streetcar context Flashcards
Baby Boom
The end of WWII brought a period of economic and personal wealth to America. Following wartime rationing and limited production – America now entered the capitalist era. The average American had more money than ever before, Americans saw spending in restaurants and bars, at theatres and cinemas as another sign of their wealth. With the war over and the promise of American prosperity on the horizon, many couples decided this was the ideal time to begin a family, and an unusually high number of children were born. This trend is called the ‘baby-boom’.
the nuclear family
Blue collar workers (workers who perform manual labour) were the last to feel the benefit of the post-war boom.
Wages were low, prices were rising. While many working class families were living in more prosperity, they did not yet experience the luxuries had by the middle and upper classes.
In many ways, the early post-war era was a socially conservative time. Gender roles for men and women were more often than not traditional and very clearly defined. When World War II ended, many women who had worked in factories during the war returned to home and the domestic way of life. The feminism so characteristic of the 1920s to early 1940s was noticeably lacking throughout the late 1940s and 1950s.
While there were exceptions, and while we must be careful about over-generalising, the traditional nuclear family was very much the cultural norm.
New Orleans
The culture of New Orleans during 1940s-1950s was defined by America’s new “melting-pot” image. Individuals from all nationalities and lifestyles found a home there.
The varying histories and lifestyles of individuals’ enabled a fusion or co-mingling to create a common ground.
This common ground was to be found in the jazz bars, restaurants and street corners.When Jazz emerged, it contained “ragtime sounds of the west”, ethnic and classical tones from “European-Americans, and “a beat and the blues” from “African-Americans”.
People of different “ethnic” backgrounds and cultures could relate to Jazz, giving this new America with an entirely new culture of its own.
The end of the Old South ways
Before the Civil War, the American South was to a great extent representative of its stereotypical image with cotton plantations, a landed elite, who flaunted their inherited wealth and gentility, and a slavery system based around the flourishing industries of tobacco and cotton.
Slavery was one of the key battle grounds over which the Civil War was fought. Slavery was regarded as evil by the Northern States, although the Southern States regarded it as essential for their tobacco and cotton industries, and therefore their wealth.
The American Civil War ended with the Confederate surrender in April 1865. As the Southern States had lost the war, they also lost their old way of life.
The rich families of the South were bankrupted. The golden age of gentile aristocracy was lost. Within 50 years this way of life no one longer existed.
Yet many Southerners looked back wistfully to the plantation life that had characterised their region pre- Civil War.Yet as the traditional South declined, the Northern States prospered. Industry flourished and immigrants from all over the world arrived to make America their new home in a bid to achieve the American Dream.
working class heroes
During the 1930s and 1940s, American literature reflected the middle and lower classes. Gone were the novels and plays about the aristocracy, replaced by emerging working class heroes and heroines.
As a result of the Great Depression the entire nation suffered from high unemployment and interest rates, and millions of Americans found themselves buried in deep debt.
Consequently, many American writers during and after the 1930s and 1940s chose to focus on the brave individual stories of those who were members of the lower and middle classes, believing that their strong work ethic and their ambitions characterised them as true Americans. The search for the American Dream gave fiction a new form of hope for the future.
Representing the everyday American that society championed after the Depression: hard-working men who were proud of themselves because of the work that they had accomplished with their own hands – they weren’t landed gentry who had been fed with silver spoons.
Being a member of the working class was almost seen as morally superior because these blue-collar workers were the antithesis of the indifferent and uncaring aristocrats who just didn’t care about anyone else but themselves.
America after world war 11
Millions ofwomen joined the workforceand the war effort, many of them discovering for the first time their independence and tenacity.
After the war, most of the men returned to their jobs and most of the women, often reluctantly, returned to the roles as homemakers.
The setting of “A Streetcar Named Desire” betrays the post-war tension between the sexes. Stanley wants to dominate his home in the same way males had dominated American society before the war. Female characters like Blanche and Stella expect more than a life of servitude, just as thousands of women after World War II wanted to retain their new-found careers and sense of socio-economic self-worth.
Art and cultural diversity in the french Quater
For all Blanche’s preaching about poetry and art, she never acknowledges the beauty of the jazz and blues which permeate the setting. A uniquely American art form, the music of the blues provides a transition for many of the scenes within “Streetcar.”In the play’s beginning, two minor female characters are chatting: one woman is black, the other white. The ease at which they communicate demonstrates the casual acceptance of diversity in the French Quarter.In fact, in a rare moment of political-correctness, Stanley insists that Blanche refer to him as an American (or at least Polish-American) rather than use the derogatory term: “Polack.”
Dionysius, orpheus and the androgyn myth
While Stanley Kowalski is presented as a modern-day avatar of Dionysius, the amoral, primitive God of drink and fertility. Blanche Dubois’s descend into the underworld of Elysian fields makes her the failed embodiment of the guilt-ridden, inconsolable Orpheus.
Although Williams never explicitly theorised about the myth, he was a huge fan of T.S. Elliott’s “mythical methods” and studied Greek at the university. Dionysius was associated with hunting – this is exactly the first image we have of Stanley when he throws Stella his “red-stained package”.In the final version, although she has not seen his first entrance, Blanche calls him “Stanley Kowalski – survivor of the stone age!” (medial caesura for emphasis) “Bearing the raw meat home from the kill in the jungle”In earlier drafts, the association of Stanley with hunting and with death was more obviously emphasised.Stanley’s taste for the bottle confirms his association with the God of drink. His preference for beer adds to the character’s phallic structure: in the rape scene, to celebrate a birth of his child, Stanley sends up an ejaculatory “geyser of foam”.
Stanley’s sensuality endows him with a hypnotic hold on Stella. This is reminiscent of Dionysius’ power to put women into trance – the Greek mania which sent the ecstatic MAENADS roving outside the city limits, causing them to abandon home + follow the God of madness.After the night of love making, Stella has an attitude of “almost narcotized tranquillity
Panthus
The conflict between Stanley and Blanche is reminiscent of Dionysius’ ruthless revenge on the King of Thebes in Euripides’ play. Both, the King Pantheus and Blanche whom Stanley ironically calls “her majesty” in scene 7.
Dressed up in a ball gown and tiara, she is the victim of visual and auditory hallucinations. Her mental collapse after the rape can be seen as the psychic equivalent of the king’s dismemberment – especially since the idea of fragmentation is conveyed symbolically by her shattered mirror.
link between orpheus and panthus
According to a Greek legend, the poet Orpheus suffered the same fate as the king of Thebes. He was too torn apart by Bacchae for refusing to worship Dionysius.Streetcar is both symbolical and ironic. The Elysian fields is a Virgilian paradise situated in an underworld
the four deuces
The “four deuces” combines a reference to the quartet of main characters with an allusion to card games and to bad luck – the Deuce being the lowest card in the deck, thereby reinforcing the fateful import of the metaphoric poker game. Derived from Latin word “Deus”, Deuce is also used as a synonym for Devil. Stanley- the master of Elysian fields, who plays the Deuce with Blanche – brings her to harm – has a symbolic name.
The moth
Williams’ first stage direction compares her to a moth, which is the antique symbol for the soul – the word ‘psyche’ meaning both butterfly and soul in Greek. The incongruity of her appearance echoes Orpheus’s journey into hell where the Greek poet was a stranger amongst the shades, the only living being ever allowed to descend into the underworld.
allan grey and belle reve
In mythology, androgyny is the privilege of the Gods and a symbol of primordial perfection. Allan Grey is remembered as a God-Like being, removed by death to the realm of myth and once idealised by Blanche. In her description to Mitch, Blanche describes him as androgynous, neither male nor female. “There was something different about the boy, a nervousness, a softness and tenderness which wasn’t like a man, although he wasn’t in the least bit effeminate-looking.” Throughout the play, he is referred to as “a boy”, “the boy”, as if he had not truly made the transition into puberty and complete sexual definition. In mythology, the child archetype is a universal symbol of androgyny.
Allan also represents Blanche’s past. Like her, he was a southerner and his family name may be emblematic of the ante-bellum South, grey being the colour of the Confederate uniform.
His death symbolises the final passing of the myth and the end of the plantation world. Belle Reve also evokes a lost androgynous state, as a symbol of paradise: “Belle Reve” unites a masculine name and a feminine adjective. This feminisation is in keeping with the image of the old south
southern gothic
a genre prevalent in literature from early 19th century to today. Characteristics of the southern gothic include: the presence of irrational, horrific transgressive thoughts, desires and impulses, grotesque characters and impulses, dark humour and overall angst ridden alienation. Brings light to how the idylic south is repressive on other cultures, engages with ideas of homosexuality.
what does belle reve stand for?
beautiful dream
Tennessee williams sister
suffered from schitophrenia and eventually got a lubotomy
Tennesse williams homosexuality
he had a relationship with a young canadian dancer Kip Keiran he met in providence, however he left him to marry a women and 4 years later killed himself. Between 1947 and 1949 to two largest news weeklies puplished two highly critical articles on homosexuality. Homosexuals were also given dishonarble discharge from the army.
Heglian tragedy
expressing tragedy as a battle between two opposing moral claims, which are both valid but both cannot co-exsist, so one tragic hero must die
Neitzschean tragedy
expressing a internal conflict between an ordered apollian side and an chiotic dionysian side
what did williams describe the main theme of his work as?
the destructive impact of soceity on the senstative non conformative individual
