Criticism In A Streetcar Named Desire By Tennessee Williams

While many will agree that Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night is critically acclaimed to be one of the most entertaining and well-liked pieces that he has written, there tends to be a discrepancy over how the characters in the play are portrayed when it comes to the importance of gender roles. After reading James C Bulman’s article over the Globe’s more recent performance of Twelfth Night and Shakespeare’s original written version, I realized that there are many ways that this famous piece has been portrayed and each has its own pros and cons.

In the play, A Streetcar Named Desire, by Tennessee Williams, gender roles were reflected on gender roles in the American Society in the 50’s. The male gender was predominant while the female gender was considered less powerful. Williams really emphasizes this stereotype, yet he focuses on the females in the play the whole time.

A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams is a play about a woman named Blanche Dubois who is in misplaced circumstances. Her life is lived through fantasies, the remembrance of her lost husband and the resentment that she feels for her brother-in-law, Stanley Kowalski. Various moral and ethical lessons arise in this play such as: Lying ultimately gets you nowhere, Abuse is never good, Treat people how you want to be treated, Stay true to yourself and Don’t judge a book by its cover.

In this play Blanche has a praxis: She must get a companion to share her life with who can provide her with shelter, food, and financial support and that’s what makes the whole story happen. This praxis is created when two things happen: First, Blanche finding out that the man she married was having an affair with another man and he decided to shoot himself after she confronted him, and second, the loss of her house in Mississippi. These two things create her need of a shelter, financial support and food therefore she decides to stay with her sister Stella.

The roles of the women in the drama are significant because of the way they shape the story and help the reader understand the nature of one of the strangest events in human history. Throughout the novel, women are portrayed in many different ways. Some are shown as being good and moral people while others the complete opposite. Arthur Miller's treatment of women in this play show women as weak beings who give into their husbands. Each women in the drama plays a significant role in showing the different archetypes there were among women especially Mary Warren, Elizabeth Proctor, and Abigail Williams. In addition, Kohlberg’s Moral Stages are six developmental stages of human moral reasoning which can tie into the view in which we have of the women in the play.

For centuries, society has taught its men and women to behave in a clear way and to expect certain things from each other. Due to this, women have been placed second, below men, the submissive gender. Women have been taught to aspire to marriage, to not be too smart, to live their life according to society who tells them how to please a man. In fact, when women saw this degradation of themselves they decided to create a movement known as feminism, the social, economic and political equality of the sexes. Due to this standard of society passed through generations, an average reader would interpret Joan Murray’s “Play-by-Play” to be a poem about older women lustfully longing after younger men and fulfilling their purpose. However, if one were to delve deeper into Murray’s poem, it could be argued that she is taking a satirical approach to the way men objectify women. Marilyn French once said, “The same men who are blind and deaf to feminism are acutely sensitive to what threatens their dominance and privilege.” In looking at the symbols, diction, and tone in Murray’s poem, one can plainly see her disdain towards the societal standard and objectification of women.

In the play A Streetcar Named Desire, Tennessee Williams’ portrays Blanch DuBoise as the character who suffers inner struggles all through her life. She is a fallen woman in the eyes of society. She would prefer to live in her own imagination. Her name is befitting for her in that she acts more as a woman of the night - she would rather be out at night or in the dim lights. She is a southern woman on all counts who lives in Laurel, Mississippi. Her life has been full of disappointments, death, and sexual propriety. Through her misfortunes, she becomes more unstable. She wants to create a life within her life to cope with all the stresses of her reality. Blanche is unable to find an escape from herself. She finds herself as a victim at the hands of her sister’s husband. Blanche hopes for new beginnings when she leaves Belle Reve from which she has been evicted. She moves to New Orleans to be with Stella, her sister, and her husband Stanley. Leonard Berkman “pities her and views her as a ‘misunderstood’ character, a tragic figure trying to start a new life for herself in New Orleans” (34). As much as she tries, she can never fully gain peace.

     In Tennessee William’s masterful play, A Streetcar Named Desire, the reader meets a middle – aged woman by the name of Blanche DuBois. Blanche lives in her own faerie tale world, one of a young, beautiful debutante, surrounded by admirers, and loved by all whom she encounters. In reality, Blanche is an aging woman who cannot cope with the actualities of life. She makes up wild stories, and when Stanley Kowalski, her brother – in – law, rapes her, the realities of life cause her to drift into absolute lunacy.

Blanche has essentially removed herself from the reality of her life. She has made up this illusionary world that she now lives in. The death of her

The first assumption that the men make about the women is that they worry over “trifles,” which is where the name of the drama comes from. While the men regard the things like the fruit preserves, the dirty towel, and how Mrs. Wright was making her quilt as just trifles the women do not see them like that (Glaspell). For the women, these little things are what they live for. It is their job to keep the house, work the farm some, and make the food. Quilting also provided a decent past time to do in-between your work. So these little things, which the men see as too insignificant to acknowledge, play a big part in the lives of women like Mrs. Peters, Mrs. Hale, and Mrs. Wright. The women saw importance these “trifles” play in Mrs.

When analysing these two plays under a gender or feminist lense it becomes obvious that feminism was not only present,

Using the plays “Much Ado About Nothing” and “The Rover”, discuss and compare each play’s treatment of women.

Throughout the story, the men are always seen as laughing and not seeing situations as seriously as they should. For example, the speech by the sheriff and county attorney describing the attorney is as chuckingly and scoffingly. The men are not taking the situation seriously because they feel that it is the women’s fault for always troubling the male that this happened. Another example is when Mrs. Hale questions Mrs. Wright on whether she is going to quilt or knot her fabric and the county attorney and sheriff burst out laughing over what they believe is an idiotic question and occupation. The last way the play shows how uncaring and insensitive the men are stereotyped to be is the fact that the women are never addressed with a first name throughout the play. The women are always referred to as the wife of their husband or introduced by their husband’s last name. All the men address each other with even their first name or their full name, but when it comes to women, the men believe they must show their dominance and addresses them with their last

In the 1947 play, A Streetcar Named Desire, Tennessee Williams explores the aspects of traditional gender roles in society; raising many questions about gender, power, and dominance. Ultimately, though, A Streetcar Named Desire observes the conflict between alpha male Stanley Kowalski and the delicately feminine Blanche DuBois, with wife, sister, and mother-to-be, Stella Kowalski, caught in the middle. Williams investigates the continuing fight for authority, on the one hand, and equality on the other; delving into gender politics and depicting many levels of uniqueness, from sexual conflicts to mental illness.

In scene seven of the play Stella Kowalski says the following: “…you’ve got to realize that Blanche and I grew up under very different circumstances than you did” (Williams, 99). With this sentence Williams introduces a possible starting point for an analysis of the Southern belle myth. The figure of the Southern belle is founded on a canonized discourse, resting on a cultural and social personification – a description, a code, a stereotype – which legitimizes and authorizes the interpretation of culture and nature, masculinity and femininity, superiority and inferiority, power and subordination. In other words, the Southern belle stereotype is based on a fear that women “might escape the rule of the patriarchy, that the oppositions of white/black, master/slave, lady/whore, even male/female might collapse into an anarchic conflagration threatening to bring down the symbolic order” (Roberts, xii). Additionally, this Southern woman stereotype is both a literature-generating principle, often supporting the very concept of Southern fiction, and a social construct, supporting the writing of Southern history and culture. In both cases it has to be read “against the South that created [it] for different social purposes, or reinvented [it] at crucial moments in history” (Roberts, xii) providing insight “into anxieties and aspirations of the culture” (Roberts, xii).