In 1948, American playwright Tennessee Williams won the Pulitzer Prize for A Streetcar Named Desire , his searing play on the individual and his/ her inner life, highs and lows, hope and despair, real and imaginary. The story of Blanche DuBois and her disintegration is set in New Orleans and begins with her arrival at her sister Stella’s place. Once a teacher, now homeless, Blanche tries her best to hide the past, about her husband who she discovers is homosexual, her loneliness, the path to prostitution and guilt.
Williams drops hints of Blanche’s fragility early on, in his stage direction notes. Before Blanche’s entry, we are told “her appearance is incongruous to this setting” of rough and poor Elysian Fields. She is “daintily dressed in a white suit with a fluffy bodice, necklace and earrings, made of pearl... looking as if she were arriving at a summer tea or cocktail party...”; and then again, "her delicate beauty must avoid a strong light. There is something about her uncertain manner, as well as her white clothes, that suggests a moth.”
Cry of pain
The ‘moth’, of fine manners hiding behind a fading Southern aristocracy, rushes straight for the flame, in her brother-in-law, the “bestial” Stanley Kowalski — and perpetual ruin. Fellow dramatist Arthur Miller, watching the first show in New York, directed by the venerable Elia Kazan, thought the play was “a cry of pain”. He said Blanche’s character had undertones of the Aristotelian tragic figure: “The inevitability of her doom, her refusal to back down in the face of it, and the essential humanity of the forces that drive her to it are the very heart of tragedy;...she is a human being trapped by the fates, making a human fight to escape and to survive with some shred of human dignity, in full recognition of her own fatal human weaknesses and the increasing absence of hope.”
Like Blanche, Kowalski too is a complex character; coarse yet sensitive. Into Blanche’s world enters Mitch, who in a rare moments of tenderness proposes to her, “You need somebody. And I need somebody, too. Could it be — you and me, Blanche,” he asks. But once Mitch hears the truth about her past, he pushes Blanche away. Miller recalled hearing the audience draw a collective breath after Blanche's desperate cry in the end: “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.”
Williams, born Thomas Lanier Williams III on March 26, 1911, brought to his plays a lyrical quality amid its social urgency. As he wrote in his memoirs: “My thing is...: to express my world and my experience of it in whatever form seems suitable...” That his plays, and especially Streetcar , have been performed by stars like Vivien Leigh and Marlon Brando and is still a favourite is a “tribute to its social reality as well as its personal poetics.”
The writer looks back at one classic each fortnight.
