ASND critical quotes Flashcards
H. Sambrook on Mitch
“Shy, clumsy, slow-thinking, he acts as a foil to the shrewd, loud, domineering Stanley”
P. Williams on Stanley’s animalistic nature
“Territorial animal desperately defending its lair”
P. Williams on stanley and stella’s relationship
“By forcing Stella to acknowledge that, like himself, she is driven by sexual urges, he validates his own moral code and justifies his own actions”
J. Shead on trunk symbol
“[Blanche’s trunk] unifies the literal and metaphorical meanings of Blanhce’s journey”
A. Wertheim symbol of the future
“The postwar hybrid of Stanley and Stella”
H Bloom on Stellas feelings for stanley
“Stella is genuinely in love with her husband”
T. Williams on Stella
“I think her natural passivity is one of the things that makes her acceptance of Stanley acceptable. She naturally ‘gives in’, accepts, lets things slide, she does not make much of an effort”
M. Skiba on the protagonist
“The protagonist’s behaviour is in a certain way symptomatic of society itself, even of humanity as a whole”
Samuel Tapp on battles in the play
“Overall Tennessee Williams has written a script that dramatizes the battle between the sexes…inequalities that exist in the world and the value of literature in helping to solve them”
Samuel Tapp on blanche
“[Blanche’s] coquetry is often a self-defensive strategy”
Samuel Tapp on expectations of blanche
“She was expected to be innocent, childlike, decorous, demure and submissive…was promised chivalry and romance”
Susannah Clapp about blanche
“She perches on spindly stilettos and on caramel-coloured cork wedges, precarious and desperately determined. She is like a bird of prey who has just alighted on her carrion”
Shirley Galloway on stanley’s survival
“Stanley survives because of sheer physical vitality, not because of any innate superiority”
Shirley Galloway on what blanche wants in a man
“[Blanche] wants a cultured man but is often subconsciously attracted to strong, basic male characters, no doubt a reflexive response since her marriage with a cultured, sensitive man ended in disaster”
Shirley Galloway on the kindness of strangers
“Her drive to lose herself in the ‘kindness of strangers’ might also be understood from this period in that her sense of confidence in her own feminine attraction was shaken by the knowledge of her husband’s homosexuality”
Shirley Galloway blanches trauma
“roots of [Blanche’s] trauma lie in her early marriage”
Shirley Galloway stanleys view of blanche
“[Stanley] has no use for Blanche…She is a disruption to his and Stella’s relationship”
Shirley Galloway blanche’s desires
“[Blanche] has her own desires that draw her to Stanley, like a moth to the light, a light she avoids, even hates, yet yearns for”
Shirley Galloway Stanley and blanche as symbols
“Tennessee Williams infuses Blanche and Stanley with the symbols of opposing class and differing attitudes towards sex and love”
Melbourne Critics TWs sister
“Having watched [Williams’] sister struggle to become the kind of southern belle that his mother expected, he knew how cruel this definition of roles could be.”
Melbourne Critics TWs homosexuality
“As a gay man, Tennessee Williams felt he was particularly sensitive to the status of women - powerless”
Melbourne Critics the sisters want security
“Both Blanche and Stella seek the security of marriage, but both find marriage has its own problems for the wife”
Melbourne Critics last comfrontation with mitch and blanche
“In the final confrontation with the drunken Mitch, when he knows she is not the virgin of his dreams, but the slut of his desires, she accuses him of being ‘uncavalier’”
Melbourne Critics on black and white women
“The black woman being perceived as lusty and compliant, the white as Puritanical and lily-pure”
Melbourne Critics southern womanhood
“The mythology of Southern Womanhood…elevated the white woman to a position of veneration (saintly)”
Emma Kirby sanity
“sanity is dependent on fitting in and adhering to the
social roles expected of us”
Ana Gazolla blanches fragmentation
Blanche’s “fragmentation is that of modern man and is also a reflection of the crisis of values in the south”
Anca Vlasopolos’s blanches victimisation
Blanche’s victimization has “less to do with the history of the South as we now have it than with gender determined exclusion from the larger historical discourse
Joan Templeton blanches epic fornications
through her own “epic fornications,” is just as responsible for her fall as the Old South is for its own demise
Elia Kazan blanche
Blanche is dangerous. She is destructive. She would soon have him and Stella fighting. He’s got things the way he wants them around there and he does not want them upset by a phony, corrupt, sick, destructive woman. This makes Stanley right!
Nancy Tischler darwinian society
sees Streetcar not as a drama of natural selection but rather as “a reversal of Darwin’s vision—back to the apes
Robert Brunstein and stanleys sexuality
perceives Stanley as the Lawrence hero “whose sexuality, though violent, is unmental, unspiritual, and, therefore, in some way free from taint.”
Bilijana Oklpocic blanche and the old aristocracy
“Williams portrays Blanche as the last representative of the Old aristocracy who tries to survive in the modern world by escaping to alcohol, madness and promiscuity”
Ruby Cohn and contrastng sounds in the pro and antagonsits names
The hard consonants of Stanley Kowalski contrast with the open vowels of Blanche Dubois
Alvin B Kernan stanley as a realist
“Stanley is a realist who trusts only his own senses…“he is easily swayed by rhinestones, believing them to be diamonds, and easily angered”
J.M. McGlinn sexual animal traits
“[Stanley] wishes to destroy [Blanche’s] composure to make her recognise that she is the same as he is, a sexual animal”
Commentary by Patricia Hern and Michael Hooper blanches lies
Blanche holds the Wildean belief that “Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of art”
-J.M. McGlinn stellas illusion
Stella ignores the needs of others and eventually adopts her own illusion. Life with Stanley-sex with Stanley-is her highest value. Her refusal to accept Blanche’s story of the rape is a commitment to self-preservation rather than love…”
Elia Kazan on stella
“Stella is a refined girl who has found a kind of salvation or realization but at a terrific price”
Robert Brustein effeminate culture and masculine libido
“The conflict between Blanche and Stanley allegorises the struggle between effeminate culture and masculine libido”
Murry Kempton williams message
“tell us about how men must look to women-ogres to be appeased, small boys to be put up with, or, if one’s luck turns for the better, strangers who will accept you and keep you safe
Eric Bentley - Darwinian
Eric Bentley sees the play as a clash of “species”
Williams - Savages
We are all savages at heart
Kathleen Lart blanche a tragic figure
On the other hand the play presents Blanche as a tragic figure and Stanley as an agent of her destruction
Foster Kirsch - Stanley and Blanche “solid match”
Kirsch sees Williams’s view of Stanley and Blanche as ambivalent. He views them “locked in a deadly sex battle” but as a “solid match” for one another
Tennessee - Major theme
One major theme for my work is the destructive power of society on the sensitive non-conformist individual
Harold Clurman - Blanche
Blanche is a delicate and sensitive woman pushed into insanity by a brutish environment presided over by chief ape-man Stanley Kowalski
Eliza Kazan - Blanche
‘Blanche is dangerous, she is destructive’ under his direction, Blanche was an unstable woman who has entered and threatened the security of a different world, and who was finally cast out allowing that world to survive.
Nicola Onyett - Social outcast
Blanche has become a social outcast because she refuses to conform to conventional moral values . In cruelly unveiling the truth about her scandalous past, Stanley strips her of her psychological, sexual and cultural identity.
Samuel Tapp - Southern Belle
Blanche Dubois is a victim of the mythology of the Southern Belle
Bak - species conflict
“Both fight over Stella, for in her choosing one species means the death of another”
Hovis - southern belle
the role of the Southern Belle as a mask and a prison
O’Connor – not prepared to hear the truth
represents Blanche as a one of a number of protagonists whose voices are silenced by the accusation of madness when they insist on speaking truths that the world is not prepared to hear
Brooker - general observation of people leading to a profound insight
“Out of nothing more esoteric than interest in human beings, Mr. Williams has looked steadily and wholly into the private agony of one lost person”
Gassner - destroying possibilities of the play by limiting it to mere pathos
“the point of the play is precisely that Blanche, who needs every consideration, is thrust into a brute world that gives her no consideration, then, I say, Williams has destroyed the tragic possibilities of Streetcar in another way: He has settled for pathos whereas the ambience of his characterisation of Blanche suggests a play possessed of a sharper, more equitable, and harder insight namely, that of tragedy”
Gassner - Blanche is not wholly believable
“In so far as Blanche’s role is concerned, only her illness is believable and even that is suspect, in so far as its inevitability is questionable”
Gassner - belittling of tragedy
Williams has “reduced potential tragedy to psychopathology”
Krutch – Blanche doesn’t betray her principles
“Blanche chooses the dead past and becomes a victim of that impossible choice, but she does choose it rather than the ‘adjustment’ of her sister. At least she has not succumbed to barbarism”
Tischner - Stella’s choice
“apparently Williams wants the audience to believe that Stella is wrong in loving Stanley but right in living with him”
Gassner - realism through surrealism
“poetic drama becomes psychological reality”
Goodman - Williams’ view of the world
the play can “be read as an allegorical representation of the author’s view of the world he lives in” linked to Williams’ view that “the apes shall inherit the earth”
Berlin - a balanced play
“Stanley condemns Blanche for her sexual looseness and Blanche condemns Stanley for his apishness, each seems both right and wrong - right in the light of truth, wrong in the light of understanding”
Bodis - lack of sympathy for Blanche
“as we cannot fully accept or reject Blanche, when she is eliminated we don’t fully sympathise nor do we rejoice fully”
Kerr - the ending
“escape-hatch ending”
Hulley - destructive
argues it’s a story about desire’s destruction rather than desire
Melman - death and sex
Blanche “grasps at desire as a means of escaping death, her passion can only lead her closer to the grave for it fuels an attempt not to reach out to the future, but to deny it”
Melman - confinement of Blanche
Blanche is “externally and internally confined”
Cardullo - Blanche is her own problem
“Blanche’s struggle in Streetcar is not so much with Stanley as with herself in her efforts to achieve lasting intimacy”
McGlinn - Blanche’s detachment from reality
Blanche “refuses to accept the reality of her life and attempts to live under illusion” leads to “self-defeat instead of survival”
Paller - pro-Blanche, Stanley’s ideologies vs Blanche’s ideologies
“pits the alienated soul and lover of beauty and refinement - Blanche - against the crueller, cruder instincts inherent in much of American life - Stanley”
Corrigan - the play as a psychological drama
“the external events of the play, while actually occurring, serve as a metaphor for Blanche’s internal conflict” (psychological drama)
Vlasopolos - Blanche’s ‘death’
Blanche doesn’t die at the end of the play but must suffer the consequences of the rape
Cohn - Stanley is justified
sides with Stanley as protector of the family. “[Stanley’s] cruellest gesture in the play is to tear the paper lantern off the lightbulb”, we never actually see Stanley “hit Stella” or “rape Blanche” - argues the rape comes from Blanche’s licentious provocation. Stanley is faithful and loyal - “his cruelty defends his world”
Adler - type of play
“a modern variation on the medieval morality play”
Burks - Darwinist survival
“less (…) a struggle between Good and Evil” and more a “Social Darwinist struggle for survival between two species of human beings”
Taylor - not that tragic
“Williams creates opposition in Blanche and Stanley but not true tragic conflict”
Kazan’s director’s notebook - pro-Stanley
For Stanley to keep things his way, he must fight off the destructive intrusions of Blanche who “would wreck his home”
Drake - pro-Blanche view
“presenting the pessimistic view of modern man destroying the tender aspects of love (…) and in Blanche’s refusal to submit, she is being portrayed as the last representative of a sensitive, gentle love whose defeat is to be lamented”
Shaw - style
“triumphantly heightened naturalism
Bentley and Boxhill - type of play
“social historical drama”
Brooks Atkinson - Williams’ presentation of people
“[Williams’] knowledge of people is honest and thorough”
