Beyond the brutalities that all slaves endured, females suffered the additional anguish of sexual exploitation and the deprivation of motherhood. In âIncidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,â Harriet Jacobs focuses on racial subjugation but also gives voice to a different kind of captivity...
James Baldwin and Richard Wright focus most of their works on the suffering of blacks in opposition to the overwhelming and repressive nature of racism that contorts the very existence of black bodies, specifically men. Wright and Baldwin assert that there are various approaches to...
Through a focus upon gender, both Elia Kazanâs film of Tennessee Williamsâ original play, A Streetcar Named Desire (Warner Bros, 1951) and Margaret Atwoodâs novel, The Handmaid’s Tale (Vintage, 1986) effectively manage to mirror the concerns of both time and place. Despite differing contextual influences,...
A Streetcar Named Desire is at its surface, an undoubtedly heterosexual play. Allan Grey, its unseen gay character, makes homosexuality a seemingly marginal topic within the play. But a deeper reading of the text suggests the opposite. Tennessee Williams uses heterosexual characters as surrogates to...
Power is the underlying current that runs through both Websterâs âThe Duchess of Malfiâ, a 17th century revenge tragedy, and Williamsâ âA Streetcar Named Desireâ, a 20th Century modern domestic tragedy. Both plays offer stark representations of powerâs tendency to corrupt, a corruption that often...
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...
Introduction Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun challenges the stereotype of 1950’s America as a country full of doting, content housewives. The women in this play, Mama, Ruth and Beneatha, represent three generations of black women who, despite their double fronted subordination, continue to...