this video will cover some analysis for a street car Named Desire by Tennessee Williams by this stage you should have read the play uh taken your test and contributed to the message board discussion so hopefully you've done a lot of thinking about the play on your own but I wanted to give you some insights that might help you to further appreciate what Tennessee Williams was trying to do in this play first of all it's appre it's important to appreciate the time period in which the play was written and performed so the play was in the 1940s um which is uh in a time that America is still very much recovering from the Great Depression and one of the ways that the government helped many Americans to recover was something called the WPA which was the works progress administration um and so the president at the time uh along with other pockets of the government paid Americans to do work on American infrastructure for example they would pay men to build Bridges or repair roads or build railroads and that kind of thing and it was called putting America back to work but in addition to these labor programs the WPA also gave money to artists and writers to uh begin trying to revive American culture and so Tennessee Williams was the recipient of some money from the WPA uh and he used that money to move to New Orleans and uh to write a street car named desire which surpassed his previous play The Glass Menagerie to become his most famous and heralded work um this time period and writing during this time period led to the rise of a style called social realism and social realism is a style that could apply to visual artwork as well as the written word so we're very late now in the in the modern period we're almost into the postmodern period And so social realism is is kind of a bridging idea social realism is the depiction in art or literature of society as that actually exists warts and all um so it draws special attention to the working class and the poor uh so social realism is going to um depict the uh sort of Human Condition With No Holds Barred so it's going to show sometimes the worst sides of people it doesn't feel the need to have um a hero or a moral it's it's going to try to be as realistic as possible even if that is uh maybe a dark uncomfortable truth um some themes that I wanted to cover with you that uh a street car name desire addresses the biggest one I think is the Old South versus the New South and those ideas are represented by blanch on the Old South Side and then Stanley and Stella on the new South Side so let's talk about what those terms mean the old South is kind of the South uh before and directly after the Civil War so you can imagine that at before the Civil War certainly um the Old South was built on this idea of very wealth wealthy aristocratic land owners so these would be the people who lived in and own plantations and they were basically like the Dukes and duchesses of the South they weren't called that but they they were very much the social royalty so these people owned a great deal of land um and they were segregated from others um so they were obviously racially segregated from people of color because they owned slaves and they would never have socialized with anyone who wasn't white they also were segregated by social class which meant that somebody who lived and owned a PL lived in and owned a plantation would not have even really socialized with white people of a lower class so they would not have been friends with people who worked in factories or people who worked in the field even if they were white um they were very much separate away above everyone else or so they thought so after the Civil War the Old South began to crumble very quickly and um the Great Depression in the 1930s really kind of put the last nail in the coffin so the Great Depression was kind of like a great equalizer in many ways because there were no more super wealthy people uh even the people who had managed to keep their homes and plantations and things uh after the Civil War there was almost no way to keep them through the depression which is something that uh the character blanch experiences she's unable to maintain the the upkeep and ownership of her home so the new South is uh this changing landscape that's happening so now um there are really no more super wealthy individuals who are running things now the the working class the every man is very much kind of moving Society forward there's no more emphasis placed on land ownership so there's um there's really no money in it and and farming and that kind of thing when you think about industrialization so many people are moving into the city they live in apartments instead of owning they pay rent um and so the whole idea of land ownership making someone powerful um is is kind of over and finally the new South is classified by the integration of race and class so obviously in the South the integration of race is something that happens very slowly and not overnight even after Jim Crow laws are done away with um we still have and still to this day have a problem with uh integration but um in many ways people did integrate especially when compared to the way that things were in the Old South so you might have an apartment building like the wanted a street car Named Desire where you have black tenants and white tenants living in the same building um and so this is going to thrust together people who just one generation before would never have interacted with each other and the same is true for class not just race so again people white people who might have used to be field hands or factory workers and never would have dreamed they would get to talk to the the wealthy land owners now they're all riding the same bus to work um so you can see how tensions might arise when you take the society that was very divided and then thrust together these people who uh previously would never have had any interaction so if you think about that in in relation to a street car Named Desire um you have blanch and Stella who grew up in the Old South and were very used to being uh high class being waited on being separate from Dirty Working Class People and that kind of thing and now um you know blanch loved that lifestyle and wants to hang on to it even though the world has kind of left her behind and Stella has kind of bought into the new South right she's married a workingclass man she lives in a a workingclass apartment and she likes it um so the tensions are are very strong between these two kind of opposing forces blanch and Stanley representing again the Old South and the new South some other themes that are important um Tennessee Williams was often um considered to be someone who wrote about this connection between Sex and Death uh we talked a little bit about that with EE Cummings that was also something that that he was famous for um but particularly uh if you notice in the beginning of the play blanch takes the street car named desire which we could say like sex would be desire right she takes the street cing desire to one called cemeteries and then one called alian Fields so alian Fields elisium was the Greek afterlife so blanch kind of takes the she rides the sex train if you will into the cemetery and then into the Afterlife and in many ways so sex really leads to her ultimate downfall and we can assume her death um this is interesting because Stanley is also a very sexual character but he does not seem to have any consequences for that behavior the way that that blanch does which we'll talk about more in a moment another theme might be illusion versus reality so if you think about blanches character uh one of the things that she's notable for is is putting on airs or putting up Illusions for people so she never goes out in the daytime she puts Shades over the lamp so nobody can see how old she is she wears clothes to make herself look more wealthy than she is uh and she still very much wants to be treated like a princess or an ays when in fact she's penales um and then on the other hand you have this very gritty reality that's represented by Stanley so he's not apologetic for his desires for his appetites um his behavior even his bad behavior he doesn't apologize for uh if you watch the film version that I've recommended you'll notice that he's always depicted as eating and talking with food in his mouth so he's very animalistic and that's very real for him so you have again this these two opposing forces of Illusion versus reality uh in your message board I asked you if there was a character that you identified with or pulled for um and I was really curious to see your answers because the play is not necessarily designed like many other plays where we have a hero and a villain or we have somebody we hope kind of gets their way all of the characters have things about them that make them unattractive to us Stanley is a rapist um his wife Stella is a battered wife who still loves her husband and wants to stay with him and then we have blanch who is this complete psychopath um who can't let go of this kind of fantasy past that she had um and so finally that brings us to this issue of gender discrepancy so if you look at the men and the women in the play um they're all sort of sexual in many ways um Stanley is the only one who is unapologetically sexual and never suffers for it because he is a straight man and he's expected in many ways to be sort of sexually aggressive uh blanch on the other hand who has developed this bad reputation just for having sex with people um is ultimately ruined by that um so because she's had many sexual partners ultimately uh the way that Society operated back then that meant that she was unmarriable um so when Mitch finds this he doesn't he decides he doesn't want to marry her um and as well as her husband so she married a young boy or was a young man rather uh who turned out to be gay and and there again you have this connection between Sex and Death because when the boy kind of Acts upon his homosexuality and is found out he kills himself so really Stanley is the the only character that has power over others because he's this kind of straight white guy and he can kind of do what he likes and when other characters try to do this so when when blanch tries to do this uh it leads to her ruin when her husband tries to do this it leads to his ruin and in many way Stella um who who kind of wants to be loved and be included in a family also suffers for that desire because she's again sort of this beaten woman who still has this great passion for her husband but in addition to all the characters being sort of unlikable for many reasons there's also the problem that they're all likable as well so in many ways when we watch a street cing desire some people really like Stanley I like Stanley um for a lot of the play I kind of think he's interesting and and he's you know knocking this kind of crazy woman off her high horse and so um and you're meant to feel that way so you're meant to kind of be conflicted about who is doing the right thing and who isn't so I hope some of these ideas have helped you kind of unlock the play a little bit and certainly any of these would make a great paper topic if you decide that you'd like to write your your final paper about a street CR Nam desire I hope you enjoyed the play let me know if you have any questions