A Streetcar Named Desire

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A Streetcar Named Desire

• LECTURE 2

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FOCUS

• Comparing Texts
• Remembering Othello
• Recap last week
• Historical Context
• Setting
• Key Players

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Gist

• The protagonist, Blanche DuBois, has come to
  visit her sister, Stella, who lives in a shabby
  neighborhood in New Orleans near the railroad
  tracks. Blanche is immediately at odds with this
  backdrop, being at once judgmental of Stella's
  bluecollar, rough and tumble husband, Stanley,
  while simultaneously being at the mercy of his
  hospitality (and hostility).

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Historical Context

• A Streetcar Named Desire is a stage play with
  elements of tragedy and pathos.
• Play represents the decline of the aristocratic
  families traditionally associated with the South.
• These onceinfluential families had lost their
  historical importance when the South's
  agricultural base was unable to compete with the
  new industrialization.
• Many landowners, faced with large areas of land
  and no one to work on it, moved to urban areas.

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The Play

• A Streetcar Named Desire, is one of the better
  known and much staged plays of Tennessee
  Williams.
• The play was first produced in New York and
  Boston in 1947. A film version directed by Elia
  Kazan followed in 1951.
• Set in New Orleans, Louisiana, shortly after
  World War II, the play explores the plight of
  impoverished Southern gentry and the rapid
  changes of Southern society in the industrial
  age.

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The Play

• Williams turned to his personal life for the
  subject matter for his plays,
• and yet there is a certain universality about
  them, for his own life aptly depicted the
  shattering of the American Dream and its effect
  on the American people.

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When?

• The action takes place between May and September
  in a shabby apartment building in the
  working-class district of New Orleans in the
  1940s, shortly after the Second World War.

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Dramatic Techniques

• Language diction, imagery, style, symbolism,
  allegory, register,
• Staging directorial devices (stage directions),
  costumes, props creation of setting
• Structure Act/Scene structure, plot

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Comparing Texts

• Thematic Concerns of Paper

• Dramatic Techniques

CENTRAL QN How do both playwrights convey
similar thematic concerns regarding the
Individual and Society through similar or
different dramatic techniques?
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Othello

• Individual Society
• The Other
• Displaced from Original Society (?)
• Alienated
• Roles Expectations of Men Women in Society
• Class Hierarchy of Social Status

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Keep in Mind

• When comparing and contrasting texts
• Ideas, issues, themes
• Representation of the Individual and the Society
• Dramatic techniques similarities differences
• eg. Similar or different use of stage
  directions, metaphors, imagery, allusions, music
  etc
• - Effects of these techniques how similar, how
  different?

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Background Setting

• Othello

• Streetcar

• Shakespeare
• Elizabethan Era
• Setting
• Venice
• Moves to Cyprus
• Two settings

• Tennessee Williams
• 1947 America
• Setting
• America in the 40s
• New Orleans
• Single setting

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Structure

• Othello

• Streetcar

• 5 Act Play
• Setting shifts from Venice in Act 1 to Cyprus for
  the rest of the Acts
• Venice
• powerful city-state in 16th C
• Commercial centre
• Orderly, law-abiding, formal

• No Acts
• Eleven scenes
• No interval
• Each scenes on a dramatic gesture
• Single setting throughout the entire play The
  Kowalskis house

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Streetcar Symbols

• Naked Light Bulb truth, reality, epiphany
• Paper lantern disguise reality, create illusion
  BUT temporary
• Colour symbolism
• White clothing symbolises purity and innocence
• Red stained meat package sexuality, establish
  gender roles
• Music as symbol for emotions
• Blue Piano present when Blanche discusses loss
  and hope
• Polka music that Blanche hears, real or imagined?
  Represents for Blanche death and imminent
  disaster
• Animal symbolism

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Epigraph

• And so it was I entered the broken world
• To trace the visionary company of love, its voice
• An instant in the wind (I know not whither
  hurled)
• But not for long to hold each desperate choice.
• The Broken Tower by Hart Crane

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Epigraph

• And so it was I entered the broken world
• To trace the visionary company of love, its voice
• An instant in the wind (I know not whither
  hurled)
• But not for long to hold each desperate choice.
• The Broken Tower by Hart Crane

• Function
• Introduces reader to thematic concerns of the
  play, raises questions essential to the play
• Broken World metaphor for the themes of love
  and loss
• Provides poetic language against which we can
  measure the less formal linguistic register of
  other characters in the play, illuminating
  Blanches literary background

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Setting A1S1
OTHELLO
At night, in a street outside Brabantios house
in Venice, two men whisper their secret griefs.
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Setting Scene One
STREETCAR
The exterior of a two-storey 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. 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 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 bar-room 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.
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Setting Scene One
STREETCAR
The exterior of a two-storey 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. 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 turquoise, which invests the scene
with a kind of lyricism and gracefully and
gracefully attenuates the atmosphere of decay.
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Setting Scene One
STREETCAR
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 bar-room 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.
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Setting Scene One
STREETCAR

• New Orleans - is a cosmopolitan city where there
  is a relatively warm and easy intermingling of
  races - the idea of NEW.
• Introduction (and esp attention to social
  context) is important
• Atmosphere established in this particular setting
• Note especially how Blanche brings to the
  Kowalski apartment her prejudices, which prove to
  be out of time and place.
• Class distinctions dont matter here

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Setting Scene One
STREETCAR
Elysian Fields - Elysium or the Elysian Fields
is a conception of the afterlife - Initial
admission - reserved for mortals related to the
gods and other heroes. - Later, included those
chosen by the gods, the righteous, and the
heroic, where they would remain after death, to
live a blessed and happy life.
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Setting Scene One
STREETCAR
Elysian Fields Part of the underworld and a
place of reward for the virtuous dead. However,
viewed as a temporary place of the souls journey
back to life.
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Setting Where?

• Many of the major themes of A Streetcar Named
  Desire are embodied in the history and culture of
  New Orleans.
• The lively setting of the French Quarter, with
  its streetcars, bars, entertainment, and jazz and
  blues music, provides a rich background for the
  emotional events of the play
• the setting also draws symbolic attention to
  changes which were taking place in American
  society, especially in the South during the Post
  World War II years of the 40s

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Setting Where?
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Setting

• At the Kowalskis, the audience is introduced to
  the characters that are of varied origins in
  their nationalities, in their backgrounds, and in
  their beliefs.
• Through the play, therefore, the reader is given
  a glimpse of the world in coexistence.

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Setting

• Neighbourhood is situated between the LN
  railroad tracks near a bowling alley and jazz
  bar.
• They live in a two room apartment that is part of
  a two family house.
• Small and very cramped with three adults sharing
  the space.

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Staging
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Staging
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Staging

• Important that audience can see the upstairs, the
  downstairs, the interior, and the exterior.
• Seeing the "outside" allows one to observe
  characters on the street racial relations
• Dramatic action of play takes advantage of the
  flexibility of this setting

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Staging

• Cramp and tight space increases tension/
  conflict between characters
• Stanley Kowalskis small apartment his kingdom.
  .
• Blanche an outsider and intruder to his
  environment.
• She occupies the room adjacent to theirs -
  invading his privacy, encroaching even between
  Stanley and Stellas sexual space

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Major

• Blanche Dubois
• Stanley Kowalski
• Stella Kowalski
• Harold Mitchell (Mitch)

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Minor

• Eunice Steve Hubbel
• Pablo Gonzales
• Negro Woman (unnamed)
• Newspaper Boy
• Mexican Woman (flower vendor)
• A Doctor
• A Nurse