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A Study of Illusion and Reality to Understand Blanche and Stanley’s Conflict for Modern Readers
Discover a comprehensive summary and expert analysis of A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams. Explore the enduring themes of illusion versus reality, character breakdowns, and the play’s cultural impact. Perfect for students, teachers, and literature enthusiasts seeking a deeper understanding of this iconic American drama.
Dive deeper into the psychological battles and timeless themes that make A Streetcar Named Desire a masterpiece. Continue reading for a detailed scene-by-scene breakdown, character insights, and expert commentary that will enrich your appreciation of Tennessee Williams’ enduring work.
Introduction: A timeless staging of the conflict between reality and illusion
A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) is one of the most important and influential works ever written for the American stage. Performed close to nine hundred times on Broadway between 1947 and 1949, its unflinching portrayal of sexual desire shocked critics and captivated audiences. The play isn’t a mere historical curiosity, though: its mix of lyricism and psychological realism remains as compelling today as when it was first performed in the mid-twentieth century.
A Streetcar Named Desire has many themes, but it’s the clash between reality and illusion that animates Tennessee Williams’ most famous play. Williams wrote it after a personal crisis triggered by his first literary breakthrough. In an essay on what he termed the “Catastrophe of Success,” he writes that success left him cold – literally, that is. While his creative struggles had filled him with a hot passion, success numbed him to all he considered good: a lively interest in human affairs, plus compassion and conviction. These qualities, he says, are the precondition for art to be made and its reason to exist.
Society, he implies, doesn’t look kindly on these qualities. Art deals in magic and illusion, neither of which are of much use in the rat race. In A Streetcar Named Desire, we meet a man who embodies that society. Stanley Kowalski is a representative of a world that values strength over sensitivity; he’s sharp-elbowed in his struggle to get ahead, has a crude sexual appetite, and a boorish love of bowling, betting, and beer. Blanche DuBois, the woman who becomes his antagonist, is, on the other hand, aristocratic, educated, and imaginative, she doesn’t want to get ahead – she wants to preserve the ideals of the old world.
Stanley and Blanche’s conflict – a conflict between harsh truths and beautiful dreams – drives the action forward. In this summary, you’ll hear the short version of Williams’ memorable staging of this timeless struggle between reality and illusion.
Before we begin, though, a quick heads up: this play contains depictions of addiction, mental illness, and sexual violence, including rape. Listener discretion is strongly advised.
The end of a beautiful dream
New Orleans, 1947. It’s a spring night, but it’s hot and humid. We’re in the French Quarter, an old neighborhood as charming as it is disreputable. Pressed up against the Mississippi with its banana and coffee-scented warehouses, this part of town is mostly made up of two-story weather-board houses. At night, bar lights twinkle in puddles and murmuring voices fill the streets. Wherever you go, there’s the sound of a tinny piano played by infatuated fingers.
Two things strike outsiders about the quarter: it’s blue-collar urbanity and it’s easy racial mixing. Both are unusual in the South – a region, at least until recently, of plantations, aristocratic manners, and pitiless segregation. And that’s where our story starts: with a stranger from that fading old world hesitantly stepping out of a streetcar into this new one.
The look on her face says it all: Blanche DuBois, a Southern belle with manners and expectations to match, doesn’t belong here. Daintily dressed in white with hat, gloves, and pearls, she looks a little moth-like as she tries to get her bearings under the streetlamp.
She’s looking for her sister, Stella, who lives in an apartment overlooking the tracks on which the streetcar locals call Cemeteries rides. It’s here, in the cramped space in which the siblings now embrace, that the rest of this drama will play out. Blanche begins grandly. She finds fault with the shabbiness of the quarter – an implicit critique of Stella’s husband, who ought to be a better provider. She then asks her younger sister if she has a maid. That puts Stella on the back foot – clearly a familiar position in this relationship. Stella replies that they only have two rooms: this one and…. Blanche interrupts with pedantic precision: “The other one.”
But these well-rehearsed roles don’t quite fit. Blanche’s haughtiness is a disguise. When she dims the lights, we sense her fear: the bright bulbs in the apartment threaten to reveal something she’d rather keep hidden. She gulps down a whiskey. She says it’s her first, but we’ve already seen her drink another. Moths prefer darkness, but they fly toward the fire that destroys them. Alcohol, we sense, may be such a flame for Blanche
Accepting a third whisky, Blanche reveals why she’s really here. She had to sell the DuBois plantation after a rapid succession of deaths bankrupted the family. The place’s name is a key to Blanche’s character: Belle Rêve, or “Beautiful Dream.” The French is slightly janky – the genders don’t match – but that’s symbolic too: Blanche is all mixed up. Her nerves got so bad that she had to ask for a leave of absence from the school where she teaches. So it’s not Stella that’s brought her to New Orleans: she needs a refuge.
It’s at this moment that Stella’s husband, Stanley, enters the apartment.
A cramped co-existence
Sex goes to the heart of Stanley Kowalski’s character. Williams tells us that the man who plays him should be a strongly-built 5’9” whose lithe movements exude “animal joy.” Most tellingly, when he looks at a woman, we should sense that he’s sizing her up – that the crude images in his mind determine how he smiles at her. The fact that he grins at his sister in law when he first meets her on this hot and humid night foreshadows the sinister direction this play will take.
Stella, we realise, hasn’t told her husband much about Blanche. Stanley asks her if she’s married. Blanche says she was, but that the “boy” died. In the background, a tiny piano strikes up a funereal waltz – a device Williams uses to communicate Blanche’s state of mind. It gradually becomes clear that this waltz represents her guilt about the nature of her husband’s death: a desperate suicide following after her discovery of his homosexuality.
Over the following weeks, the three characters settle into a cramped co-existence. Stanley and Stella take the bedroom at the back; Blanche, the couch in the kitchen up front. The smallness of the space causes countless psychological and physiological blockages.
Blanche sleeps where Stanley and his bowling buddies play cards at night, sprays expensive perfume about, and dims the lights with Chinese paper shades. From the perspective of the patriarch used to ruling this roost, Blanche’s feminine presence violates his prerogatives. When the beer-guzzling card players need to relieve themselves, they find the door locked: Blanche is in the bathroom taking a soothing bath. At night, the couple refrains from its usual lovemaking: the flimsy curtain separating kitchen and bedroom offers no privacy.
Guests, Benjamin Franklin is supposed to have said, are like fish: they start smelling after three days. But as the play progresses, Stanley’s ordinary frustration hardens into hate. What turns him against Blanche is her way of shaming him. She rubs his nose in his ignorance by quoting Edgar Allen Poe and speaking French. She needles him about the smallness of the apartment and compares his bowling trophies to children’s baubles. Her snobbery has a racial undercurrent: for Blanche, he’s a “Polack,” an uncouth outsider with shallow roots in America. The contrast with the aristocratic DuBois family that owned the land upon which it grew is clear.
Stella begs Stanley to indulge her sister’s “small vices.” But the affront to Stanley’s pride is too great: he’s determined to expel Blanche from their life.
The card game
Williams’ title likens emotions to streetcars: they move us from place to place. Inadequacy is one car Stanley rides. It takes him from shame to hatred and on to violation.
Alone in the apartment one day, he rifles through Blanche’s possessions. His suspicious mind turns the prop jewelry he finds into priceless pearls and rare rubies. Laughing at his naivety, Blanche bats away the suggestion that she cheated Stella out of her inheritance. The DuBoises were a debauched bunch, she says: they frittered everything away on wine, women, and song. Selling Belle Rêve barely covered the bills they ran up in the course of their “epic fornications.”
But when Stanley grabs a bundle of her dead husband’s love letters, we sense that her coolness is a put-on. Distraught, she promises to burn them. Stanley understands the insulting implication: his mere touch is enough to compromise and corrupt. Stung, he strikes back, telling her that Stella is pregnant with his child – a revelation that horrifies Blanche.
Stanley’s slow-simmering resentment finally boils over in the next scene – a pivotal moment in the play. It’s a hot evening a few days later. The kitchen is lit with “lurid, nocturnal brilliance.” Stanley and his friends are playing poker at the table. Smoke hangs in the air; discarded watermelon rinds litter the floor. The room reeks of stale tobacco, sweat, and whiskey.
The sisters are in the bedroom. At first, the two rooms are separate worlds, one masculine, the other feminine. Blanche, though, unites them. She undresses in front of the curtain, casting a provocative shadow onto the fabric that distracts one of the card players – a seemingly sensitive man called Mitch. When Mitch later crosses the threshold to use the bathroom, Blanche detains him with flirtatious talk. Stanley listens with growing irritation: he believes his wiley sister-in-law is setting a trap for his naive friend. When Blanche turns on a radio, he explodes, hurling the device into the street. Stella protests. Stanley drags her outside and slaps her – hard. The men restrain him, pulling him into the bathroom and dousing him in cold water.
Blanche, who’s been playing a game of her own, senses victory. Gallant Mitch promises the refuge she came to New Orleans to find. Stanley’s violent outburst, meanwhile, might just be the wake-up call her sister needed. She leads Stella out of the apartment – and away from her husband. But Stanley still has a hand to play. Cooled off and sobered up, he yells for Stella under the window of the upstairs neighbor’s apartment where the women sought shelter. His voice is thick with remorse. Overcome by desire, Stella turns away from her sister – physically and emotionally. She glides down the stairs and falls into her husband’s arms.
A streetcar named Desire
The next morning, Blanche finds Stella in bed lazily recovering from the night’s exertions. She calls Stanley a “madman.” For once, Stella doesn’t humor her sister. Instead, we hear her point of view. It’s matter-of-factly modern. There are things that happen between a man and a woman in the dark, Stella says, that make everything else seem unimportant.
That’s nothing but brutal desire, Blanche counters. It’s like the “rattle-trap streetcar” called Desire that bangs through the quarter as it goes up one old narrow street and down another. When Stella asks Blanche if she’s ever ridden it, Williams draws our attention to the larger design of his drama. Desire, he reminds us, was the name of the tram Blanche took before changing onto the line called Cemeteries. Desire brought her here – literally and figuratively.
The following scenes take us from spring into summer. As the action unfolds, we learn about Blanche’s past. The stories Blanche has told, we now see, are like the lanterns she places over harsh lightbulbs: they flatter to deceive. It’s Stanley who discovers the truth. It’s his malicious revelation of these facts that begins Blanche’s unravelling.
Stanley first pours poison into Mitch’s ear, telling him what he’s learned from a salesman who regularly travels to the part of Mississippi from which the DuBois sisters hail. After selling Belle Rêve, Blanche moved into a hotel called the Flamingo – a seedy place associated with prostitution. Blanche’s behavior, Stanley tells Mitch, was so notorious that soldiers at a nearby base had to be warned not to have anything to do with her. As for her teaching job, there was no leave of absence – she was fired after having an affair with a 17-year-old pupil. She was all but driven out after that. Penniless and with her reputation in tatters, she came to New Orleans.
Mitch, who was on the verge of proposing, breaks off his relationship with Blanche. During an angry showdown, Blanche admits everything. Mitch, though, is too drunk to process anything she says in her defence. It’s one of the tragedies of this play that no one hears Blanche’s side of the story except us – the audience. It wasn’t lust that put her on the fateful streetcar named Desire – it was a betrayal. After finding her husband in bed with another man, she told him that he disgusted her. It wasn’t true: she still loved him deeply. They were dancing to a slow waltz when she said it. Her husband rushed out; a gunshot halted the music. The illusion that had sustained her was shattered in that moment: she realized then that her lot in life was debt, death, and a guilt that could only be temporarily drowned in whiskey and carnal desire.
It’s symbolic of Stanley’s victory that Blanche’s words fail to move Mitch. Equally symbolic is what happens next: he tries to rape her – an attempt Blanche only thwarts by screaming “Fire!” and scaring him off. That, too, foreshadows the play’s sinister conclusion.
Illusion and reality
Until now, the piano has punctuated Blanche’s words. As we enter the frenetic final scenes of this drama, it threatens to overwhelm them. We’re not listening to an instrument being played in a bar down the street anymore – it’s as though we’re inside Blanche’s head. Gunshots ring out, but the waltz goes on. Blanche, we sense, is very close to losing touch with reality.
Stella has gone into labor and we find Blanche alone in the Kowalski apartment, where she’s preparing for her departure. She downs a whiskey and hurls flowery dresses into her trunk. She looks around nervously, pours herself another drink, and then resumes her task. We watch her cycle through these actions several times. Williams’ directions tell us that the actor playing Blanche should try to suggest a growing sense of hysterical exhilaration.
When Stanley enters the apartment, it’s clear that he’s also been drinking. He says the nurses at the hospital told him to go home. His bright shirt tells us he’s been bowling; his triumphant air, that he won. He grins as he asks Blanche where she’ll go. She invents a suitor who’s promised to take her on a Caribbean cruise. This sensitive man, she says, values her mind and respects her privacy. That’s just as well: he’s cast enough pearls before swine. Stanley doesn’t catch the Biblical allusion, but he understands it’s an insult: Blanche has implied he’s a pig often enough.
He also understands that it’s a lie. He’s been onto her from the start, he now says – not once did she pull the wool over his eyes. He mocks her pretensions: she thought spraying perfume around and covering lights with paper lanterns would turn the place into Egypt and make her the Queen of the Nile! Blanche backs away, tripping into the bedroom; Stanley advances. Desperate, she grabs a bottle and waves it in his face. He snatches it out of her hand. “We’ve had this date from the beginning,” he says, lifting her up and carrying her to the bed. Stanley wants to destroy Blanche and raping her achieves his aim.
When Stella returns from the hospital, she learns what her husband has done. Although Stella refuses to believe it at first, deep down she knows what he’s capable of. The play ends as another poker game takes place in the apartment and Blanche is in a catatonic state, escorted out by staff of the mental institution she’ll be receiving treatment. Blanche resists until a kind doctor calms her. The game carries on as Blanche leaves, saying, “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers”. Not only has the violation completely shattered Blanche’s sanity, but also has destroyed the marriage: As the curtains roll down, Stella heads upstairs to pack her belongings and leave Stanley.
Why does Williams choose to end on such a bleak note? As a number of critics point out, Stanley and Blanche are proxies for two larger forces: illusion and reality. We habitually favor the latter – make-believe, we dismissively say, is for children. Williams sets out to make Stanley attractive – it’s not by chance that he resembles the good-looking, tough-talking pragmatists who people American westerns and hard-boiled detective novels. Williams was suspicious of these kinds of heroes. By portraying Stanley as a brutal tyrant, he forces us to reckon with the dark side of qualities we often admire. In the end, it’s not only Blanche who has to confront the “harsh reality” embodied by Stanley – the audience does too.
Conclusion
In this summary to A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams, you’ve learned about the memorable showdown between Blanche DuBois and Stanley Kowalski. The two characters are proxies for forces that often feature in Williams’ work: illusion and reality. Modern industrial society, as Williams depicts it through Stanley, is ambiguous: admirably free of old-world prejudice, it also values strength over sensitivity. Blanche has her flaws – she is, among other things, hypocritical and snobbish. But her destruction at Stanley’s hands is a brutal demonstration of the flaws of a society incapable of understanding and compassion.