Industrial South Flashcards
(7 cards)
What does Streetcar chronicle?
The defeat of an aristocratic southern belle by a new working-class society.
Context point- What befalls Blanche in his play befell many upper-class Southerners as industrialisation swept away at their traditional power base.
What is the connection between the industrial south and Stanley?
He symbolises working-class power and post war masculinty - emotionally repressed and physically dominant
He’s the embodiment of the modern, industrial America.
*John. S. Bark; “Stanley is a product of materialistic, post-war society.
When did the the decline of the Southern Aristrocracy begin?
With the confederate defeat in the Civiil War.
It was openly evident by World War I.
Impact of Industrilialisation in the South.
From the 1920’s - 1940’s industrialisation continued to expand, and the old Southern class structure couldn’t withstand it’s effects.
Composition of the labour force changed radically: more blacks, poor whites, immigrant stock, and women began working than ever before.
*Blanche = Fading Southern genitilty
*Stanley = Risining industrial New America.
What happened to the succesful members of this group?
Became part of a burgeoning middle class that slowly replaced the disappearing aristrocracy of the Old South as the elite in the Southern community.
*Marxist view (relating to or denoting the political and economic theories of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.):
-Stanley resent Blanche’s aristrocatic airs, exposing her as a fradulent symbol of the old South.
-Represents class struggle and the breakdown of elitism
What was the aristrocratic tradition that gave away to a new order?
How and what made it go away?
The aristrocatic traditon where certain concepts rooted in both man and woman: He, the social man as master and her, the homebound woman as mother and nurturer.
Particularly after women gained the constitutional rigth to vote in 1920 and as divorce, employment, and education became more readily available to them.
What would have the Southern Sense of hierachy been if it appeared to remain?
It would have been no more than the aristricrats clinging to the last vestiges of obsolete (out of date) power, for by the 1940’s Southern wealth and influence already shifted to the industrialists.
