Critics Flashcards
Williams on the play overall
The play is about the ravishment of the tender, the sensitive, the delicate by the savage and brutal forces of modern society
William Hawkins - Stanley
Stanley is “an honest animal who needs no motivation for anything he does other than he wants to do it at a particular time”
Louis Kronenberger - Blanche lying
Blanche is “the most demonically driven kind of liar - the one who lies to the world because she must lie to herself”
John Chapman - Blanche reality vs fantasy
Blanche “chuns the reality of what she is and takes gallant and desperate refuge in a magical life she has invented for herself”
Differing opinions on Blanche
Williams gives audiences significant reasons to sympathise with Blanche as well as to dislike her in the first four scenes and the result, for many spectators, was likely the emergence of several possible appraisals of Blanche
Susan spector - Exorcism
The 1947 performance “left audiences feeling that a madwoman had entered an alien world and, after shaking that world, had been successfully exorcised”
Costa - Masculinity
Williams’ play depicts a weak and unadjusted masculinity
Thomas Hardy - Tragedy
The bad end unhappily, the good unluckily. That is what tragedy means
Lant - Stella’s weakness
“Stella consistently refuses to look at things, to listen to the truth, or even to tell the truth”
Adler - Stella’s baby
Just as the plantation served as a symbol of the past, Stanley and Stella’s baby stands for the way the “working class” ethos will be carried into the future
Williams about good + bad in the play
There are no ‘good’ or ‘bad’ people… It is a tragedy with the classic aim of producing a catharsis of pity and terror, and in order to do that, Blanche must finally have the understanding and compassion of the audience. This without creating a black-dyed villain in Stanley’
Simon Bubb - Mitch imitating stanley
Instead of offering a positive alternative to Stanley’s insensitive, bullish masculinity, Mitch has ended up imitating it
Galloway - 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”
McDonough - The role of men in the play
Sensual brute Stanley, Blanche’s young husband Alan, and the naive Mitch… together epitomise the conflicting masculine identities available in Williams’ stage world
Elia Kazan on stanley being right
‘Blanche is dangerous. She is destructive. Stanley’s got things the way he wants them around there and he does not want them upset by a…destructive woman. This makes Stanley right!’ - Elia Kazan (director of the 1951 film)
Francis Gilbert - Rape scene
Williams’ stage directions are very expressionistic: “Lurid reflections appear on the walls around
Blanche. The shadows are of a grotesque and menacing form…”
The grotesque shadows are expressions of how Blanche is feeling; her internal turmoil is reflected in the external world. These expressionistic stage directions implicitly tell the audience that the rape is almost a nightmarish fantasy of Blanche’s
John Bax - Rape scene
His rape of Blanche is not just an assertion of power but a final act of erasure, a deliberate destruction of her identity and autonomy
