Streetcar: Themes?

Question 1

Desire and fate?

Answer 1

Desire has brought Blanche to the point where she has to move in with her sister, and she literally arrives on a streetcar ‘named Desire’.

• Sexual passion keeps Stella with Stanley, so that she says ‘I’m not in anything I want to get out of’ (Scene Four, p. 42).
• Despite being newly married to Blanche, Allan allowed himself to succumb to his illicit desire for another man.
• Desire and fate combine when Blanche stops resisting Stanley; he says: ‘We’ve had this date with each other from the beginning!’ (Scene Ten, p. 97).

Question 2

Death?

Answer 2

• Blanche has been traumatised by her husband’s suicide, so that she now ‘hears’ the music that was playing at the time, then the gunshot.
• Blanche tells Stella, then Mitch, about the family deaths she endured at Belle Reve, saying that ‘funerals are pretty compared to deaths’ (Scene One, p. 12).
• Mitch carries a cigarette case given to him by a dying girl, inscribed with lines by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, about love after death.
• A blind Mexican woman sells ‘ Flores para los muertos ’ (flowers for the dead) (Scene Nine, p. 88).

Question 3

Madness?

Answer 3

• Blanche recognises her own mental instability and says that because of it she cannot be left on her own (Scene One, p. 10).
• Blanche suffers repeated hallucinations relating to her husband’s suicide.
• Blanche’s preference for fantasy over reality is, arguably, always on the edge of madness.
• Blanche is eventually driven over the edge into madness when she is raped by Stanley, and is led away to a mental institution.

Question 4

Social class?

Answer 4

• Blanche and Stella are from a once wealthy plantation-owing family, though Stella has happily accepted a lower social status with Stanley.
• Blanche calls Stanley an ‘ape’, but she may have a valid point in speaking out for tender feelings and the arts, which she feels are beyond him.
• Stanley seems to need to feel that even if he does not know about something – such as jewellery – he knows someone who does.
• Stella thinks that Blanche is too snobbish, and says ‘don’t you think your superior attitude is a bit out of place?’ (Scene Four, p. 46).

Question 5

Gender?

Answer 5

• Blanche expects men to treat her with old-fashioned courtesy, despite her shady past.
• Stanley rejects the idea that women should be treated with any special respect, and would never get up because a woman had entered the room.
• Stanley annoys Stella by treating her in a sexist way in front of other men – for example, slapping her thigh.
• Mitch is prepared to treat Blanche with the courtesy she demands, until he learns about her past. Then he thinks she no longer deserves it.