Streetcar Named Desire - thematic quotations, critical interpretations, and context Flashcards
(15 cards)
Quotations that support the theme of women and gender - 21
Blanche - [her delicate beauty must avoid a strong light] [uncertain]
Stanley - [manhood] [power] [seed-bearer]
Stanley - “let me enlighten you on a point or two, baby”
Blanche - “I was fishing for a compliment, Stanley”
Blanche - [she throws her head back and laughs] - response to violence
Poker night scene - men: [coloured shirts… coarse and direct and powerful as the primary colours] vs women: [the bedroom is relatively dim]
Stanley - [loud whack of his hand on her thigh]
Blanche - “the Little Boys’ Room”
Blanche - [moves closer] [feigned difficulty]
Mitch - “Poker shouldn’t be played in a house with women”
Stanley - “I want my baby down here”
Stella - “when men are drinking and playing poker, anything can happen”
Blanche - “[Shep Huntleigh can] set us up in a shop”
Blanche - “have someone’s protection”
Blanche - “you make my mouth water” vs boy - “ma’am”
Stanley - “A pair of queens?…. I am the king around here”
Stella - “people like you abused her and forced her to change”
Stanley - “I pulled you down off them columns”
Mitch - “what I been missing all summer”
Stanley - [brilliant silk pyjamas]
Stanley - [his fingers find the opening of her blouse]
Quotations that support the theme of secrecy and deceit - think light motif - 18
Blanche - [faintly to herself] vs [with a wild cry]
Blanche - “Turn that off! I won’t be looked at in this merciless glare!”
Blanche - “No, one’s my limit”
Blanche - “cards on the table”
Stanley - [shoves it roughly open] [rips off the ribbon]
Blanche - [partially closes the portieres]
Blanche - “I can’t stand a naked lightbulb”
Eunice - “I heard about you and that blonde”
Blanche - “temporary magic”
Blanche - “paper lantern over the light… I’m fading now”
Blanche - “I want to deceive him enough to make him - want me”
Blanche - “Voulez-vous coucher avec moi ce soir?”
Mitch - “How old are you?”
Blanche [singing] - “Say, it’s only a paper moon… Barnum and Bailey world”
Mitch - [tears the paper lantern off the lightbulb]
Blanche - “I don’t want realism… I want magic”
Stanley - “there isn’t no millionaire!”
Eunice - “don’t ever believe it”
Quotations that support the theme of death and mortality - 13
Blanche - “They told me to take a streetcar named Desire, and then transfer to one called Cemeteries and ride six blocks and get off at - Elysian Fields”
Blanche - “The long parade to the graveyard”
Blanche - “funerals are pretty compared to deaths”
Blanche - “the Grim Reaper had put up his tent on our doorstep”
Blanche - [love letters] “yellowing with antiquity”
Blanche - “I’m not young and vulnerable any more”
Blanche [brightly] - “Did he kill her?”
Blanche - “he was in the quicksands and clutching at me”
Blanche - “I hope candles are going to glow in his life. His auntie knows that…wind blows them out”
Mexican woman - “Flores para los muertos”
Blanche - “we didn’t dare even admit we had ever heard of [death]”
Blanche - “the opposite is desire”
Blanche - “trained young soldiers”
Quotations that support the theme of madness - 18
Blanche - [must avoid a strong light…suggests a moth]
Blanche - [the music of the polka rises up, faint in the distance]
Blanche - “I like an artist who paints in strong, bold colours, primary colours”
Blanche - “I ought to go there on a rocket that never comes down”
Blanche - [sharp, frightened cry]
Blanche - [moaning cry… hysterical tenderness]
Stella - “Haven’t you ever ridden on that streetcar?”, Blanche - “it brought me here”
Blanche - “in this dark march towards whatever it is we’re approaching”
Blanche - “I’ve got to be good and keep my hands off children”
Blanche - “we danced the Varsouviana” [minor key] vs [resumes in a major key]
Blanche - “sometimes - there’s God - so quickly”
[the Varsouviana music steals in softly]
Blanche - “El pan de mais…“
[a distant revolver shot is heard, Blanche seems relieved]
Blanche - “I think it was panic”
Blanche - “This place is a trap”
[The Varsouviana is filtered into a weird distortion, accompanied by the cries and noises of the jungle]
Blanche - “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers”
Quotations that support the theme of status and hierarchy - 26
[weathered grey] [the coloured woman a neighbour]
Stanley - [bellowing] vs Stella - [mildly]
Blanche - “Only Mr Edgar Allan Poe - could do it justice”
Stella - “you’d better give me some money”
Stanley - “The Kowalskis and the DuBois have different notions”
Blanche - “I hereby endow… peruse”
Blanche - “maybe he’s what we need to mix with our blood now that we’ve lost Belle Reve”
Stanley - “Nothing belongs on a poker table but cards, chips, and whisky”
Blanche - “Please don’t get up” vs Stanley - “Nobody’s going to get up, so don’t be worried”
Mitch - [awkward courtesy]
Blanche - “what does - what does he do?”
Stella - “This is my house and I’ll talk as much as I want to”
Mitch - “That don’t make no difference in the Quarter”
Blanche - “wore his pin for a while”
Blanche - “you still have sufficient memory of Belle Reve to find this place and these poker players impossible to live with”
Blanche - “animal”, “ape-like”, “raw meat”
Blanche - “quaint little words and phrases”
Blanche - [without waiting for him to accept, she crosses quickly to him and presses her lips to his]
Blanche - “you disgust me”
Stanley - “Dame Blanche”
Stanley - “I am…one hundred per cent American… don’t ever call me a Polack”
Blanche - [scarlet satin robe] vs Mitch - [blue denim shirt]
Stanley - [stares at her for a count of ten]
Blanche - [the bells] are the only clean thing in the Quarter”
Doctor - “Miss DuBois”
Critical interpretations that support the theme of women and gender
Nancy Tischler [Blanche] - “her quality is pathetic softness, not tragic strength”
Robert Brustein - “The conflict between Blanche and Stanley allegorises the struggle between effeminate culture and masculine libido”
The New Yorker - “The play is about the disintegration of a woman…or of a society”
Fang - “Sorrowfully, when Blanche is stuck in trouble, men are always the ones to whom she resorts”
Elia Kazan - “Blanche’s tragic flaw is that she adheres to the Southern tradition that she needs a man for completion — she can complete herself”
Critical interpretations that support the theme of secrecy and deceit
George Hovis [Southern Belle] - “Both a mask and a prison”
John Chapman [Blanche] - “shuns the reality of what she is and takes gallant and desperate refuge in a magical life she has invented for herself”
J.M. McGlinn - “Blanche is not the only DuBois who lives in illusions: Stella is in an illusion too, that she is happy and free in her life with Stanley”
Critical interpretations that support the theme of death and mortality
Tennessee Williams - “These seemingly fragile people are the strong ones really”
Philip C. Kolin - “The lantern is Allan’s shroud in this new world, death never very far away from desire”
Calvin Bedient - “[Stanley’s] primitive life force is death to [Blanche], because she cannot turn it into a game”
Critical interpretations that support the theme of madness
Thomas Porter - “Blanche is cast as the ‘invader’ in an unfamiliar world which resents her and will destroy her”
Galloway [Blanche] - “has her own desires, that draw her to Stanley, like a moth to a light, a light she voids, even hates, yet yearns for”
Critical interpretations that support the theme of status and hierarchy
M Skiba (on Blanche) - “At first glance, Blanche DuBois may seem superficial, even a bit ridiculous on account of the importance she attributes to her looks and to her former social status”
Albert Wertheim – “Stella and Stanley’s baby represents the future — which is a Kowalski future, not a DuBois future, as shown by Blanche being removed and Stanley staying in the household, the ultimate victory”
Philip C. Kolin - “[Blanche] wants to dilute and neuter Stanley’s harshness….by diminishing the intensity of the lightbulb [with the paper lantern]
Context that supports the theme of women and gender - 2
Southern belle - an upper-class woman who expected men to treat her with courtesy
After WW2, women’s social status shifted, so they gained more of an accepted position within marriage
Context that supports the theme of secrecy and deceit - 1
Deceit a key theme of poker - must bluff or trick other players to make them think you have better cards than they do
Context that supports the theme of death and mortality - 1
Civil war marked death of South
Context that supports the theme of madness - 2
Madness a key Southern gothic theme, rising up against concept of “Lost Cause” (renewed power of the South)
Williams’ sister lobotomised - harsh treatment of mental illness very close to home
Context that supports the theme of status and hierarchy - 2
Old South - immigrants/different races enslaved or in service vs New America - greater influx of immigrants therefore wider acceptance of people from other cultures eg New Orleans = Big Easy
