Context

Question 1

The change of Stanley from an Irishman to a Polish immigrant

Answer 1

Change may have been made to emphasise the tensions between classes within in the play, as Polish immigrants prior to the 1940s/50s were labourers, uneducated, and looked down upon.

Question 2

Homosexuality in Williams’ plays

Answer 2

• Williams’ sexuality appears to have been prominent in his personal life, but was only ever a strand within his plays: never a central theme.
• Williams declared that he did not want to ‘limit’ himself ‘to writing about gay people’; the main focus of his work seemed to be social issues

Question 3

Southern Gothic

Answer 3

• inspired, perhaps, by belonging to a dying/decaying culture
• the decay of the plantation and focuses on the tension between realistic and supernatural elements (?)
• often bordered on the gross or grotesque; the macabre

Question 4

Expressionism

Answer 4

Williams states in the production notes of his play The Glass Menagerie that the aim of expressionism is a ‘closer approach to truth’

Question 5

Plastic theatre

Answer 5

influenced by Brechtian epic theatre, where realism is disrupted so that the audience have a critical distance to the action and characters in order to gain the moral message of the play
- aim is to create a theatrical experience that is greater than realism (props, costume, lighting etc.)

Question 6

Nemesis

Answer 6

the inescapable cause of one’s downfall (“We’ve had this date with eachother from the beginning”)

Question 7

Eleos, phosbos and pathos

Answer 7

pathos: pity - compassion
phosbos: fear - identification

Question 8

anagnorisis

Answer 8

protagonist recognises true situation they are in e.g. Blanche realises too late that she has ‘beauty of the mind’, ‘richness of the soul’ and ‘tenderness of the heart’ after only seeming to believe that her worth is attached to her physical appearance

Question 9

peripeteia

Answer 9

sudden reversal of fortune or change in circumstances

Question 10

cartharsis

Answer 10

as a result of audiences feeling pathos and phosbos, they can, theoretically, fall with the tragic protagonist and be cleansed: making them better people and the world a better place

Question 11

media res

Answer 11

‘in the middle of things’

Question 12

hamartia

Answer 12

fatal flaw

Question 13

1940s tragedy

Answer 13

focused far more on the common man than on a noble man like in Aristotelian tragedies

Question 14

Antebellum South

Answer 14

built on the back of slave labour. A romantic and idealised period

Question 15

Southern Belle

Answer 15

• had to survive by being attractive and marrying well due to no financial independence
• expected to balance being chaste and flirtatious to maintain desirability

Question 16

What happened after the Great Depression, where farmers already suffered bankruptcy, that made it worse?

Answer 16

drought that led to a large Dust Bowl that killed cattle and made it extremely difficult to grow crops. farmers had to sell property

Question 17

The New Deal

Answer 17

programmes in the 1930s brought about in an attempt to reinflate the economy. at this stage, the previous working-classes suddenly had a lot more disposable income than these Old Money Families. people moved to the city as a result, and there was a sense of dislocation. people looked to the past for comfort

Question 18

WW2

Answer 18

Agricultural industry lost huge amounts of work as WW2 took place

Question 19

Cold War

Answer 19

constant sense of fear of eastern Europe (where Stanley is from)/ Russia. paranoia and xenophobia

Question 20

Kazan’s ‘spines’ or super-objectives

Answer 20

Blanche: to maintain tradition and live by it
Stanley: protect his family from Blanche’s invasion
Stella: hold on to Stanley no matter the cost

Question 21

Stanislavski

Answer 21

actors should essentially ‘become’ their characters rather than merely act like them in order to give the most convincing and effective performance possible
using objectives in units was a key way to do this

Question 22

Naturalism

Answer 22

hold a mirror up to real life and present reality onstage. three principles:
- action should be plausible
- characters should be like real people (motivations and actions should be accurate)
- setting should be realistic

Question 23

Which three dramatists that employed naturalism was Williams particularly inspired by?

Answer 23

Chekhov, Strindberg, Ibsen

Question 24

Marlon Brando and naturalism

Answer 24

he was trained in a specific theatre group that focused on naturalistic theatre

by contrast, Vivien Leigh and Jessica Tandy (both played Blanche) were classically trained.

Question 25

Brando’s acting vs the women

Answer 25

audiences exposed to the mumbling, inarticulate menace of Brando’s method acting

conversely exposed to fragile and wide-eyed theatricality of Leigh and Tandy (both played Blanche)

Question 26

original production had intervals after scene 4 and 6

Answer 26

end of scene 4: turning point of tension as Stanley has overheard Blanche and Stella’s conversation and he ‘grins through the curtains at Blanche’
end of scene 6: Blanche’s traumatic past is revealed and audiences are left with a brief moment of comfort before the hurtling and imminent tragedy

Question 27

Poetic realism in 19thc Germany

Answer 27

the way of mirroring reality through the veil of illusion, poetic language and symbolism.

Question 28

American realism

Answer 28

• psychological verisimilitude
• unveiling truths through art

Question 29

hollywood glamour

Answer 29

• Hollywood was often referred to as ‘the dream factory’ in the 1930s/40s because it enabled escapism and fantasy in an America ravaged by the Great Depression, and later WW2.
• typical plots during this period included glamorous young women being pursued by wealthier and older men
• soft focus lens used on these women in these films is reminiscient of the way in which Blanche attempts to soften her appearance using the Chinese lantern, only meeting Mitch in the evening etc.

Question 30

Old money families

Answer 30

• lost their historical importance as agricultural industries of the Southern states were unable to compete with new industrialisation

Question 31

key quotation from ‘The World I Live In’ (Tennessee Williams interviews himself)

Answer 31

‘I don’t believe in villains or heroes - only right or wrong ways that individuals have taken, not by choice but by necessity or by certain still-uncomprehended influences in themselves’

Question 32

the Lavender Scare (linked to the Second Red Scare)

Answer 32

a moral panic about homosexuals that began in the very same year Williams wrote his play (1947). many in the arts became politically vulnerable as there was an association of communism with ‘subversives’ and homosexuals in particular who tended to be more liberal in their ideologies.

Question 33

The Glass Menagerie

Answer 33

examines the price of artistic isolation at the expense of social and family life

Question 34

la petite mort

Answer 34

a French euphemism (more popular in English) for orgasm that directly translates to ‘the little death’. this idea of the linking between sexual desire and death is not only referenced by Blanche - “Death is the opposite [of desire]” - but this idea can also be seen as Stella’s ‘eyes and lips have that almost narcotized tranquility’ after Stanley has carried her into the bedroom at the end of scene 3.

Question 35

Jim Crow Laws

Answer 35

laws that enforced racial segregation. such laws remained in force until 1965.