therefore when the story ends their memories continue on. Matthews claims
that the fourth section does not "[complete] the shape of the fiction's
form" or "retrospectively order" the rest of the book; in fact it does not
have much to do with the first two sections at all (9). The Compson clock
ticks away toward the family's imminent demise, but it chimes the wrong
hours, mangling the metaphor. Reverend Shegog's sermon does not have the
intended effect, so he modifies it and tells it again: it "succeeds because
it is willing to say, and then say again" (12). The story doesn't end; its
loose ends are not tied together. Instead it constantly repeats. Faulkner
himself said that the novel grew because he wrote the story of Caddy once
(Benjy's section), and that didn't work, so he wrote it again (Quentin's
section), but that wasn't enough either, so he wrote it again (Jason's
section), and finally wrote it again (Dilsey's section), and even this
wasn't good enough. The story of Caddy and the Compsons does not end, but
repeats itself eternally in its characters' memories.
The Streetcar Named ”Desire”
Context
Tennessee Williams was born Thomas Lanier Williams in Columbus,
Mississippi, in 1911. Much of his childhood was spent in St. Louis. The
nickname Tennessee' seems to have been pinned on him in college, in
reference to is father's birthplace or his own deep Southern accent, or
maybe both.Descended from an old and prominent Tennessee family, Williams's
fatherworked at a shoe company and was often away from home. Williams lived
with mother, his sister Rose (who would suffer from mental illness and
later undergo a lobotomy), and his maternal grandparents.
At sixteen, Williams won $5 in a national competition for his essay, "Can a
Wife be a Good Sport?," published in Smart Set. The next year he published
his first story in Weird Tales. Soon after, he entered the University of
Missouri, where he wrote his first play. He withdrew from the university
before receiving his degree, and went to work at his father's shoe company.
After entering and dropping out of Washington University, Williams
graduated from the University of Iowa in 1938. He continued to work on
drama, receiving a Rockefeller grant and studying play writing at The New
School in Manhattan. During the early years of World War Two, Williams
worked in Hollywood as a scriptwriter.
In 1944, The Glass Menagerie opened in New York, won the prestigious New
York Critics' Circle Award, and catapulted Williams into the upper echelon
of American playwrights. Two years later, A Streetcar Named Desire cemented
his reputation, garnering another Critics' Circle and adding a Pulitzer
Prize. He would win another Critics' Circle and Pulitzer for Cat on a Hot
Tin Roof in 1955.
Tennessee Williams mined his own life for much of the pathos in his drama.
His most memorable characters (many of them complex females, such as
Blanche DuBois) contain recognizable elements of their author or people
close to him. Alcoholism, depression, thwarted desire, loneliness in search
of purpose, and insanity were all part of Williams's world. Certainly his
experience as a known homosexual in an era and culture unfriendly to
homosexuality informed his work. His setting was the South, yet his themes
were universal and compellingly enough rendered to win him an international
audience and worldwide acclaim. In later life, as most critics agree, the
quality of his work diminished. He sufiered a long period of depression
after the death of his longtime partner in 1963. Yet his writing career was
long and prolific: twenty-five full-length plays, five screenplays, over
seventy one act plays, hundreds of short stories, two novels, poetry, and a
memoir. Five of his plays were made into movies.
Williams died of choking in an alcohol-related incident in 1983.
Characters
Blanche { Stella's older sister, until recently a high school English
teacher in Laurel, Mississippi. She arrives in New Orleans a loquacious,
witty, arrogant, fragile, and ultimately crumbling figure. Blanche once was
married to and passionately in love with a tortured young man. He killed
himself after she discovered his homosexuality, and she has sufiered from
guilt and regret ever since. Blanche watched parents and relatives{all the
old guard{die off, and then had to endure foreclosure on the family estate.
Cracking under the strain, or perhaps yielding to urges so long suppressed
that they now cannot be contained, Blanche engages in a series of sexual
escapades that trigger an expulsion from her community. In New Orleans she
puts on the airs of a woman who has never known indignity, but Stanley sees
through her. Her past catches up with her and destroys her relationship
with Mitch. Stanley, as she fears he might, destroys what's left of her. At
the end of the play she is led away to an insane asylum.
Stella Kowalski { Blanche's younger sister, with the same timeworn
aristocratic heritage, but who has jumped the sinking ship and linked her
life with lower-class vitality. Her union with Stanley is animal and
spiritual, violent but renewing. She cannot really explain it to Blanche.
While she loves her older sister, and pities her, she cannot bring herself
to believe Blanche's accusation against Stanley. Though it is agony, she
has her sister committed.
Stanley Kowalski { Stanley is the epitome of vital force. He is a man in
the ush of life, a lover of women, a worker, a fighter, new blood{a chief
male of the ock, with his tail feathers fanned and brilliant. He is loyal
to his friends, passionate to his wife, and heartlessly cruel to Blanche.
Mitch { An army buddy, coworker, and poker buddy of Stanley. He is the
sensitive member of that crowd, perhaps because he lives with his slowly-
dying mother. Mitch and Blanche are both people in need of companionship
and support. Though Mitch is of Stanley's world, and Blanche is off in her
own world, the two believe they have found an acceptable companion in the
other. Mitch woos Blanche over the course of the summer until Stanley
reveals secrets about Blanche's past.
Eunice { Stella's friend and landlady. Lives above the Kowalskis with
Steve.
Steve { Poker buddy of Stanley. Lives upstairs with Eunice.
Pablo { Poker buddy of Stanley.
A Negro Woman { Two brief appearances. She is sitting on the steps talking
to Eunice when Blanche arrives. Later, in the 'real-world-struggle-for-
existence' sequence, she ri es through a prostitute's abandoned handbag.
A Doctor { Comes to the door at the play's finale to whisk Blanche off to
an asylum. After losing a struggle with the nurse, Blanche willingly goes
with the kindly-seeming doctor.
A Nurse { Comes with the doctor to collect Blanche and bring her to an
institution. A matronly, unfeminine figure with a talent for subduing
hysterical patients.
A Young Collector { A young man (seventeen, perhaps), who comes to the door
to collect for the newspaper. Blanche lusts after him but constrains
herself to irtation and a passionate farewell kiss. The boy leaves
bewildered.
A Mexican woman { A vendor of Mexican funeral decorations who frightens
Blanche by issuing the plaintive call: Flores para los muertos. The Mexican
woman later reprises this role in the underrated comedy Quick Change
(1990), starring Bill Murray and Geena Davis.
Summary
Stanley and Stella Kowalski live on a street called Elysian Fields in a run-
down but charming section of New Orleans. They are newly married and
desperately in love. One day Stella's older sister, Blanche DuBois, arrives
to stay with them, setting up the drama's central con ict: an emotional tug-
of-war between the raw, brute sensuality of Stanley and the fragile,
crumbling gentility of Blanche. Truth be told, it is not an even match, for
Blanche is already sliding down a slippery slope. Blanche and Stella are
the last in a line of landed Southern gentry. Stella has renounced the worn
dictates of class propriety to follow her heart and marry an uncultured
blue-collar worker of Polish extraction. Meanwhile, Blanche has played
nursemaid to the old guard on its deathbed and watched the family estate
slip through her fingers into foreclosure. Her professed values are those
of an older South, of charm and wit and chivalry, gaiety and light,
appearance and code.
Blanche claims she has been given a leave of absence from her high school
teaching job to recover from a nervous breakdown. She settles in with the
Kowalskis but things do not go smoothly. Her disapproval of Stanley and the
station in life her sister Stella has chosen is obvious, though she strives
to be polite. Her feelings against Stanley are galvanized when she
witnesses him strike Stella in a fit of drunken rage. Stanley's feelings
for her are similarly hardened when he overhears her describe him as animal-
like, neolithic, and brutish. Blanche's imposition, her airs, and her
distortions of reality infuriate Stanley. He begins to chip away at her
thin veneer of armor.
Of Stella's and Stanley's friends, one seems to stand above the rest in
sensitivity and grace. This is Mitch, who works at the same factory as
Stanley, and lives with his sick mother. He has no refinement, but his
native gentleness and sincerity inspire Blanche to return his afiection.
The two seem to need each other They see a great deal of one another as the
summer wears on, but Blanche places strict limits on their intimacy. She
has old-fashioned ideals and morals, she tells him. Meanwhile, Stella's
first pregnancy progresses and Stanley continues his subtle campaign of
intimidation against Blanche.
Blanche's past catches up with her. When she was younger, she fell in love
with and married a man whom she later caught in bed with another man. When
she confronted him, he killed himself for shame. This knocked the
foundations out from under her, and the subsequent poverty and emotional
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