SND More Critics

Question 1

Adler

Answer 1

Blanche’s birthday dinner “is like an uneaten communion”, while “the rape is “a desecrated marriage ceremony” and the concluding image of the play “father, mother and child in a swaddling blanket” is an “unholy family”. Blanche leaves the stage “a violated Madonna”.

Question 2

J.M. McGlinn

Answer 2

”Stella ignores he needs of others and eventually adopts her own illusion. Her refusal to accept Blanche’s story of the rape is a comitment to self preservation rather than love”

Question 3

Elia Kazan on Blanche

Answer 3

“​Blanche is dangerous. She is destructive.”

Under his direction, Blanche was portrayed as an unstable woman who threatened the security of Stanley’s world, leading to her being cast out to allow that world to survive.​ 

Question 4

Felicia Londré

Answer 4

“the small apartment becomes a cage in which Blanche is trapped with no escape from Stanley’s growing aggression”

Question 5

Harold Bloom

Answer 5

“it is not Blanche, but Stanley who is ultimately trapped - he is the real victim of a changing world that seeks to emasculate him”

Question 6

Tennessee Williams

Answer 6

“Blanche’s guilt over her husband’s suicide is the cage she cannot escape”

Question 7

J.M. McGlinn on Stanley

Answer 7

“He thinks mereley that she feels superior to him” and he wants to destroy her composure “to make her recognise that she is the same as he, a sexual animal”

Question 8

harold clurman on blanche

Answer 8

“a delicate and sensitive woman pushed into insanity by a brutish environment presided over by chief ape-man Stanley Kowalski.”