A Streetcar Named Desire summary

Sex goes to the heart of Stanley Kowalski’s character. Williams tells us that the man who plays him should be a strongly-built 5’9” whose lithe movements exude “animal joy.” Most tellingly, when he looks at a woman, we should sense that he’s sizing her up – that the crude images in his mind determine how he smiles at her. The fact that he grins at his sister in law when he first meets her on this hot and humid night foreshadows the sinister direction this play will take. 

Stella, we realise, hasn’t told her husband much about Blanche. Stanley asks her if she’s married. Blanche says she was, but that the “boy” died. In the background, a tiny piano strikes up a funereal waltz – a device Williams uses to communicate Blanche’s state of mind. It gradually becomes clear that this waltz represents her guilt about the nature of her husband’s death: a desperate suicide following after her discovery of his homosexuality.   

Williams’ title likens emotions to streetcars: they move us from place to place. Inadequacy is one car Stanley rides. It takes him from shame to hatred and on to violation.  

Alone in the apartment one day, he rifles through Blanche’s possessions. His suspicious mind turns the prop jewelry he finds into priceless pearls and rare rubies. Laughing at his naivety, Blanche bats away the suggestion that she cheated Stella out of her inheritance. The DuBoises were a debauched bunch, she says: they frittered everything away on wine, women, and song. Selling Belle Rêve barely covered the bills they ran up in the course of their “epic fornications.”

The next morning, Blanche finds Stella in bed lazily recovering from the night’s exertions. She calls Stanley a “madman.” For once, Stella doesn’t humor her sister. Instead, we hear her point of view. It’s matter-of-factly modern. There are things that happen between a man and a woman in the dark, Stella says, that make everything else seem unimportant. 

That’s nothing but brutal desire, Blanche counters. It’s like the “rattle-trap streetcar” called Desire that bangs through the quarter as it goes up one old narrow street and down another. When Stella asks Blanche if she’s ever ridden it, Williams draws our attention to the larger design of his drama. Desire, he reminds us, was the name of the tram Blanche took before changing onto the line called Cemeteries. Desire brought her here – literally and figuratively. 

Until now, the piano has punctuated Blanche’s words. As we enter the frenetic final scenes of this drama, it threatens to overwhelm them. We’re not listening to an instrument being played in a bar down the street anymore – it’s as though we’re inside Blanche’s head. Gunshots ring out, but the waltz goes on. Blanche, we sense, is very close to losing touch with reality. 

Stella has gone into labor and we find Blanche alone in the Kowalski apartment, where she’s preparing for her departure. She downs a whiskey and hurls flowery dresses into her trunk. She looks around nervously, pours herself another drink, and then resumes her task. We watch her cycle through these actions several times. Williams’ directions tell us that the actor playing Blanche should try to suggest a growing sense of hysterical exhilaration.