A Streetcar Named Desire

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Tennessee Williams

Drama

Aug 7, 2018

In New Orleans at the time in which Tennessee Williams set his classic play, there really was a streetcar running through the French Quarter, where the drama unfolds, to Desire Street, which gave the transit line its name. A more romantic or fitting title for the play is hard to conceive: Its juxtaposition of the prosaic and the poetic characterizes both the playwright’s heroine and his theme. From the moment she sets foot in the Kowalskis’ apartment, Blanche commands the stage (until, in the drama’s climactic act of violence, Stanley takes it back). She is very much a performer, and consciously so, whether sneering at Stanley or clutching at the attentions of his friend Mitch. Her desire is an attempt to redeem her distressed circumstances through sentiment, to gain admittance to a wider world than the one at hand through the only resource available to her imagination. Both melodramatic and recognizable, Streetcar's characters are haunting, and Blanche’s ultimate fate harrowing and heartbreaking.

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