UNIVERSIDADE DO ESTADO DO RIO GRANDE DO NORTE – UERN

FACULDADE DE LETRAS E ARTES – FALA

DEPARTAMENTO DE LÍNGUAS ESTRANGEIRAS – DLE
SUBJECT: ENGLISH LITERATURE III
PROFESSOR: MARIANO TAVARES

A Streetcar Named Desire, by Tennessee Williams: A review

Hugo Delleon de Paiva Teixeira

Tennessee Williams was born in Columbus, Mississippi in 1911. He

was a famous writer and playwright. He has a very large list of plays and works
and in this review we are going to talk about the one that made him won The Commented [MT1]: win

Pulitzer Theater Award in 1948: A Streetcar Named Desire.

The play basically has four main characters. Blanche, a widowed,
educated, middle-aged woman who did her best to pay the bills and maintain
her parents’ plantation called The Belle Reve. Stanley, Blanche’s brother-in-law, Commented [MT2]: Belle Reve

oppressive, invasive, spiteful and greedy, who has the goal of earning an
inheritance by being married to Blanche’s sister. Stella, Blanche’s sister, is a
submissive, caring, supportive woman who takes advantage of all her
husband’s action and atrocities throughout the play. Mitch, Stanley’s friend who
at first was kind and had a loving feeling about Blanche.
Located in the city of New Orleans, the play unfolds due to Blanche’s
move to a poor house where her sister and brother-in-law ?. The relationship Commented [MT3]: live (?)

between Blanche and her brother-in-law unfolds and becomes increasingly

dense and dangerous. At first Stanley’s desire was for greed for the good of his
wife and sister-in-law’s family, then intensified into a sense of frustration and
hatred when he realized that his sister-in-law had extinguished his good
opportunity to improve his living conditions. Easy way, as the good profiteer it is.
Blanche introduces herself as a well-educated woman who jailed for the
maintenance of her family’s assets had failed in this process due to lack of
support from her relatives (Stella). However, because she was divorced and
somewhat young, she sought a last chance at getting married. Opportunity she
found when she met Mitch. At first the relationship was reciprocal and
respectful, but changed due to revelations about the promiscuous life that
Blanche supposedly had in Laurel, Mississippi.
 Stanley is a representation of the modern man of the time, the
immigrant, the new, the evolution, the future of the USA. His constant clash with
Blanche glimpses this dichotomy between woman and man, intelligence and
strength, brain and muscles, the obsolete and the modern. But above all it
involves the sexual issue not only between them but all the characters in the
play. Desire as the cause of the fall of the human being.
The sin of the flesh permeates the entire play, from the title to the apex
of the Stanley rape scene on his sister-in-law. Blanche once again finds herself
alone and realizes that she never gets support from her family, but from the
strangers she has related to.

OBS: Who wrote the last four paragraphs? Did you write them yourself?