A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams

First produced: 1947; first published, 1947

Type of work: Drama

Type of plot: Tragedy

Time of plot: 1940s

Locale: New Orleans, Louisiana

Principal Characters

• Blanche DuBois, a neurotic young woman in her late twenties
• Stella Kowalski, her younger sister
• Stanley, Stella’s husband
• Steve Hubbell, ,
• Harold Mitchell (Mitch), and
• Pablo Gonzales, Stanley’s poker-playing friends
• Eunice Hubbell, Steve’s wife

The Story

Two streetcars, one named Desire, the other Cemeteries, brings Blanche DuBois on a spring afternoon to the Elysian Fields address of her sister Stella, whom she has not seen since Stella’s marriage to Stanley Kowalski. Blanche, dressed in a fluttering white garden party outfit, jars with the shabbiness and menace of the neighborhood from her first appearance. The proprietress of the building admits her to the Kowalski apartment a few minutes before Stella’s return. One of Blanche’s weaknesses becomes immediately apparent when, after a successful search for Stanley’s whiskey, she drinks a half glass of it neat.

When Stella returns, Blanche makes only a token effort to hide her dismay at her sister’s new surroundings. Stella is happy with her wild man and regards Blanche’s criticisms with good-humored tolerance. Blanche turns on Stella and defends herself against a fancied accusation that she allowed Belle Reve, the family mansion, to be lost. When Stanley enters some time later, he greets Blanche brusquely. When he mentions her dead husband, Blanche becomes first confused and shaken, then ill. Later, while Blanche is in the bath, Stanley and Stella are free to discuss the implications of her sudden visit. Stella asks him not to tell Blanche that she is going to have a baby. Stanley, who is suspicious over the loss of Belle Reve and imagines himself cheated of property, tears open Blanche’s trunk looking for papers. Blanche enters and, using a pretext to get Stella out of the house, presents him with legal papers detailing the forfeiture of all the DuBois property. Blanche demonstrates a bewildering variety of moods in this scene, flirting with Stanley, discussing the legal transactions with calm irony, and becoming abruptly hysterical when Stanley picks up old love letters written by her dead husband. Her reaction to the news of Stella’s pregnancy is reverent wonderment.

It is Stanley’s poker night with three cronies, one of whom, Mitch, is a large, sentimental man who lives with his mother. Stella and Blanche enter after an evening in the French Quarter that they extend to two thirty in the morning to keep out of the way of the poker game. They cross into the bedroom, separated only by portieres from the living room, and meet Mitch leaving the bathroom. Blanche looks after him with some interest as he returns to the game. She begins undressing in a shaft of light through the portieres that she knows will expose her to the men in the next room. She dons a robe in time for Mitch’s next trip to the bathroom. Out of the game, he stops to talk to Blanche, and during their conversation she adopts an air of primness and innocence. Not wanting Mitch to see how old she really is, she asks him to cover the naked light bulb with a little Chinese lantern she bought in the French Quarter. They dance briefly to some music from the radio, but when the radio distracts the poker players, Stanley becomes violent and throws the radio out of the window, which sets off displays of temper that involve everyone in the house. Blanche and Stella flee to the upstairs apartment, leaving the men to deal with an outraged Stanley. When Stanley discovers that he is alone, he bellows up the stairway like a lost animal until Stella comes down to him.

The next morning Blanche persists in regarding as desperate a situation that Stella has long since accepted as normal. Blanche recollects an old admirer, Shep Huntleigh, who she thinks might rescue them. When Stella defends Stanley, Blanche retaliates with a long speech describing Stanley as a Stone Age man. Because the noise of his entry is covered by the sound of a train, Stanley hears the entire speech. To keep them from realizing that he overheard, he leaves and enters again. Stella runs into his arms.

Several weeks later, well into the humid Louisiana summer, Blanche is hoping for a proposal of marriage from Mitch, whom she is dating. One day, Stanley, who was been making investigations into Blanche’s conduct in Laurel, Mississippi, torments Blanche with hints of what he has found out. After he leaves, a young man comes to the door to collect for the newspaper. Blanche makes tentative advances to him, and before he leaves, she kisses him very gently on the lips.

Later that evening, Blanche and Mitch return from a date. He stays on for a talk in which Blanche tells him she is hardly able to put up with Stanley’s boorishness any longer. Mitch almost ends the conversation by asking Blanche how old she is. His mother wants to know. Blanche diverts his attention from her age by telling him about her husband, whom she married when they were both very young. One evening, she discovered her husband in a sexual act with an older man. Later, while they danced to the Varsouviana at a casino outside town, she confronted him with her knowledge. Rushing outside, the young man shot himself. Somehow, the mood of this speech prompts the long-awaited proposal from Mitch. Blanche is incoherent with gratitude and relief.

On Blanche’s birthday, in the autumn, Stella prepares a birthday dinner, which Stanley spoils as effectively as he can. He tells Stella that Blanche was a prostitute at a disreputable hotel in Laurel, a hotel she was asked to leave, and that she lost her high school job because of an affair with a seventeen-year-old student. At first Stella refuses to believe Stanley, then she defends Blanche’s behavior as a reaction to a tragic marriage. Stanley gives the same information to Mitch, who does not appear for the birthday dinner. Stanley climaxes the scene by smashing the dinner dishes on the floor and giving Blanche his birthday present, a bus ticket back to Laurel. At this point, Stella reveals that she is in labor, and Stanley takes her to the hospital.

Much later that same evening, Mitch comes to the Kowalski apartment in an ugly mood. He repeats to Blanche the lurid details of her past that he learned from Stanley. She admits them angrily and volunteers even worse episodes. In the street outside the house, an old Mexican woman sells her flowers for the dead. Even though Mitch no longer wants to marry Blanche, he begins a clumsy sexual assault on her that she repels by screaming, illogically, that the building is on fire.

With the help of Stanley’s liquor, Blanche retreats into the safety of madness. By the time Stanley returns from the hospital, she is decked fantastically in scraps of old finery from her trunk. Stanley rapes her, their struggle underlined by jazz music from a neighboring bar and by a fight between a drunk and a prostitute in the street outside.

In the final scene, another poker game is in progress when Blanche is taken to an asylum. Stella cannot accept her sister’s claim that Stanley raped her, for to do so would mean the end of her marriage. To persuade Blanche to leave quietly, Stella tells her that Huntleigh came for her. When Blanche sees the attendants, she is frightened at first, but then quickly responds to their kindness. Mitch rages at Stanley and has to be pulled off him by the other men. Stanley comforts Stella’s weeping, and the neighborhood returns to normal, its values undisturbed.

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