A Streetcar Named Desire summary

Name: A Streetcar Named Desire
Rating: 4.1 (29 reviews)
Author: Tennessee Williams

Tennessee Williams

A Study of Illusion and Reality

4.1 (29 ratings)

19 mins

Brief summary

A Streetcar Named Desire delves into the tumultuous life of Blanche DuBois, as her fragile reality clashes with her sister Stella's gritty New Orleans life, exploring themes of desire, mental illness, and societal decay.

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A Streetcar Named Desire
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What’s in it for me? A timeless staging of the conflict between reality and illusion

A Streetcar Named Desire has many themes, but it’s the clash between reality and illusion that animates Tennessee Williams’ most famous play. Williams wrote it after a personal crisis triggered by his first literary breakthrough. In an essay on what he termed the “Catastrophe of Success,” he writes that success left him cold – literally, that is. While his creative struggles had filled him with a hot passion, success numbed him to all he considered good: a lively interest in human affairs, plus compassion and conviction. These qualities, he says, are the precondition for art to be made and its reason to exist.

Society, he implies, doesn’t look kindly on these qualities. Art deals in magic and illusion, neither of which are of much use in the rat race. In A Streetcar Named Desire, we meet a man who embodies that society. Stanley Kowalski is a representative of a world that values strength over sensitivity; he’s sharp-elbowed in his struggle to get ahead, has a crude sexual appetite, and a boorish love of bowling, betting, and beer. Blanche DuBois, the woman who becomes his antagonist, is, on the other hand, aristocratic, educated, and imaginative, she doesn’t want to get ahead – she wants to preserve the ideals of the old world.

Stanley and Blanche’s conflict – a conflict between harsh truths and beautiful dreams – drives the action forward. In this Blink, you’ll hear the short version of Williams’ memorable staging of this timeless struggle between reality and illusion.

Before we begin, though, a quick heads up: this play contains depictions of addiction, mental illness, and sexual violence, including rape. Listener discretion is strongly advised.

The end of a beautiful dream

New Orleans, 1947. It’s a spring night, but it’s hot and humid. We’re in the French Quarter, an old neighborhood as charming as it is disreputable. Pressed up against the Mississippi with its banana and coffee-scented warehouses, this part of town is mostly made up of two-story weather-board houses. At night, bar lights twinkle in puddles and murmuring voices fill the streets. Wherever you go, there’s the sound of a tinny piano played by infatuated fingers.

Two things strike outsiders about the quarter: it’s blue-collar urbanity and it’s easy racial mixing. Both are unusual in the South – a region, at least until recently, of plantations, aristocratic manners, and pitiless segregation. And that’s where our story starts: with a stranger from that fading old world hesitantly stepping out of a streetcar into this new one.

The look on her face says it all: Blanche DuBois, a Southern belle with manners and expectations to match, doesn’t belong here. Daintily dressed in white with hat, gloves, and pearls, she looks a little moth-like as she tries to get her bearings under the streetlamp.

She’s looking for her sister, Stella, who lives in an apartment overlooking the tracks on which the streetcar locals call Cemeteries rides. It’s here, in the cramped space in which the siblings now embrace, that the rest of this drama will play out. Blanche begins grandly. She finds fault with the shabbiness of the quarter – an implicit critique of Stella’s husband, who ought to be a better provider. She then asks her younger sister if she has a maid. That puts Stella on the back foot – clearly a familiar position in this relationship. Stella replies that they only have two rooms: this one and…. Blanche interrupts with pedantic precision: “The other one.”

But these well-rehearsed roles don’t quite fit. Blanche’s haughtiness is a disguise. When she dims the lights, we sense her fear: the bright bulbs in the apartment threaten to reveal something she’d rather keep hidden. She gulps down a whiskey. She says it’s her first, but we’ve already seen her drink another. Moths prefer darkness, but they fly toward the fire that destroys them. Alcohol, we sense, may be such a flame for Blanche

Accepting a third whisky, Blanche reveals why she’s really here. She had to sell the DuBois plantation after a rapid succession of deaths bankrupted the family. The place’s name is a key to Blanche’s character: Belle Rêve, or “Beautiful Dream.” The French is slightly janky – the genders don’t match – but that’s symbolic too: Blanche is all mixed up. Her nerves got so bad that she had to ask for a leave of absence from the school where she teaches. So it’s not Stella that’s brought her to New Orleans: she needs a refuge.

It’s at this moment that Stella’s husband, Stanley, enters the apartment.

A cramped co-existence

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.

The card game

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.”

A streetcar named Desire

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.

Illusion and reality

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.

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What is A Streetcar Named Desire about?

A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) is one of the most important and influential works ever written for the American stage. Performed close to nine hundred times on Broadway between 1947 and 1949, its unflinching portrayal of sexual desire shocked critics and captivated audiences. The play isn’t a mere historical curiosity, though: its mix of lyricism and psychological realism remains as compelling today as when it was first performed in the mid-twentieth century.

Who should read A Streetcar Named Desire?

Drama lovers interested in intense narratives
Fans of Southern Gothic settings
Anyone interested in the history of theater

About the Author

Tennessee Williams (1911-1983) was an American playwright whose work had a profound impact on the shape of contemporary drama. He is best known for his two Pulitzer Prize-winning plays A Streetcar Named Desire and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, both of which were adapted for cinema and became critically acclaimed films. Williams also wrote essays, poetry, short stories, and memoirs. He was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame in 1979.

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