A05

Question 1

What does Victoria Elliot say about youth?

Answer 1

Blanche is still lost in the fantasy of her youth

Question 2

What does Rebecca Cole say of imagination?

Answer 2

Blanche symbolises the beauty of aristocratic imagination that is slowly being crushed by Stanley’s drive for materialism.

Question 3

What does Gabi Reigh say of the old south?

Answer 3

The old south is defeated as much by its own corruption as by the threat of a newly emerging society.

Question 4

What does P.WIlliams say of Stanley?

Answer 4

A territorial animal desperately defending its lair.

Question 5

What does a critic say of Stanley’s masculinity?

Answer 5

After proving his masculinity on the battlefield, he’s ready to assert his manhood

Question 6

What does contemporary critic Hardold Clurman say of the evolution of class in Streetcar?

Answer 6

Streetcar is a ‘dramatisation of sensibility crushed by brutishness.’

Question 7

What is the Marxist reading of the play?

Answer 7

There is greater sympathy for Stanley’s proletariat lifestyle and Stella’s mindset of love being more important than class divides. Less sympathy to Blanche as a relic of an aristocratic hierarchy.

Question 8

How does Michael Billington sympathis with Stanley?

Answer 8

You understand his refusal to be insulted and patronised by his sister in law.

Question 9

What does Robert Grove say of Blanche’s rape?

Answer 9

In scene 10 Blanche has really been asking for what she gets.

Question 10

What does Arthur Miller say in his 2004 essay?

Answer 10

Stanley is a sexual terrorist, a tiger on the loose.

Question 11

What does Costa say of the marginalised voice?

Answer 11

Williams’ gives voice to the marginalised minority that did not fit in the ideological structure of the cold war period.

Question 12

What does a modern sociological perspective on the play show?

Answer 12

Stanley is not a charming man prone to outbreaks of violence, he is an absolute batterer. He is perfectly consistent to a profile of an abuser.

Question 13

What did earlier critics notice of Stanley?

Answer 13

He was a highly ranking officer in the war, and he is in fact relatively well educated, he is able to reference Shakespeare’s Anthony and Cleopatra to show his acknowledgement of Blanche’s facade.

Question 14

What does Heinzeltman say of Williams?

Answer 14

He was the ‘Laureate of the outcast.’

Question 15

What does Ted Hughes say of art?

Answer 15

‘Every work of art stems from a wound in the soul of an artist.’

Question 16

What did Thornton Wilder, an early critic of the play say of Stella and Stanley?

Answer 16

That the play was based upon a fatally mistaken premise. no Woman that had ever been a lady would marry a vulgarian such as Stanley.