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.”
