Week four – A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) – Tennessee Williams – 26 October, 2010

CONTEXTS

Biographical background

[See Powerpoint for a photo of Williams]

[See Powerpoint for a breakdown of the key events of Williams’ life]

-  Although he was born in 1911, Tennessee Williams did not exist until 1939, when he changed his name from plain Tom to Tennessee. Although there are various versions of how this renaming came about, one story suggests it was a nickname that Williams acquired when his friends couldn’t remember which Southern state he came from. They knew it had a long name, but in fact it was Mississippi, not Tennessee. Whether true or not, it does suggest that Williams was keen to stress his Southern identity, and as we’ll see, that Southernness was very clearly expressed in Streetcar. [For name stories, see Spoto, pp.66-67.]

-  With his sister Rose, Williams grew up in various Southern towns, eventually settling in St. Louis, Missouri, where his father was branch manager of the International Shoe Company.

-  During the 1920s, Williams wrote short stories, poems, articles, and travelled around Europe with his grandfather in 1928.

-  Is persuaded to be a playwright by a production of Ibsen’s Ghosts that he sees in 1936.

-  1937: several plays produced by the Mummers amateur group in St. Louis. Studied playwriting and production at University of Iowa, 1937-1938.

-  1939: lives for a time in French Quarter of New Orleans. Perhaps has first significant homosexual relationship here.

-  1940: takes a playwriting seminar in New York with John Gassner, and has first lengthy homosexual affair in Provincetown.

-  Rose is institutionalized in 1943 and is treated with lobotomy.

-  1944: The Glass Menagerie premiered in Chicago and transfers to a highly-successful Broadway run in 1945.

-  Williams actually wrote a version of Streetcar during rehearsals for The Glass Menagerie in 1944, set it aside to write Summer and Smoke, and then came back to it when he was living in New Orleans in the autumn of 1945. He worked on it some more there and then re-wrote the play in one month whilst summering in Key West in 1946.

-  Despite Williams’s misgivings (he was convinced that the play would be a failure, perhaps because of the great success of The Glass Menagerie), it ran on Broadway successfully for 855 performances, and became the first American play to win all three major awards: the Pulitzer Prize, the New York Drama Critics Circle Award, and the Donaldson Award.

New Orleans

Real New Orleans

[See Powerpoint for a view of the French Quarter]

§  In the stage directions to the play, Williams describes the area around Stella and Stanley’s building as ‘poor but unlike corresponding sections in other American cities, it has a raffish charm. […] You can almost feel the warm breath of the brown river beyond the river warehouses with their faint redolences of bananas and coffee.’

§  This is the Vieux Carré, or French Quarter of New Orleans, indeed the street on which the building sits, Elysian Fields, is named after the Avenue des Champs-Élysées in Paris.

§  Perhaps gives the sense of a place both within and outwith America – its ‘melting-pot’ atmosphere should suggest what is best about the country, and Williams notes that ‘New Orleans is a cosmopolitan city where there is a relatively warm and easy intermingling of races in the old part of town.’ (p.115) Such intermingling foregrounds the intermingling of blood that has gone on between Stanley (a ‘Polack’), and Stella (of high-bred, French Huguenot ancestry).

§  Williams called this area of New Orleans ‘[t]he last frontier of Bohemia. A place in love with life.’ (See chapter 11 of the PBS programme about New Orleans listed on the wiki page for Streetcar.) From the 1920s onwards, the French Quarter of New Orleans was home to many writers, artists, and musicans, and before that it is generally regarded as the birthplace of the blues and of jazz – a blend of African harmonies and rhythms and European instrumentation, and the soundtrack to A Streetcar Named Desire: from the ‘blue piano’ which sounds at the beginning and then throughout, to the ‘hot trumpet and drums’ which are most prominent at the end of scene ten when Stanley takes Blanche into the bedroom.

§  Despite the decay that he saw in New Orleans, the city seemed to represent for Williams a place of renewal – he said that whenever he suffered loss, he felt that he belonged there more than anywhere else in the country, and claimed that more than half of his best work was written in the city (he set six short stories, five short plays, and three full-length plays there). There was something about the city that seemed to highlight aspects of people’s characters – this may in part explain the vibrant, sometimes garish theatricality of the play, and it also mimics Williams’s own experiences: he came to live in New Orleans first on December 26, 1938, making a break from his family in an attempt to define his life and his work more sharply. As critics have noted, it was here that he changed his name from Tom Williams to Tennessee Williams.

§  Williams wants us to consider New Orleans is a place of almost intoxicating sensuality: looking at the sky ‘attenuates the atmosphere of decay’; Williams suggests that we can ‘almost feel the warm breath of the brown river’; we can smell the bananas and coffee; and hear the sound of the ‘blue piano’. How do you think this intoxication affects the way in which Blanche and Stanley – in particular – behave?

Symbolic New Orleans – the new South

§  We get a sense from Williams’s New Orleans of things being stripped back to their base elements. This elemental quality is exemplified both by the primitive violence that we experience in the theatre when we see Stanley throw plates around the stage, and by the ritualistic chanting of the Mexican Woman, offering flowers for the dead. Blanche, who lives on elaborate illusions cannot cope with such a reduction to basic humanity and reacts by dressing herself up, trying to inhabit her illusions through alcohol, and placing paper shades over the lights to avoid having to look at reality.

§  Such actions have lead some critics to see Blanche as a metatheatrical agent: playing a part, drawing attention to the costumes and props of the theatre, and even organizing the lighting of her face and body. This rather suggests an explicit connection between Blanche and Williams himself. According to Kazan, ‘Blanche DuBois, the woman, is Williams. […] Blanche DuBois-Williams is attracted to the person who’s going to murder her… […] I saw Blanche as Williams, an ambivalent figure who is attracted to the harshness and vulgarity around him at the same time that he fears it, because it threatens his life.’ (p.139) Kazan’s sense of Williams’ deep involvement in the character is supported by one of the original titles for the play, ‘The Moth’, which suggests a creature that is attracted to its own destruction.

§  And it is the combination of two base and basic concerns of human existence, desire and death – the opposites which Blanche identifies for Mitch in scene nine – which seem to sum up the atmosphere of this part of New Orleans. Given that, in Greek mythology, Elysium was the area of the Underworld described as the resting place for heroes or those of great moral virtue, the entry of Blanche into Elysian Fields – and the existence of Stanley within it – holds some considerable irony. Christopher Bigsby has noted that, ‘[a]s the twentieth century rushed away from it, the South became an aesthetic rather than a social fact.’ (‘Tennnesee Williams: the theatricalising self’, in Modern American Drama, 1945-1990, p.48), and that in Blanche, ‘[t]he barren woman condemned to an asylum becomes a perfect image of the South.’ (‘Tennessee Williams: the theatricalising self’, p.50.) This idea of barrenness suggests that sexuality is the key element that defines Blanche – and Stanley too – and however shocking it is, there is something of the force of inevitability (perhaps this is a nod towards classical tragedy: the events that cannot be foreseen or prevented?) when Stanley rapes Blanche in between scenes ten and eleven – Stanley says: ‘We’ve had this date with each other from the beginning!’ (p.215)

§  In The Little Foxes, Lillian Hellman showed how a newly ambitious and industrializing South had become a place where only the ruthless could survive, turning the old Southern values of hospitality and gentility into commodities to be bought and sold. In the tragic downfall of Blanche too – morally, physically, emotionally, mentally, Williams suggests that the old Southern values and identities have been destroyed, and replaced by characters like Stanley. Blanche (and perhaps the American audience) might like to see him as an invader, a ‘Polack’, but as Stanley says so forcefully in scene eight, ‘a one hundred per cent American, born and raised in the greatest country on earth and proud as hell of it’. Given his actions during the play, this self-identification raises difficult questions about American society, and the fact that the play takes place in a unique American environment cannot answer these questions. After all, Stanley does not identify himself as a ‘New Orleaner’, or even a Southerner, but as an American.

Death and decay

§  It seems quite possible that Streetcar’s concerns with death derive in part from the turmoil of the recent world war, and that the clash of old and new civilisations in the play mirror the struggle that had been taking place between the old world of Europe and the new world of America. And America would soon take over from Europe as a superpower, as much of Europe began rebuilding.

§  Yet there is also a personal strain here, since during 1946, Williams – who was a hypochondriac – believed that he was dying of pancreatic cancer (which he wasn’t). But he genuinely seemed to believe that Streetcar would be the last play he ever wrote. (See Donald Spoto’s biography of Williams, The Kindness of Strangers, p.139.)

Language and imagery

§  Arthur Miller (who we meet next week,) said that Streetcar had a tremendous effect on him as he wrote Death of a Salesman. But it was ‘[n]ot the story or characters or the direction, but the words and their liberation, the joy of the writer in writing them, the radiant eloquence of its composition’. (See Miller’s autobiography, Timebends, p.182.) Miller saw in Streetcar a linguistic link with Europe, ‘the whole tradition of unashamed word-joy that, with the exception of Odets, we had either turned our backs on or […] used archaically’. (Ibid., p.182.)

A focus upon the use of language in Scene Nine (pp.203-207):

§  Frequent duets/trios – many of the scenes in the play feature only two or three characters together. The characters’ use of language in these scenes can suggest a clash of registers, tones.

§  Lyricism vs. directness of language – ‘I thanked God for you, because you seemed to be gentle – a cleft in the rock of the world that I could hide in!’ (p.205) vs. ‘Let’s turn the light on here.’ (p.203) Both have wider meanings.

§  Symbolism – the danger of ‘Don’t turn the light on!’ (p.204) The replacing of ‘The Flamingo’ with ‘The Tarantula’, which might be humorous in another context. (p.204) ‘Kiefaber, Stanley, and Shaw have tied an old tin can to the tail of the kite.’ (p.205) Draw attention – she cannot hide; cannot fly; old can.

§  Fragmented dialogue – dashes, ellipses: latter stages of the scene, suggests she is slipping into her own thoughts and out of touch with what is being said to her.

§  Repetition: ‘B: You said you needed somebody. Well, I needed somebody, too. […] M: You lied to me, Blanche. B: Don’t say I lied to you. M: Lies, lies, inside and out, all lies. B: Never inside, I didn’t lie in my heart…’ Suggests a happy matching of language in another situation, but here suggests a deadness, as if the repeated words cancel each other out.

§  Stream of consciousness: seems to mark Blanche’s final retreat into fantasy and memory – though here this is real memory, not fabricated; alarming is the way that Blanche flits in and out of reality.

Influences

§  Williams said that his plays always started with character. His inspiration for Streetcar was an image he had of Blanche sitting in a chair by the window, forlornly awaiting one of her ‘gentleman callers’. This gave rise to the original title for the play: ‘Blanche’s Chair in the Moon’ (which gives a sense of the naïve and impossible hopes of Blanche). As well as this, Williams also considered ‘The Passion of a Moth’, ‘Go, Said the Bird’, ‘The Moth’, ‘The Primary Colors’, ‘Electric Avenue’, ‘The Paper Lantern’, and ‘The Poker Night’ as possible titles for the play.

§  Jo Mielziner, the stage designer for a number of Williams’s productions noted that:

If [Williams] had written plays in the days before the technical development of translucent and transparent scenery, I believe he would have invented it. […] It was a true reflection of the contemporary playwright’s interest in – and at times obsession with – the exploration of the inner man. Williams was writing not only a memory play but a play of influences that were not confined within the walls of one room. (Quoted in Bigsby, A Critical Introduction to Twentieth-Century American Drama, v.2: Williams/Miller/Albee, pp.49-50.)

§  In Streetcar, Williams tries to make the style of the play reflect the content. Just as the characters spill over from one apartment to another and the sounds of the street echo in the rooms on stage, so the staging is transparent, with lighting guiding the audience’s attention, as if we are flitting in and out of the consciousness of the characters themselves. Williams’s comments about another play, ‘The Spinning Song’ (1943), seem highly relevant to Streetcar. He said that he wrote ‘The Spinning Song’ after seeing Sergei Eisenstein’s film, Alexander Nevskii, and inspired by Eisenstein’s combination of modern music (by Prokofiev), surreal art, and action, he aspired to create: ‘a synthesis for the stage of those artistic terms that informed the film of Eisenstein – a classic theme with broad and familiar outlines, a tragedy purified by poetry and music of modern feeling, a vividly pictorial presentation that would offer the utmost visual excitement and be informed by the rich and disturbing beauty of surrealist painting.’ (Quoted in Bigsby, A Critical Introduction to Twentieth-Century American Drama, v.2, pp.56-57.) Clearly the references here to music, surreal art and poetry are to be echoed in Streetcar in much more effective ways, and seem particularly effective in scenes 3 (with the reference to Van Gogh [see Powerpoint for a reproduction of The Night Café, the van Gogh painting upon which Williams is said to have based the stage direction of scene 3], use of colours and shadows, and the music and sounds towards the end of the scene, chiming in powerfully with Stanley’s own cries), and scene 10 (with the ‘lurid reflections’, jungle noises, and use of transparency in the staging to make the action of the inside and the outside of the apartment simultaneous – a highly cinematic technique, as if one image were dissolving into another suggesting connections between them in a way that echoes Eisenstein’s techiques).