streetcar named desire context Flashcards
World War 2
- Set and written just after, characteristically little mention
- Fear that though we were making leaps in some fields we are also becoming more violent
Williams as a Southerner
- Civil war meant south suffered economically
- Romantic decay of grandeur
Old v New south
- Plantations vs industrialisation.
- Old world vs American dream
- Classes
- Stanley and Blanche represent this.
Williams as a homosexual
- Illegal most of his life.
- Tolerated in places such as new Orleans
- Alan Gray
Williams and politics
- Unpolitical writer
- Wrote about peoples burdens not big political issues.
Social context of the old South
- Women symbolic as passive and Chaste, this couldn’t support Blanche.
- Southern Gothic, authors knew their world was dying, very dark
John S Bak on class
‘The Cherry Orchard
and Streetcar are both
about the proletariat
supplanting the effete
bourgeoisie.’
Where does John T von Szeliski believe Williams sympathies lie?
‚Finding most men savage, Williams’s sympathy is on the side of the delicately built
person whose soul is revolted by crass life. A Streetcar Named Desire is his allegorical
demonstration of this “pitiful” situation.’
Plastic theatre
Uses imagery and stage directions profusely. Written to be read.
American literature context
- Southern gothic focus on death, decay, madness. Edgar Allan Poe
- Struggle of romanticism and Realism.
- Horatio Algers, rags to riches. Mark Twain.
- Romantic literature, [re civil war, all nice democratic stuff.
New Orleans
- Cultural melting pot
- Acceptance
- Poverty after collapse of slavery.
- Blue Piano
- Heterogeneous, Stella and Stanley.
What is the Hegelian Dialectic
Conflict of two equally justified opposing forces. Can’t work. No goodies or baddies.
America as a patriarchal society.
- Stella can’t make it on her own
- It is Stanleys world
- Blanche won’t fit in.
Mitch holding Mae West
- As a beast he doesn’t know how to handle a women
- Mae West Marionette in a King Kong Parody.
Vivien Leigh
- Blanche based on her performance of Scarlet Ohara from gone to the wind.
- Plays Blanche in film 12 years later.
