Critical Analysis (AO5)
Tennessee Williams 1947: Letter to Elia Kazan (director)
Williams needs the “compassion of the audience” to evoke catharsis. Blanche’s demise should not be
blamed on Stanley but on “misunderstanding”, leaving a feeling of “if only they had known each
other” (1) . Blanche and Stanley should not be seen as ‘good’ or ‘bad’. “Don’t take sides or try to
present a moral”
(1) Stanley and Blanche both feel like outsiders, threatened and desire dominance to feel security
Elia Kazan 1947: the Notebooks in Kazan on Directing ed Robert Cornfield (2010)
“This is a poetic tragedy, not a realistic, naturalistic one.” In an Aristotelian drama, the flaw or
‘tradition’ needs to be special. In Blanche’s case this is her need for protection which creates intense
solitude. Only a complete breakdown or violent ride on the streetcar named Desire can break through
her ‘tradition’. The tragic flaw or “fatal inner contradiction” in her character actually drives people
way and makes her more lonely, inevitably leading to her doom. “In another society, she would
work; but in Stanley’s society, no”. “This is a classic tragedy”.
Theodore H Parker (1947): Hartford Courant
The play is set in the noisy and rowdy quarter of New Orleans whilst a great tragedy of a woman’s last
desperate stand for decency takes place inside. This “imaginative realism” used makes her fall more
ironic and poignant. They play may seem like a combination of melodrama and brisk comedy but is
not these because of its “infinite tenderness” and “poetry with which Mr Williams has probed his
characters and set out their lives”
Eliot Norton (1947): Boston Post
A play of “primitive power and fury (…) along the line between melodrama and tragedy, grimly
humourless, pitiless and sordid, yet fascinating”. Compassion and pity in the play are important as
without, the play is “scandalous”
Sean McEvoy et al: Tragedy — A Student Handbook
The real tragedy of the play is not the personal circumstances but the losses of the culture and society
itself. In the final scene Eunice comforts Stella and tells her that ‘Life has got to go on’ and the men
return to their card game. Williams shows us that sometimes just carrying on is the hardest most
tragic thing of all. His play is a modern, social kind of tragedy.
George Jean Nathan (1947): The New York Journal American
“Whilst it may shock the emotions of its audience, doesn’t in the slightest shock them into spiritual
education”
Tennessee Williams 1950: Letter to Censors
There had been objections to the rape scene by censors. Williams addresses the play as a “peculiarly
moral play” and the rape of Blanche as a “pivotal, integral truth (…) without which the play loses its
meaning which is the ravishment of the tender, the sensitive, the delicate, by the savage and brutal
forces in modern society”. Removing the scene would be disastrous to the play’s demonstration of
“very important truths about the world we live in” of Streetcar. Blanche is neither a dipsomaniac
(alcoholic) nor nymphomaniac (excessive sexual desire in women) and Stanley is not completely bad.
Scene 10 encapsulates the cruelty of the world and creates catharsis for the readers. Without the
rape a climax which has been built up to is not reached. Moral, internal issues are explored in physical
form to express the urgency and severity of these conflicts in modern society.
