A Streetcar Named Desire

1. { } A Streetcar Named Desire LECTURE 2

3. {FOCUS} • Comparing Texts • Remembering Othello • Recap last week • Historical Context • Setting • Key Players

4. {Gist} The protagonist, Blanche DuBois, has come to visit her sister, Stella, who lives in a shabby neighborhood in New Orleans near the railroad tracks. Blancheis immediately at odds with this backdrop, being at once judgmental of Stella'sblue­collar, rough and tumble husband, Stanley, while simultaneously being at the mercy of his hospitality (and hostility).

5. {Historical Context} • A Streetcar Named Desire is a stage play with elements of tragedy and pathos. • Play represents the decline of the aristocratic families traditionally associated with the South. • These once­influential families had lost their historical importance when the South's agricultural base was unable to compete with the new industrialization. • Many landowners, faced with large areas of land and no one to work on it, moved to urban areas.

6. {The Play} • A Streetcar Named Desire, is one of the better known and much staged plays of Tennessee Williams. • The play was first produced in New York and Boston in 1947. A film version directed by Elia Kazan followed in 1951. • Set in New Orleans, Louisiana, shortly after World War II, the play explores the plight of impoverished Southern gentry and the rapid changes of Southern society in the industrial age.

7. {The Play} • Williams turned to his personal life for the subject matter for his plays, • …and yet there is a certain universality about them, for his own life aptly depicted the shattering of the American Dream and its effect on the American people.

8. {When?} The action takes place between May and September in a shabby apartment building in the working-class district of New Orleans in the 1940s, shortly after the Second World War.

9. {Dramatic Techniques} • Language – diction, imagery, style, symbolism, allegory, register, • Staging – directorial devices (stage directions), costumes, props= creation of setting • Structure – Act/Scene structure, plot

10. { {Comparing Texts} Thematic Concerns of Paper Dramatic Techniques CENTRAL QN: How do both playwrights convey similar thematic concerns regarding the Individual and Society through similar or different dramatic techniques?

11. {Othello} • Individual & Society • The Other • Displaced from Original Society (?) • Alienated • Roles & Expectations of Men & Women in Society • Class & Hierarchy of Social Status

12. {Keep in Mind} • When comparing and contrasting texts: • Ideas, issues, themes • Representation of the Individual and the Society • Dramatic techniques: similarities & differences [eg. Similar or different use of stage directions, metaphors, imagery, allusions, music etc] - Effects of these techniques: how similar, how different…?

13. {Background & Setting} Othello Streetcar Tennessee Williams 1947 America Setting America in the 40s New Orleans Single setting • Shakespeare • Elizabethan Era • Setting • Venice • Moves to Cyprus • Two settings

14. {Structure} Othello Streetcar No Acts Eleven scenes No interval Each scenes on a dramatic gesture Single setting throughout the entire play: The Kowalskis’ house • 5 Act Play • Setting shifts from Venice in Act 1 to Cyprus for the rest of the Acts • Venice: • powerful city-state in 16th C • Commercial centre • Orderly, law-abiding, formal

15. {Streetcar Symbols} • Naked Light Bulb – truth, reality, epiphany • Paper lantern – disguise reality, create illusion BUT temporary • Colour symbolism • White clothing – symbolises purity and innocence • Red stained meat package – sexuality, establish gender roles • Music as symbol for emotions • Blue Piano – present when Blanche discusses loss and hope • Polka music that Blanche hears, real or imagined? Represents for Blanche death and imminent disaster • Animal symbolism

16. {Epigraph} And so it was I entered the broken world To trace the visionary company of love, its voice An instant in the wind (I know not whither hurled) But not for long to hold each desperate choice. – “The Broken Tower” by Hart Crane

17. {Epigraph} And so it was I entered the broken world To trace the visionary company of love, its voice An instant in the wind (I know not whither hurled) But not for long to hold each desperate choice. – “The Broken Tower” by Hart Crane • Function: • Introduces reader to thematic concerns of the play, raises questions essential to the play • “Broken World” – metaphor for the themes of love and loss • Provides poetic language against which we can measure the less formal linguistic register of other characters in the play, illuminating Blanche’s literary background

18. OTHELLO {Setting A1S1} At night, in a street outside Brabantio’s house in Venice, two men whisper their secret griefs.

19. {Setting Scene One} STREETCAR The exterior of a two-storey corner building on a street in New Orleans which is named Elysian Fields and runs between the L & N tracks and the river. The section is poor but unlike corresponding sections in other American cities, it has a raffish charm. The houses are mostly white frame, weathered grey, with rickety outside stairs and galleries and quaintly ornamented gables. This building contains two flats, upstairs and down. Faded white stairs ascend to the entrances of both. It is first dark of an evening early in May. The sky that shows around the dim white building is a peculiarly tender blue, almost turquoise, which invests the scene with a kind of lyricism and gracefully attenuates the atmosphere of decay. You can almost feel the warm breath of the brown river beyond the river warehouses with their faint redolences of bananas and coffee. A corresponding air is evoked by the music of Negro entertainers at a bar-room around the corner. In this part of New Orleans you are practically always just around the corner, or a few doors down the street, from a tinny piano being played with the infatuated fluency of brown fingers. This blue piano' expresses the spirit of the life which goes on here.

20. {Setting Scene One} STREETCAR The exterior of a two-storey corner building on a street in New Orleans which is named Elysian Fields and runs between the L & N tracks and the river. The section is poor but unlike corresponding sections in other American cities, it has a raffish charm. The houses are mostly white frame, weathered grey, with rickety outside stairs and galleries and quaintly ornamented gables. This building contains two flats, upstairs and down. Faded white stairs ascend to the entrances of both. It is first dark of an evening early in May. The sky that shows around the dim white building is a peculiarly tender blue, almost turquoise, which invests the scene with a kind of lyricism and gracefully and gracefully attenuates the atmosphere of decay.

21. {Setting Scene One} STREETCAR You can almost feel the warm breath of the brown river beyond the river warehouses with their faint redolences of bananas and coffee. A corresponding air is evoked by the music of Negro entertainers at a bar-room around the corner. In this part of New Orleans you are practically always just around the corner, or a few doors down the street, from a tinny piano being played with the infatuated fluency of brown fingers. This blue piano' expresses the spirit of the life which goes on here.

22. {Setting Scene One} STREETCAR • New Orleans - is a cosmopolitan city where there is a relatively warm and easy intermingling of races - the idea of NEW. • Introduction (and esp attention to social context) is important • Atmosphere established in this particular setting • Note especially how Blanche brings to the Kowalski apartment her prejudices, which prove to be out of time and place. • Class distinctions don’t matter here

23. {Setting Scene One} STREETCAR Elysian Fields: - Elysium or the Elysian Fields is a conception of the afterlife - Initial admission - reserved for mortals related to the gods and other heroes. - Later, included those chosen by the gods, the righteous, and the heroic, where they would remain after death, to live a blessed and happy life.

24. {Setting Scene One} STREETCAR Elysian Fields: Part of the underworld and a place of reward for the virtuous dead. However, viewed as a temporary place of the souls’ journey back to life.

25. {Setting Where?} • Many of the major themes of A Streetcar Named Desire are embodied in the history and culture of New Orleans. • The lively setting of the French Quarter, with its streetcars, bars, entertainment, and jazz and blues music, provides a rich background for the emotional events of the play; • the setting also draws symbolic attention to changes which were taking place in American society, especially in the South during the Post­ World War II years of the 40’s

26. {Setting Where?}

27. {Setting} • At the Kowalskis, the audience is introduced to the characters that are of varied origins in their nationalities, in their backgrounds, and in their beliefs. • Through the play, therefore, the reader is given a glimpse of the world in coexistence.

28. {Setting} • Neighbourhood is situated between the L&N railroad tracks near a bowling alley and jazz bar. • They live in a two room apartment that is part of a two family house. • Small and very cramped with three adults sharing the space.

29. {Staging}

33. {Staging}

34. {Staging} • Important that audience can see the upstairs, the downstairs, the interior, and the exterior. • Seeing the "outside" allows one to observe characters on the street [racial relations] • Dramatic action of play takes advantage of the flexibility of this setting

35. {Staging} • Cramp and tight space – increases tension/ conflict between characters • Stanley Kowalski’s small apartment = his kingdom. . • Blanche = an outsider and intruder to his environment. • She occupies the room adjacent to theirs - invading his privacy, encroaching even between Stanley and Stella’s sexual space

36. {Major} • Blanche Dubois • Stanley Kowalski • Stella Kowalski • Harold Mitchell (Mitch)

37. {Minor} • Eunice & Steve Hubbel • Pablo Gonzales • Negro Woman (unnamed) • Newspaper Boy • Mexican Woman (flower vendor) • A Doctor • A Nurse