Response to Tennessee Williams' "A Streetcar Named Desire"

Tennessee Williams' renowned 1947 play "A Streetcar Named Desire" is an arguable staple in the history of American literature. The play examined issues like the potentially dangerous and destructive nature of certain social norms and the the social "roles" people find themselves playing to conform to them--and how what's considered "normal" isn't always actually right. It tells the story of Blanche--a woman astray, in more ways than one, staying with her sister Stella and Stella's new husband, Stanley, a powerful and impulsive drinker, in New Orleans about the time the story was written.

Blanche is lost in the past as well as the present, constantly regretting and blaming herself for the suicide of her husband, who died some years before the play opens, which makes her grip on reality and the present shaky at best--she's gets not just lost in the moment, but completely loses herself in it, she hides her age, gets lost in her dreams, and refuses to see things as they are, which results in her always having something to hide, because she's also making a mistake of some sort, which leads her to deceive everyone in her life. Stella knows that Stanley is bad news, when he beats her in the play it's clear that it wasn't the first time, but she can't leave him, or won't--she' loves him, even though loving him cripples her--it makes her submit to being possessed and controlled, in a way, and leaves her more and more dependent on him as each day passes. Stanley doesn't have any honor or respect for anything except himself, and only has the power and the cunning to get what he desires--which makes him, in a way, the weakest of the three, and possibly even more detached with reality than Blanche, whose might as well be fast asleep.

While the play definitely opens on a lot important things, and deals with some really dark matter, I can't help but question if Williams did the right thing here--while the subject matter here needs to be dealt with and seen for sure, I feel like, as with a lot Williams ("The Glass Menagerie" comes to mind) he only focuses on the weak people--not the weaknesses of people. None of the characters in the "Streetcar" are strong, or even realistic--they are merely characters, to the most basic degree, left symbolizing the only the weaknesses they embody and represent. Real people are not only what makes them weak, yet in his play that is arguably all we see.

In class we discussed why literature focuses on weak characters, especially women ones from this time period, when there are so many who were not and do not fit that model of submissive and lost and dependent... It was a totally excellent question, worth not just asking, but acting on.