hello everybody today i wanted to have a look at the role of stella kowalski in a streetcar named desire by tennessee williams now having looked at a lot of streetcar essays a common theme has emerged in that many students are getting locked in to this central conflict between blanche and stanley so much so that they overlook the character of stella and her role in the play and after all she is a character well worth analyzing she is of course at the center of this conflict she has to walk the metaphorical type rope between the two characters and she is a character who's rich with um thematic detail now as we look at different facets and aspects to her character i do want you to bear this quotation in mind from williams himself now he says about stella that i think her natural passivity is one of the things that makes her acceptance of stanley acceptable she naturally gives in accepts lets things slide she does not make much of an effort and as as i've said as we explore her character in more detail i want you to bear this idea of natural passivity in mind she is it is true to say not a character that is particularly striking but all of this is done purposefully and i want us to now think about her role her place in the play so why first of all is stella's situation so difficult well she acts as the fulcrum the center point between the two energetic and dynamic forces in the play that being the feverish and neurotic excitability of blanche and the sexual magnetism and brute force of stanley she also spends the majority of the play negotiating between the needs of her husband and the needs of her sister which puts her in an incredibly um pressurized position throughout the play and as we know she has to make quite difficult decisions blanche as we discover is economically and some would argue argue sexually dependent on stanley and this situation is further intensified by the arrival of the baby who who represents this kind of hybrid mix of the old south and the new emergence working class and i want you to consider really in the in the in the scope of the play is she a character who is punished for her sanity kind of like the reverse of blanche or is she simply more adaptable and more pragmatic than her sister now in the hodder guide that provides a very short summary of her character and it actually focuses in on stella's name and that her name embodies this tension between her former life at bel reeve and the new life and her new life at elysium fields and this is this is quite true blanche's affectionate stella for star becomes the the exclamation the bellow of stellar from stanley so even her name goes through changes throughout the play and unlike her sister stella got away from belle reeve during the war and made her way to new orleans where she met stanley and it's quite significant that only during a time of such immense social cultural and historical upheaval would the as close to our aristocratic i guess uh stella dubois have met the working class stanley kowalski and that's a really good point made um stella is emblematic of the socially turbulent uh time of post-war america okay that that her representative of the old south meets with the new emergent second generation immigrant stanley so think about how stella here is emblematic of this time of social upheaval and social turbulence and like her sister stella is a sexually passionate woman and although she pities blanche and wants to protect her she refuses herself to believe her accusation of rape and this is something we'll talk about in a little bit more detail now tennessee williams as you are i'm sure aware is well known for his quite long ex uh lyrical and and detailed stage directions and if we look at the very opening of the play we learn a lot about the setting of elysium fields we are introduced to the roughish charm of new orleans and the french quarter we are told of the atmosphere of decay our senses are bombarded with the with the smell of coffee and bananas and that with the we can almost feel the warm breath of the of the brown river and we also hear a lot about the music that becomes an essential part of the play as well and it's similar when we get our first introduction to brunt uh to branch to blanche rather um this famous line about her in appearance being incongruous to the setting the image of a delicate beauty her uncertain manner and this um quite memorable uh comparison to her resembling a moth and we also get this with stanley as well we are told about his um his sexual prowess and that he bears the the emblem of the gordy seed bearer and that he views all women through sexual classifications his appreciation of rough humor so what we can see here is that in these three descriptions we learn a lot either about the character or at the very start the setting so what do we get when we're first introduced to stella it says stella comes out of the first floor landing a gentle young woman about 25 and have a background quite obviously different from her husbands now for williams who is an author who gives us extensive detail in his stage directions this really is very very little a gentle woman about 25 but what we do learn about her perhaps even more is in the dialogue and the exchange that follows this now notice the way that stella speaks here mildly but she's saying don't holler at me like that now we would normally expect don't shout at me being said in a quiet accentuated or exclamative type of way but here stella even when she's admonishing someone speaks mildly and stalet stanley responds in mono syllables an exclamative catch we've got this image of him heaving the meat at her and he just goes meat okay he heaves the package at her she cries out in protest but manages to catch it then she laughs laughs breathlessly so even as she's trying to protest this and say no no stanley she ends up laughing oh stanley again perhaps implying a degree of passivity and this image of her crying out in protest but eventually fumbling and managing managing to catch this meat is quite uh symbolic of her life the fact that she is by the end of the play trying to to clutch hold of what very little she has and to to make a life if not for her but at least for her child so what do we know then we do know that she's younger than blanche about 25 we do also know that planche treats her like a child okay she calls a blessed baby my baby sister you messy child um but but stella herself speaks in a quite plain inoffensive and cliched manner and this is shown here um really um in this in this little passage here it's often overlooked this but i really think it shows us the the quite stark contrast between blanche and stella so this is when blanche is really shocked about the surroundings and she says what are you doing in a place like this i'm going to be honestly critical about it never never in my worst dreams could i picture only po only mr edgar allan poe could do it justice out there i suppose is the ghoul haunted woodland of weir now here she's making literary illusions obviously a sign of her past as an english teacher and her intelligence and she's using these kind of extended metaphors now notice how this contrasts by stellar just saying no honey those are just ln tracks those are just train tracks these those are just streetcar tracks okay that blunt kind of abrupt way of speaking that that shows just how well stella has fit into her surroundings her new surroundings of elysian fields now this also is um a sign of how blanche um expects stella to be able to describe things but stella can't really find the words she's not really a person of words of extensive descriptions in the same way that blanche is so when she's asking what stanley is like stella just says oh you can't describe someone you're in love with here's a picture of him and just hands the photo to blanche now can we imagine that uh that if the the shoe was put on the other foot and stella was asking blanche how how her lover looks she would be able to reel off an extensive description so these little subtle hints at the very very start of the play really accentuate that that difference between blanche and stella not only in the way that they act and behave but also in the way that they speak and perhaps most shocking of all particularly to a modern reader is the way that stella casually accepts stanley's violent behavior look at these series of quotes here you're making too much of a fuss about this slowly and emphatically she means it i'm not in anything i want to get out of okay and here we see how um she is also very very much attracted to his sexual and animal magnetism okay she says here there are things that happen between a man and a woman in the dark that sort of make everything else seem unimportant when she tells the story about stanley knocking off the light bulbs with her heels she says she was thrilled by it okay so she really is she does you know find stanley very much an attractive force um and she kind of just brushes aside this this casual uh violence and you know she says when men and w when men are drinking and playing poker anything can happen and this is quite quite shocking particularly to to as i've said modern readers we also get a quite um detailed description of her at the opening of scene four so this is just after the poker night so notice here her face is serene in the early morning sunlight one hand rests on her belly rounding slightly with new maternity from the other dangles a book of coloured comics again could we ever imagine blanche reading comic books this again is another sign of how well she is fit uh she's fitted in to her new surroundings her eyes and lips have an almost narcoticized tranquility now this is a really uh quite an interesting quote narcotics tranquility implying an almost drug-induced serenity to her that she's just impervious to what's gone on the night before that she's just sat almost like i've said in a drug-induced state of serenity and peacefulness and notice this contrast here with blanche who appears at the door looking like she's spent a sleepless night and her appearance entirely contrasts with stellars so um williams is is stating this quite explicitly here now i've just been reading i've been reading this book called the critical introduction to the 20th century to 20th century american drama and there's a fantastic little bit on this about stella um and apparently during rehearsals williams was really not happy with the way that uh stella was acting okay um and he thought that she was being much too animated and he actually says to uh kazan who was the director it seems that she has way too much vivacity at times she's bouncing around in a way that suggests a co-ed on a on a benzedrine kick that's an amphetamine i know it's impossible to be literal about the description narcoticized tranquility but i do think there is an important value in suggesting it in contrast to blanche's rather feverish excitability blanche is the quick light one stella is relatively slow almost indolent now he clearly wanted this this line of narcoticized tranquility to be portrayed um in the actor that that was playing stella and he wasn't too happy when when he saw her being quite feverish and quite excitable because that is the role that blanche is supposed to play now i also want to um have a look at when stanley talks about um when he met stella for the first time and he said when we first met me and you you thought i was common how right you was baby i was common as dirt you showed me a snapshot of the place with the columns now this is a this picture here at the bottom is a very typical um representation of what bel reeve could look like this is a typical southern plantation home and that's what he's referring to with the place with the columns i pulled you down off them columns and how you loved it having them colored lights going now we've mentioned here that stella is quite casually accepting of stanley's violence and i want you to consider particularly how she is very sexually passionate and very much sexually attracted to stanley i want you to consider whether stanley really did pull her off those columns whether he did pull her away from the life of the old south in belle reeve and what what that represents towards this uh the the um cosmopolitan life in elysian fields i want you to think whether he really did pull her away from that or whether she was a willing jumper from the columns um due to her intense physical attraction to stanley now she does in her defense try to defend her sister um in the uh in the poker night scene when the radio is playing he tries to defend her she tries to defend her and also at blanche's ill-fated birthday party she calls um she calls stanley disgustingly greasy here she says that um he's making a pig of himself at the table but both of these occasions result in violent outbursts from stanley and this is what stella gets for speaking out this physical visceral reaction and perhaps most striking of all she chooses not to believe the story of blanche's rape and if we look at the dialogue here it doesn't say i don't believe what happened she has doubts she says i don't know if i did the right thing eunice says what else could you do again a quite pragmatic response i couldn't believe her story and go living on with stanley don't ever believe it life has got to go on she doesn't say she doesn't believe it but she couldn't believe it she chooses to accept stanley's version of the story she chooses to accept the the male story the power story now we might reasonably presume that stella will carry a burden of guilt and if you think about how williams himself carried a degree of guilt after his sister's lobotomy as a prize for the preservation of her marriage and this is from york notes but perhaps more striking is blanche's decision here to accept illusion and fantasy over reality she has in a sense inherited this from branch blanche's um susceptibility and fascination with illusion and fantasy has now been passed on to stella she is after all a dubois at heart and she has inherited this dubois trait but stella as we mentioned at the start is forced to weigh up her economic dependency and her sexual desire for stanley and her new role as a mother with her loyalty to her sister despite what uh williams describes as her luxurious sobbing when um when blunt is taken away to the asylum we need to think is stella's decision one of emotionless pragmatism will stellar continue to live her life in a relationship that she doesn't want to get out of or is she now living a bigger lie and this is something that was reflected in the movie as we know the senses um sanitized the ending and had um stella leave uh with the baby after after blanche was led to the asylum even the the senses at the time couldn't have stella going on living with stanley but either way what's significant here is that her mode of thought yet again adapts to this environment and the circumstance in which she has been placed she is very chameleon-esque and she's able to fit in to her surroundings and perhaps this is why at least on the surface of things stella survives while blanche metaphorically dies and in this book that i mentioned earlier bixby says that through making this decision to um side with stanley and to choose not to believe blanchard's accusation of rape she is opting for the future over the past for potency over sterility and i just wanted to end here on a quote from albert wertheim who talks about the way in which the play is structured and the forces that drive the plot forward and he argues that the clock in a street car named desire is stella's pregnancy i think that's a really interesting way of looking at it it is no accident that the day the kowalski baby the post-war hybrid of stanley and stella is born is also the day that the representative of the antebellum south which basically means pre-american civil war south blanche is defeated raped and destroyed now this is significant because obviously the rape of blanche isn't just a physical act it is a metaphorical raping of the old south and what it represents in america now it is a symbolic act as well as a literal and a physical act williams cast something of a cold eye on the triumph of a new post-war south peopled by brutish and insensitive stanley kowalski's now i just wanted to end really on that thought of stella's pregnancy being the force that drives the plot forward within the play and i hope that i've helped shed some light onto why stella is such an important and rich character worth studying in the in the play and i really do want to see some of you think about these ideas in your extended responses thank you