A Streetcar Named Desire Summary: What Happens and What It Means
What it is about
A Streetcar Named Desire is a play by Tennessee Williams, first performed on Broadway on 3 December 1947. It follows Blanche DuBois, a former Southern belle in her thirties who arrives in the French Quarter of New Orleans with nowhere else to go. The family home, a plantation called Belle Reve, has been lost to creditors. Blanche travels from Laurel, Mississippi, to move in with her younger sister Stella and Stella's husband Stanley Kowalski, who rent a shabby two-room flat.
Almost nothing Blanche says about herself is reliable. She tells Stella she has taken a leave of absence from her job teaching English because of her nerves. That is a lie, and the truth surfaces later. From her first scene she is jittery, reluctant to be seen in bright light, and drinking more than she admits. She also complains about the flat, criticises her sister, and calls Stanley "common".
Stanley returns the suspicion. He dislikes her manners and resents the way her presence disrupts his settled, pleasure-seeking routine. Worried that he has been cheated out of an inheritance, he demands to know what became of Belle Reve, and lectures Stella on the Napoleonic Code, under which a husband controls his wife's financial affairs. Blanche hands over the paperwork. Among it Stanley finds a bundle of letters she says are love letters from her dead husband, and for a moment her feeling seems to stop him short. Then he tells her Stella is pregnant.
The rest of the play is a slow contest between the two of them, fought over Stella, over the truth about Blanche's past, and over who gets to stay in the apartment. Blanche's one route out is Mitch, one of Stanley's poker friends, whose courtesy marks him off from the other men.
The main characters
Blanche DuBois is the centre of the play and one of the great roles in American theatre. She is penniless, mannered, theatrical and frightened. Her deceptions are not casual; they are the only shelter she has left. Her first marriage, when she was very young, ended when she discovered her young husband Allan Grey in a sexual encounter with an older man. She told him she was disgusted with him, and he killed himself. She carries that.
Stanley Kowalski is loud, physical and shrewd. Blanche calls him subhuman. He is also a man defending his home and his marriage against a woman he correctly judges to be lying. After a poker night interrupted once too often, he explodes in a drunken rage and strikes Stella. Blanche and Stella take refuge with Eunice Hubbell upstairs. Stanley then cries out from the courtyard until Stella comes down, and she allows herself to be carried off to bed. The next morning Blanche describes him as an animal and Stella says they are fine. Stanley overhears and says nothing.
Stella is the pivot. She has chosen this life and will not be talked out of it. Mitch is the play's decent man, up to a point. He has also lost someone, and when Blanche confesses her marriage to him he says they need each other.
How it ends (spoilers)
Stanley gathers gossip from a travelling salesman with contacts in Laurel: Blanche was sacked from her teaching post for sleeping with an underage student, and afterwards lived in a hotel known for prostitution. He passes it all to Stella, and to Mitch. At Blanche's birthday party there is an empty chair where Mitch should be. Stanley's present is a one-way Greyhound ticket back to Laurel. The row that follows is cut short when Stella goes into labour.
Mitch comes later and confronts Blanche. She admits the stories are true and begs forgiveness. He rejects her, then demands sex on the grounds that he has waited long enough, and she drives him out by threatening to cry fire. Stanley returns from the hospital to find her alone, deep in a fantasy about a rich old suitor arriving to rescue her. He plays along, then tears the story apart and advances on her. She threatens him with a broken bottle and is overpowered. He is last seen carrying her unconscious to his bed.
The themes
Class runs through every scene. Blanche speaks for a vanished plantation gentility that has already been sold off; Stanley belongs to the working city that replaced it. The play refuses to let either of them simply win the argument.
Madness is the second thread, and Williams builds it carefully. Blanche's horror of strong light, her drinking, her inventions and her retreat into a story about a suitor are all stages in the same decline. Family is the third. Stella must choose between a sister who needs her and a husband she wants, and the choice is made at Blanche's cost.
Why it still matters
It is one of Williams' most influential plays and remains among his most performed, with many adaptations in other forms. The best known is the 1951 film directed by Elia Kazan. The play's reputation rests on Blanche: a character who lies constantly and still earns sympathy, and whose undoing is carried out in a two-room flat by people with ordinary motives.
