-reading in my life certainly put things I saw at home in perspective. The mom who looked to a primal, driven, upward American Dream driven man, I saw that up close. Saw too the past that haunted her, found that in a jewelery box, the dissolving of the South, yep, that was clear as the 60's ground through the issues of race and revealed separate fountains and lunch counters, hoses aimed and the structures of the Grand to the realities of the damned. Mom maintaining of her Virginia life to this day that she never saw the life of her black neighbor as we know it to have been. The required blindness of this...still amazes me. In the 80's at the death of my uncle Fletcher Flagg who laid all the underground cable in the state of VA, those who worked for him, respected him, black lifetime employees, refused to stand under the funeral tent, in the rain, standing their respectful many feet away, clustered and held by all that my belle-mom never saw. How could that ever be missed?
Then there was Kazan bringing me/us to Williams, and his work with Brando, seeing that the play became vehicle for a lens on my family, their times, our culture, on the many threads of immigration, the forces of the century.The 20th century was the story of the immigrant allowed to build the future on his back of sweat and tears. It spoke to me.. In fact in many ways it was the truer family album. In every sense of the word.
And now this summer at 48 I re read the play. Streetcar. For pleasure on a beach. Set in New Orleans you have the clash of the animal that is Stanley, the immigrant that is charging goring bull, balanced by the wife and the reluctant sister Stella, taking in her sib fallen Blanche to bring the marriage into volcanic eruption. See Stanley making his way into the forces for the brutal shaping of his times. I look up at my Italian husband as he headstorms through an emotional roar in response to a request for more sensitivity....shake my head a little aware of my attractions and family patterns..aware enough to feel the DNA....Stanley beset by this sister that arrives. Blanche comes to their home in desperation, full of the condescending gentility and with her secrets, defensiveness, her need to be important and so full of judgment, she disdains Stanley as cave man. Her opinion and the layers that bind in the stratifications of Old South...She is hiding the truth of her own falling from grace and goading the bull. If nothing else this is a bullfight from opening. She has fallen from the Eden-like myth she structures mentally now as "what was." Fallen as far as one might go. What always gets me of Blanche is how she cannot be held to the same standard she requires of others, how she uses her intellect to foist the other ( tendencies so found within my own limitations.) She, however, hides things unimaginable-perhaps overstated here to drive the engine needs of this play, she as teacher seduced a 17 year old student (Stanley falls into these truths he uses to lance her through), her former love is a suicide after his discovered (and witnessed by Blanche) homosexual affair, her life is as out of control as Stanley's destructive nature. Through them the clash of forces storms until something is harmed irrevocably, the utter confusion and quirk of human desire-desire she does not herself feel-she rejects. Ultimately he rapes her, imagine that. Into her sister's stormy, passionate, home she took her life after hers has gone so very wrong, to this she is then ground up in this meeting of two adversaries fighting, really I think, over soul like claim on Stella. Winning her to them is a redemption.
Stella exists then in symbiotic relationship to her beast and she really cannot now be also owned by the past she left too. Loyalties war in her. The play set up immediately in her reticence and "fear" of this visit, that the two things cannot co-exist, and Stella knows this.
Her own re-invention with Stanley is no home for the things Blanche carries as her "truths." ( in my own small way co-existing with my southern raised Mom in my house and with my 2nd generation immigrant husband some echo of this battle I live every day in much more benign way) And the tension builds, in nightmare grows, as Stanley acts upon it all to destroy Blanche and what she represents, to ultimately play out ( pardon the pun) his needs to expose and denigrate her, to ultimately at any cost win and destroy the opponent. Brando could best embody this character, he lived it. His daughter's lament later in his life that she was "his sacrifice" no less than telling us Brando was typed into this for a reason. He would go over any line held, as this was an illusion or flight from reality to preserve for Blanche a way to live within her illusions, he held no desire to allow that, it met no need of his.
We call them defenses now, these things Blanche carries, and recognize that they allow us to spin in a fairy-tale, to mythologize and avoid confrontation with our inner demons and truths, it is the avoidance of our faults and inadequacies. And more is here, this too a statement on female "roles" and the boundaries of cultural limitations. We employ these defenses inside of another "level" of them, held generationally and nationally these, and Williams with his disastrously searing writing was storming through the ones that were in some small danger of falling, women moving into the work forces, racial issues into challenge, "rules" questioned and adapting and being stripped in his age. The cultural and social "mores," the lies of the times, were hauled into the nation's spotlights. The South hid, as Williams knew, that families held homosexuality, lust, racism, incest, classism, limiting feigning subordinate roles for women, women who within these families were actually very powerful in emotional control through guilt and the blackmail of maintenance of their mythology, and who used these roles to play upon but then to deny the animal attractions, the sexual passions.Ultimately he is questioning the status and the "refinements" and roles of money and class, it was a southern culture of hierarchies bound in the "rules" we now look upon in wonder. Or horror. Williams took the gloves off pugalistically punching this into the literary consciousness. Here was a character, Stanley Kowolsky that had nothing there in him to idealize, no heroic thread at all, a brute, Blanche is not wrong in that. Anti-hero. If anything he's as revolting as Blanche with her razor alcoholic tongue. He drives Blanche to a mental institution in the actions of his brutal animal nature. What activated him clearly was his innate understanding of her perpetuation of this thing far greater than herself, the machinations of the old South.
Into the Elysian Fields riding the Streetcar line named "Desire" we watch the women, trapped in the inevitability that Blanche will be stripped of every myth she constructs, so necessary is her fictional recreations when gone, she is left mad. Then speaking a line as she is put in this place so Southern in reference, the mental ward, that resonates with my soul, "I've always depended on the kindness of strangers."
Within the context of the play is how it is set into it's times and within that how it sets into the individual reader's "times" acting on that personal level, how it resonates with self, and rings out to the cultural level that helps define this. I. Living with a mother that held many of Blanche's fragile needs-to be saved by a male,or to serve under one with the status of class system-her first unfaithful yet well-educated, highly valued 1st spouse,then my living with the veiled Mom's disdain for the characteristics of her protective second spouse who ranged at the level of beastman, hiding the secrets of a former "life," fleeing the pieces being fit together to ask her to look at a progressive flight into this state of defeated, disabled, enduring, suffering Southern bellish female, living in her illusions and as if on a set of a play with theatrical-like constructs, I took note of how the 60's and 70's took from her the marriage as all failed generationally in the run to divorces, watched her fall into her own kinds of madnesses. I contextualized the William's play themes within a living context, ours. I cannot help but understand it on that level. This is what great writers like William's do, they grab the dynamics of their age and reveal. Our secrets were stripped here, our defenses seen for the myths they are. In high school I met reality in my English program. And this above all else maybe why I fight so hard against what I see happening in education now. Lost are the ways to challenge the myths of the age.
So , yes, this work will for me be a piece that resonated at the level of pattern recognition. As I look up into the force of wanting the romantic horse to ride to me place of hope and dream, my white knight, my love, my romance, as I brutally address a "past" with the destructive forces of reality gilded by the mental tendency to recreate history and flutter eye lids. Yes, there is no denial of simple truth. I war with it. As the shadow looms, I seek the avoidance of madness in the unfortunate follies of a Blanche.Which is madness. Yes, I see what can happen. ( And thinking in archetypes, the true Southern way and so entrenched in Americas definitions of self, I see Blanche as that defensive blindness the south embodies and note that he runs her after this brutal assault with her rape, straight into intractable insanity. I wonder if he was saying that the processes that shined this brilliant cold cruel one message light on southern behavior would drive her, stripped of these evolved defenses, into madness. The destroying of the south, yes, this must also be his meaning. His warning. ) Also most tragically and worrisome I see in her that judging, critical, the spinning of superiority...the inability to face the disappointments, inadequacy, look squarely at her meaninglessness, her perpetuation of her needs, and the animal truths of passion...sure it's held there. If this was truly archetypal prophetic writing then in the destruction of Blanche what has been done- for really it would have been in her redemption and in her survival and in her reform, restructuring, in her acceptance of her realities and the putting a foot in front of another to rebuild a better self (something she cannot do, skilless) her emergence as transformed being- it is there that hope might have blossomed. Is he saying we burn and set aflame our brother? For me William's always looked at the fragility of the woman, his greatness for me was his understanding and writing the contexts of how this might look within the individual life of a falling, failing female character. I can't say why I once identified with Stella or recognized a mother in Blanche( and now feel shifts of identification), but re-reading I find myself compelled to face the deepest kinds of primal personal, devolving, disappointing "stuff" including where a "man" sits within my efforts to re-invent myself and how a man, both as father figure and in relationships, sits within my psyche.
He wrote to a cousin, this I have no doubt, myself (maybe you too) forcing the play into personal self examination and into a conscious place from the beast that is our unconscious. We might look at Stanley as this. In desires and drives we see him illuminate in harsh, cold, stark pieces such as this, the kind of reaction that those Old Southern structures took to push, bull whip and force their secrets and ugliness to the surface to be examined and found binding, repulsive and so carnal. So, at base, common. Among the southern writers that bared this truth out of their pen, no one took us to reality like the fiction of Williams at a time the beast had to be stopped from gorging our souls and humanity.
Well worth the summer read.
Summary of A Streetcar Named Desire
The Pulitzer Prize and Drama Critics Circle Award winning play—reissued with an introduction by Arthur Miller (Death of a Salesman and The Crucible), and Williams' essay "The World I Live In."It is a very short list of 20th-century American plays that continue to have the same power and impact as when they first appeared—57 years after its Broadway premiere, Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire is one of those plays. The story famously recounts how the faded and promiscuous Blanche DuBois is pushed over the edge by her sexy and brutal brother-in-law, Stanley Kowalski. Streetcar launched the careers of Marlon Brando, Jessica Tandy, Kim Hunter and Karl Malden, and solidified the position of Tennessee Williams as one of the most important young playwrights of his generation, as well as that of Elia Kazan as the greatest American stage director of the '40s and '50s.
Who better than America's elder statesman of the theater, Williams' contemporary Arthur Miller, to write as a witness to the lightning that struck American culture in the form of A Streetcar Named Desire? Miller's rich perspective on Williams' singular style of poetic dialogue, sensitive characters, and dramatic violence makes this a unique and valuable new edition of A Streetcar Named Desire. This definitive new edition will also include Williams' essay "The World I Live In," and a brief chronology of the author's life.
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