Streetcar+Themes+-+Past+and+Present


 * a. **** THE AMERICAN SOUTH **
 * The American Civil War (1861-65), fought between the USA government and eleven rebel Southern states (to put it crudely, North versus South) was largely about Southern opposition to slavery. The war (won by the North) led to a psychological split between North and South (rather like the much discussed North- South divide in England.) This play is deeply interested in how the archetypically Southern way of life- romantic, genteel, literary, cultured, but also racist, unrealistic and ineffectual- if it ever existed, is coming to an end. **
 * Blanche, of course, is the representative of the Southern way of life. She continually harks back to her days at Belle Reve- a beautiful way of life, but merely a “beautiful dream”; it no longer exists. **
 * Notice, too, the symbols, images and ideas associated with Blanche. The polka music, for example, is an old and romantic form of music. She is fond of poetry- especially American Romantic (or Transcendentalist) writers like Hawthorne, Poe and Whitman (Scene III, p.151) Whereas she takes pride in her French roots and, despite having been married, keeps her maiden name (symbolising her insistence on hanging onto her past), Stanley has abandoned his (much more recent ) Polish roots and insists upon thinking himself as “…a one hundred per cent American, born and raised in the greatest country on earth, and proud as hell of it…” Even Stella has accepted, or is moving towards, this new way of life. She has taken Stanley’s name (abandoning her own background and, thus the Southern way of life) and chooses him over Blanche at the end. Notice too, her name is associated with light (“Stella for Star!”, scene 1), which symbolises all the truth which terrifies Blanche; Stella, unlike Blanche, accepts the Southern way of life is dead; it was beautiful and sensitive, like Blanche’s husband Allan- but also like him, it is now gone. **
 * Another symbol often associated with Blanche is the streetcar- a rattling, old-fashioned vehicle. Stanley, on the other hand, is linked with the train which roars along the L& N tracks. Both the train and Stanley are the products of a dynamic, modern America, and they both contribute to Blanche’s downfall; in Scene IV the train’s noise enables Stanley to eavesdrop on the sisters’ conversation and in Scene X it renders Blanche petrified with fear just before Stanley attacks and rapes her. Does Stanley, then, represent the future as Williams saw it? Yes, but paradoxically he is also associated with the prehistoric past; see, for example, his entrance into the play, throwing raw meat to his wife, appearing like a caveman / hunter figure. Again, when he howls for Stella to return to him in scene III, he again appears like a “primitive”, the word Blanche uses to describe him in scene two (p.137). He represents what the future would be like in America; a place where strength and brutality would be the most important attributes, where the violence of prehistoric times would be visible once again. Williams may be making a comment on the nature of humanity here; for the civilisation represented by Blanche is artificial, and Stanley is a more honest figure; are we all at heart, then, “primitive” like him? **
 * Stanley (and the North) is hard, practical, unromantic, unimaginative, violent, energetic and dynamic – everything that Blanche (and the South) isn’t. He destroys her just as the Northern way of life made that of the South redundant. This play, then, as well as being a study of violence between men and women (or between “hard” and “soft” people) can be read as a study of American cultural history. **
 * Williams himself realised that the Southern way of life was doomed, and regretted it to an extent. In an interview in 1957, he declared, “I write out of love for the South … (which) once had a way of life that I am just old enough to remember – a culture that had grace, elegance, an inbred culture, not a society based on money … I write about the South because I think the war between romanticism and the hostility to it is very sharp there.” He also once said, “The apes will inherit the earth.” By “apes”, of course, he means the “primitive” people like Stanley; “hard” people whom he simultaneously dislikes and admires. **

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