Critics Flashcards
Williams - split personality
“I draw every character out of my very multiple split personality. My heroines always express the climate of my interior world at the time in which those characters were created.”
Mihaela Magdić - Stella
‘a transitive type of a woman. She is neither a Southern belle nor a modern woman.’
Nina Leibman - Stella
‘she is not the lustful instigator but the passive respondent’ - only sexual in response to male sexuality - the pinnacle of female entrapment.
Tamanna Farahdina - Blanche
embodies the spirit of the late-nineteenth century
Feminist ideal of the ‘New Woman’, describing the desire for an ‘economically independent woman who wanted social, political, and educational equality among
men’.
Kimmel - manhood
“The suburbs bec[a]me a central fact of postwar America and the new arena for proving one’s manhood”
Panda - Stanley/Stella
“Stanley-Stella relationship is one of the supreme examples of hierarchization of activity/passivity opposition”
The plays title emerges from reference to world beyond stage. What quote reflects the way the author arrived at the title when looking out of his New Orleans window?
Down this street, running on the same tracks, are two streetcars, one named Desire, the other Cemetery. Their indiscourageable progress… struck me as having some symbolic bearing of a broad nature on life.’
Williams - plastic theatre (Glass Menagerie)
‘a new, plastic theatre which must take the place of the exhausted theatre of realistic conventions.’
Williams - symbols (Intro to Camino Real)
‘symbols are nothing but the natural speech of drama… the purest language of plays.’
Williams - realism plus expressionism
‘sometimes a living quality is caught better by expressionism than what is supposed to be realistic treatment’. (Letter to Eliza Kazan 1947)
C Vann Woodward - southern identity shaped…
by a failure to share in the great American traditions of ‘success, affluence and innocence’ Viewed as ‘the benighted South’ (racist, religious bigotry and poverty)
Post-war mood (Chester Eisinger)
‘one of fear, terror, uncertainty, and violence, mingled with sad satisfactions and a relief at victory’.
Williams in interview to ‘Gay sunshine’ - main focus of work on social issues not sexual orientation.
‘I am not about to limit myself to writing about gay people.’
The extreme reactions to the play.
One critic called it the product of an “almost desperately morbid turn of mind”. In contrast, another described it as “a revelation. A lyrical work of genuine originality and disturbing power”.
Williams - Justification for violent plays
“If there is any truth in the Aristotelian idea that violence is purged by its poetic representation on stage, then it may be that my cycle of violent plays have had a moral justification after all”.
Williams major theme of work
‘I have only one major theme for my work, which is the destructive power of society on the sensitive, non-conformist individual’
Williams summed up the moral of the play
‘If we don’t watch out, the apes will take over’.
Benjamin Nelson - sex
for Blanche ‘has been her Achilles heel. It has always been his [Stanley’s] sword and shield.’
Van Gogh on ‘The Night Cafe’
‘A place where one can ruin oneself, go mad, or commit a crime’.
titled perspective = moral degeneracy
Streetcar about (Williams)
‘Ravishment of the tender, the sensitive, the delicate, by the savage and brutal forces of modern society’.
Harold Bloom
Desire is the single most important theme of the play — even Blanche, who initially seems to represent purity, is tainted by desire.
Kazan - 3 opinions
Stanley didn’t want to rape Blanche- forced to by her refusal to bargain with him
on his own terms.
Stella has found a sort of salvation with Stanley, but at the tremendous cost that she must ignore how unhappy his actions make her
Blanche’s tragic flaw is that she adheres to the Southern tradition that she needs a man for completion — she can complete herself
Brooks Atkinson –not political play
Streetcar is a deep exploration of a singular person with no sociopolitical
aspects
Bert Cardullo – Blanche and Mary Magdalene
Blanche’s courting of Mitch mirrors Mary Magdalene’s courting of Jesus
and her eventual redemption through it; this is twisted by Mitch’s rejection of Blanche
Aristotle - tragic hero
‘the tragic hero should be neither better nor worse morally than normal people, in order to allow the audience to identify with them.’
J.H. Adler – Stanley creative
Stanley is more creative than destructive – he shows the vitality that the Old
South has lost
Nancy Tischner – The play is decidedly not a classical tragedy
Blanche is “pathetically soft” and not a traditional tragic figure and we leave the theatre outraged rather than soothed.
Judith J. Thompson– ‘myth for our time’
Williams’ drama is a “myth for our time”, portraying man’s constant
search for transcendence and imbuing the human with religious significance
J.M. McGlinn– Stanley rape motivation
Stanley feels judged by Blanche, and his rape of her is his attempt to get her
to admit that she is a sexual animal, like him
