Streetcar Named Desire Themes and Symbols

Dialogue

The conversations are pruned of irrelevancy. Blanche’s educated speech and literary allusions contrast with Stanley’s down-to-earth language and crude—but often effective and amusing—imagery. The dialogue is rich in tropes, (rhetorical features) including the commonplace cliches of Stanley and the literary allusions and quotations of Blanche.

Themes

Dreams and Reality

Theme 1 The reluctance or inability of people to accept the truth. Blanche lives in a cocoon of unreality to protect herself against her weaknesses and shortcomings, including her inability to repress sexual desire. To preserve her ego, she lies about her promiscuous behaviour in Laurel; she shuns bright light, lest it reveal her physical imperfections; and she refuses to acknowledge her problem with alcohol. Stanley effectively penetrates her cocoon verbally with his crude insults and physically with his sexual coup de main near the end of the play. Stanley has his own problem: He lacks the insight to see what he really is—a coarse, domineering macho man ruled by primal instincts. Unlike Blanche, though, he is happy in his ignorance. For her part, Stella accepts the truth—partly. She acknowledges that Stanley is crude and that her apartment is cramped and shabby. But, in the end, she refuses to accept the truth about her sister’s past and about Stanley’s violation of Blanche. “I couldn’t believe [Blanche’s] story [about the rape] and go on living with Stanley,” Stella says.

Theme 2 The final destruction of the Old South, symbolized by Blanche and Belle Reve (the family property seized by creditors). This theme—not unlike that in Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind—begins to unfold in the opening scene of the play. Two women, one white and one black, sit as equals on the steps of an apartment building while Blanche arrives on scene accoutered in the attitude and finery of a southern belle of yesteryear. She is an alien, a strange creature from another time, another place. 

Gender

Theme 3 The despoliation of the sensitive and feminine by the feral and masculine. Blanche and her first husband, a homosexual, cannot survive in the world of Stanley and his kind. Stanley is a robust weed who grows in Blanche’s carefully cultivated garden of lilies. 

Theme 4 Unbridled sexual desire leads to isolating darkness and eventually death. Williams establishes this theme at the beginning of the play, when Blanche takes a streetcar named Desire (sex), transfers to one named Cemeteries (Death), and gets off at a street named Elysian Fields (the Afterlife). He maintains the theme during the play with references to Blanche’s first husband, a homosexual who committed suicide after she caught him with another man, and with Blanche’s literal and figurative retreat into the shadows after having many sordid affairs. She shuns bright lights; she dates Mitch only in the evening.

Theme 5 All that glitters is not gold. This Shakespearean motif manifests itself in Blanche’s inability to grasp how Stanley and Stella can succeed at marriage without the finer things of life.

.

Climax: The climax of a play or another literary work, such as a short story or a novel, can be defined as

 (1) the turning point at which the conflict begins to resolve itself for better or worse, or as

(2) the final and most exciting event in a series of events. The climax of

 “A Streetcar Named Desire” occurs, according to both definitions, when Stanley rapes Blanche. This brutal act marks the completion of her mental deterioration, pushing her over the edge from sanity to madness.

Symbols

1.     Streetcar named Desire: Blanche's desire. Although Blanche arrives in New Orleans as a somewhat broken woman, she keeps alive her desire to be with a man and to lead a life as an elegant, respectable woman.

2.       Streetcar named Cemeteries: Old, disgraced Blanche, the one that Blanche left behind—dead, so to speak—in her hometown of Laurel, Miss., to begin anew in New Orleans. This streetcar can also suggest that life is over for the new Blanche as well, for she is damaged property edging toward madness. 

3.     Street named Elysian Fields: The new life Blanche is seeking. In Greek mythology, the Elysian Fields (also called Elysium and the Elysian Plain) made up a paradise reserved for worthy mortals after they died. Because Blanche's old self "died" in Laurel, Miss., she traveled to New Orleans to seek her Elysium.

4.      Belle Reve: Name of Blanche's family home in Mississippi. It represents the "beautiful dream" (the meaning of Belle Rêve in French) that Blanche seeks but never experiences.

5.      Blanche's white suit: False purity and innocence with which Blanche masks her carnal desire and cloaks her past. 

6.     Blanche's frequent bathing: Her attempt to wash away her past life. 

7.     Alcohol: Another way Blanche washes away bad memories.

8.      Bright light: Penetrating gaze of truth that sees the real Blanche with all her imperfections. When she greets Stella the first time in the apartment, she says, "And turn that over-light off! Turn that off! I won't be looked at in this merciless glare!" Blanche avoids bright lights throughout the play.

9.       Blanche: Blanche means white in French, and—in keeping with her name—she wears a white dress and gloves in the opening scene of the play to hide her real self in the purity that white suggests. 

10. Stella: Stella means star or like a star in Latin, although she lives in a shabby apartment building in a lower-class section of New Orleans. It could be argued that she is the star of her husband’s life and the star that led Blanche to New Orleans. 

11. Stanley: Old English name meaning stone field. Thus, it is possible he represents a cemetery for Blanche. Stanislaus was the name of a king of Poland. Clearly, Stanley is the king of his household. 

12. The small Kowalski apartment: The size and plainness of the life to which Blanche, who formerly lived in a splendid mansion, must adjust. 

13. Allen Grey: Gray area of Blanche's life, between the bright light that she avoids and the darkness she seeks. She loved Allen Grey, but he betrayed her. In New Orleans, she remembers the good and the bad of her relationship with him. 

14. Paper: Imagery centering on paper represents impermanence, unreality, or artificiality. For example, the paper legal documents Blanche brings with her to New Orleans attest to the loss of the family homestead, Belle Reve. The youth collecting for the local paper, The Evening Star, represents the ephemerality of sexual gratification. Apparently, he reminds Blanche of Allen Grey. On a whim, she suddenly kisses the youth but then dismisses him, mindful of the disgrace she brought upon herself with her liaison with a student. The song Blanche sings while bathing, "Paper Moon," symbolizes the fantasy world of love. 

.