Essays on a Streetcar Named Desire

“A Streetcar Named Desire” is a story of damaged people. Blanche DuBois, a repressed and sexually warped Southern belle, seeks either atonement or reassurance; she wants someone to help lift the burden of her guilt for her twisted sexuality. Meanwhile, Stanley Kowalski, a horrifyingly abusive...

The theme of contrast is key to A Streetcar Named Desire as it is so obviously displayed in every aspect of the play. Most importantly, Blanche is in a stark contrast with Stanley – a contrast which ends up being very problematic – and there...

In Ibsen’s A Doll’s House and Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire, both playwrights have shed light on the struggles women face to establish their place in the patriarchal society. While in A Doll’s House women finally triumph over patriarchy, in A Streetcar Named Desire, they...

“A picture is worth a thousand words.” This timeless saying embodies the ability of imagery to convey multiple messages and themes in an overarching structure. Through detailed nuance, the playwright Tennessee Williams utilizes the imagery found in his characters’ actions and settings to surpass the...

Throughout A Streetcar Named Desire, Blanche is caught between the contradictions of her own character and the society surrounding her. She persistently fights to conceal the truth of her personality and past, failing to comprehend the changing conditions of post-WWII, post-New Deal America. In the...

Power is the underlying current that runs through both Webster’s ‘The Duchess of Malfi’, a 17th century revenge tragedy, and Williams’ ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’, a 20th Century modern domestic tragedy. Both plays offer stark representations of power’s tendency to corrupt, a corruption that often...

Tennessee Williams’s play, A Streetcar Named Desire, illustrates the struggle of power between economic classes and the changes taking place in America at that time, regarding social status. The constant tension between Blanche and Stanley represents the conflict between social classes, and the clash of...

In Tennessee Williams’ play, A Streetcar Named Desire, the nature of theatricality, “magic,” and “realism,” all stem from the tragic character, Blanche DuBois. Blanche is both a theatricalizing and self-theatricalizing woman. She lies to herself as well as to others in order to recreate the...

The measure of a man’s character is what he would do if he knew he never would be found out. Thomas Babington Morality is the very foundation of goodness and the pillar of righteousness. Immorality, however, is the threshold towards conspicuous malevolence. These two extremes...

Using the first three scenes of “A Streetcar Named Desire”, it is safe to use certain words to describe Stanley Kowalski: animalistic, dominance-driven, and hotheaded. Stanley has grown up as a city-boy who developed a behavior that would drive most people into the opposite direction....

Through a focus upon gender, both Elia Kazan’s film of Tennessee Williams’ original play, A Streetcar Named Desire (Warner Bros, 1951) and Margaret Atwood’s novel, The Handmaid’s Tale (Vintage, 1986) effectively manage to mirror the concerns of both time and place. Despite differing contextual influences,...

Since the focal theme of “A Streetcar Named Desire” is that of integration and adaptation, the relationship between Blanche and Stella is important and its function evident: Williams establishes a contrast between them. For example, when Stella says, in Scene One, that ‘the best I...

By the time she speaks her famous closing line about depending on the kindness of strangers, it has become apparent that the ability of Blanche DuBois to survive in a world of men—and not just animalistic throwbacks like Stanley Kowalski, either, but men of all...

Blanche in “A Streetcar Named Desire” is a character who will throughout the duration of the play invoke all sorts of contrasting, even opposite emotions. To analyze one’s emotions is no easy task, and to do so most effectively one must break the play into...

Tennessee Williams uses a variety of techniques to produce a strong sense of dramatic tension throughout A Streetcar Named Desire, as he mainly focuses on the interactions between characters to create an edgy mood. For example, Williams’ presentation of Blanche suggests she is actually the...

Patriarchy refers to a social system in which men categorically hold more power than women. They occupy powerful positions in society and their actions and decisions carry more authority than those of women. Patriarchy is embedded in society’s institutions and the ways in which we...

In both Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar named Desire and Sylvia Plath’s Ariel, there is extensive concern for how masculinity and femininity are portrayed. Both texts present archetypical interpretations of gender as well as juxtaposing figures that undermine these stereotypes, either actively or passively. One such...

The postmodernist writers emerged after the Second World War, and their fierce critiques of human nature showed a race that was vile and heinous at best, with Tennessee Williams’s depiction being no different. In his play A Streetcar Named Desire, Williams explores the gruesome nature...

Throughout scenes 1 and 2 of A Streetcar Named Desire, playwright Tennessee Williams presents Stanley as extremely powerful and authoritative through the use of dialogue as well as stage directions. The audience immediately learns how strong Stanley is in a physical sense; however, we soon...