A Streetcar Named Desire: The Title?
After half a century of critical and public acclaim, Streetcar is so much a part of theatrical
heritage that it is hard to imagine it being called anything else. But it is worth remembering
that what seems natural and inevitable now did not seem so to Tennessee Williams when
he wrote the play. His string of working titles suggests the final choice was not glaringly
obvious. Desire as a driving force is clearly a central concern of the play, but the so is the
idea of fatal attraction suggested by ‘The Moth’, or of ruthless cat and mouse competition
suggested by ‘The Poker Night’. And, while those titles connect closely to patterns of
imagery permeating the play’s action, dialogue and stage effects, my contention is that the
title finally chosen does not.
Limited Journeys
On the one hand, the metaphor of experience as a physical journey has a long literary
history. And the kind of travel particularized by a streetcar fits well with the play’s
representation of desire as a driving force taking characters to destinations which are, at
best, very approximate choices. On arrival, Blanche refers to her bewildering tram ride,
and Williams uses the New Orleans districts – Desire, Elysian Fields, Cemeteries – as
indicators of her fears and compulsions. With her departure, the playwright reintroduces
the traveling metaphor with Blanches tragic ‘Please don’t get up. I’m only passing through.’
On the other hand, by the time the play opens, Blanche is near the end of her journey; in
fact we ware watching her last chance road-stop. Between her arrival and departure – the
opening and closing moments of the play – Williams has created a fixed interior in the two
rooms of the Kowalski flat, with exterior stage areas also strongly suggesting a specific
location. There is limited opportunity within that stage space to make use of streetcar-
related props and imagery. One exception occurs in scene 8, when Stanley hands Blanche
a bus ticket back to Laurel, signifying his determination that she will be defined by her past
– and by the seediest part of it. (He could have spent the money on a journey to any
destination, but Laurel is the only place where Stanley can be sure that Blanche will be
labeled as depraved.) Other than that, vehicular allusions seem somewhat dragged in, for
example in scene 6 ‘Is that streetcar named Desire still grinding along the tracks at this
hour?’
True, the dialogue at time alludes to life as geographical movement. This, I think, is why
Williams makes Stanley a worker who travels. Stella describes him as the ‘one of his
crowd that’s likely to get anywhere.’ Compare Mitch, employed on the appropriately chose
spare-parts bench. The Kowalski’s flat faces the L&N tracks because they are connected
to an industrial future, while the sound effect of a locomotive is always a threat to Blanche.
It is first heard when Stanley enters in scene 4, thunders past with glaring lights as she
relives Allan’s death in scene 6, and the engines roar makes her crouch as Stanley
approaches menacingly in scene 10. However, the symbolic relevance of the train is much
reduced by Williams changing his earlier intention that Blanche would die by throwing
herself under the wheels of a locomotive.
Lighting the stage
Despite the play’s allusions to life as a journey, scrutiny of the text shows Williams actually
makes scant use of the streetcar because – banal as it sounds - they play is set neither in
a bus station nor on a tram. In contrast, if we turn to one of his working titles, The Moth,
Williams’ stage setting allows him to introduce the light symbolism and related props with
effortless skill. Take, for example, the Chinese lantern. Naturalistically, it seems just the
purchase Blanche would make: frivolous, elegant and blurring the shabby surroundings
,she longs to obscure. Dramatically, in scene 3, it changes the lighting effect as Blanche
exerts her influence over Mitch, and sets one half of the stage in opposition to the lurid
light over the poker players. The contrasting effects define two opposing territories from
which Blanche and Stanley wage a tug-of –war over Mitch during scene 3.
Symbolically, the lantern shields Blanche from the ‘merciless glare’ of a bare bulb, itself
connected through the dialogue to acts of deliberate cruelty or vulgarity, and to a harsh,
unforgiving attitude. Later, Mitch angrily snatches off the shade, complaining he has been
deceived, but Williams’ stage business in scene 3 shows Mitch’s deceptions are as much
self-induced as anything. His willingness to put up the lantern signifies his active collusion
in the romanticized version of herself that Blanche constructs. In contrast, Stanley’s refusal
to participate, his view of Blanche’s yearning for magic and glamour as mere trickery, is
expressed in his ironic reference to the lantern: ‘You come here and sprinkle the place with
powder and spray perfume and cover the light-bulb with a paper lantern and lo and behold
the place has turned into Egypt and you are the Queen of the Nile’
I could go on to examine how Williams uses the lantern in the final scene, but I think the
point is made: some elements of the play seem effortlessly woven into its fabric,
naturalistically and symbolically; the play’s title is not one of them.
Life Luggage
Having said that, one travel-related property works supremely well: Blanche’s trunk.
Seamlessly integrated into the play’s action, it unifies the literal and metaphorical
meanings of Blanche’s journey. Travelers have luggage, and experience also brings
psychological and emotional baggage. Both are evident in the contents and arrangement
of Blanche’s trunk, whose importance is made clear by her comment, ‘Everything I own is
in that trunk.’ Clearly, the compartments represent areas of Blanche’s past experience –
ones she would no doubt prefer to keep separate – and highlight the contradictions in her
situation and in her psyche: glamour overlaying the debt, tributes from conquests
overlaying vulnerability and pain. And Stanley’s intrusion into the trunk marks the
beginning of his invasion of Blanche’s self, which does not ease until the ultimate
penetration – rape.
In scene 2, Stanley starts to rummage through Blanche’s possessions for proof she has
misappropriated the family assets. Immediately visible are the glamorous clothes and
accessories which Blanche takes refuge in to bolster her crumbling sense of self worth.
She tells Stanley ‘clothes are my passion’ and in a sense they are – a sublimation of other
passions Blanche has learned to fear and tries to repress. But the trunk also contains
Allan’s love letters, and it is when these, not the clothes, are handled that Blanche
expresses a sense of desecration. Allan’s letters are romanticized by Blanche’s description
of them as ‘yellowing with antiquity’. Yet they are beribboned not simply because they are
precious but because they are taboo, connected to repressed feelings of guilt: ‘I hurt him
the way you would like to hurt me, but you can’t! I’m not young and vulnerable anymore.
But my young husband was and I – never mind about that.’
Stanley’s ravaging of Blanche’s trunk prefigures his raking over of her past to get ‘the
dope’ on ‘sister Blanche’. The rough handling begins behind her back (as do his enquiries
through Shaw) while she bathes. When he spots the relics of her marriage tucked beneath
other papers, Stanley, the wary poker player, mistakes secrecy for subterfuge: ‘What’s
them underneath/ (He indicates another sheaf of paper.)
,He ends by ‘ripping’ the ribbons from Allan’s letters, which are scattered to the floor. And
what Stanley accidentally uncovers here about Blanche’s distant past is of absolutely no
interest to him., just as it is not in scene 7. There he crows about the scandals he has
unearthed: Blanche’s affair with a student and her stay at the Hotel Flamingo. Stella’s plea
for understanding falls on deaf ears. Stanley’s only response to her account of Blanche’s
marriage is: ‘All we discussed was recent history. That must have been a pretty long time
ago.’
Unpacking the past
It is fitting that the trunk makes a second major appearance in scene 10 – dragged into the
centre of the stage again. In the patterning of the dramatic structure, the second and
penultimate are mirror scenes. Both cover the only significant periods of time when
Stanley and Blanche are alone and Stella is out of the flat. In the former scene Blanche is
‘unpacked’ and by the latter she is packing. Her tiara and gowns are again on display, this
time crumpled and soiled, symbolising the damage that Stanley has inflicted on her self-
image and her image in Mitch’s eyes. This degradation is also reflected in Stanley’s
scornful description of Blanche’s costume. Earlier, his suspicions about being swindled are
voiced in deliberate exaggerations: ‘genuine fox fur pieces, a half mile long’; ‘bracelets of
solid gold’; ‘a crown for an empress’; but there is also, perhaps, a grudging admiration. By
scene 10 Stanley assess Blanche’s costume with confident mockery: ‘Take a look at your
self in that worn-out Mardi Gras outfit, rented for fifty cents from some rag-picker.’
Under his ‘merciless glare’ Blanche is stripped of all dignity. She drops the bottle in defeat
when she sees even her resistance construed as whorehouse posturing: ‘So you want
some rough-house! All right, let’s have some rough-house!’
In summary, then, Blanche’s trunk represents aspects of her self: her inherited
circumstances, her experiences, her memories, losses and aspirations. Stanley’s intrusive
investigation and dismissal of its contents show his contempt for all these aspects of
Blanche.
An exploration of Williams’ use of this prop, as with the Chinese lantern, shows how
naturally symbolic meanings seem to emerge from the drama, so much so that these
meanings can be summed up idiomatically. In scene 3, the radio shows that Mitch literally
and figuratively ‘dances to Blanche’s tune’; in scene 5 coke spilling on her white dress
reveals Blanche’s fear of ‘staining her image’; in scene 5 the young man’s lighter illustrates
the temperamental ‘spark of attraction’. Likewise, Blanche’s trunk shows her ‘psychological
and emotional baggage’. In contrast, the play’s title does not seem to emerge from the
drama itself. Instead, the characters have to import it by reference to a world beyond the
stage. This reflects the way the author himself arrived at the title, looking out through his
New Orleans window: ‘Down this street, running on the same tracks, are two streetcars,
one name Desire, the other Cemetery. Their indiscourageable progress up and down
Royal struck me as having some symbolic bearing of a broad nature on life .. And that’s
how I got the title.’
, Themes in ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’
Three themes are very prominent throughout the play:
· Desire and Fate
· Death
· Madness
Desire and Fate:
This is a dominant theme that runs throughout the play and is particularly prominent in the
title itself. Williams himself was intrigued by the names of two streetcars that carried the
words ‘Desire’ and ‘Cemeteries’ as their destination. Whilst living in New Orleans in 1946
Williams mentioned these aptly named streetcars in an essay he wrote:
Their indistinguishable progress up and down Royal Street struck me as having symbolic
bearing of a broad nature on the life in the Vieux Carre – and everywhere else for that
matter.’
A streetcar running directly to its destination on a predetermined course could easily be
seen as a symbol of fate. For Williams, however, the streetcar’s destination, ‘Desire’,
spoke more than an undefined force of fate. This force clearly drives Blanche, her sexual
passion and desire overwhelms her at moments in the play, we see her clearly driven by
forces more powerful than her. She acknowledges Stanley’s masculinity and animal
passion from the onset of her visit. She openly flirts with him and teases (not necessarily in
a sexual way always, but she often seeks a reaction or attention) him as the play
develops.
The image of the streetcar is used in scene 4 when Stella and Blanche discuss sexual
desire. Stella asks Blanche, ‘Haven’t you ever ridden that streetcar?’ Stella is clearly a
passionate woman too, perhaps driven by the same force as Blanche. She did after all
abandon her life on a country plantation and succumb to the passionate love of Stanely. Is
the final destination for Stella shown in Eunice perhaps?
There is another image of fate in the play. In scene 4, 6 and 10 Williams introduce a
roaring locomotive at a dramatic moment: Blanche’s condemnation of Stanley; her
description of her husband’s death and just before the rape. However, the random
introduction of the locomotive as a symbol of fate does not carry here the impact of the
streetcar metaphor. It could be that Williams had originally intended the locomotive as the
leitmotiv (dominant, or lead, motif) of his play, but considered the ironic predetermined
course of a lurching streetcar to be far more dramatic.
The idea that Williams is trying to convey seems to be that to be drive by desire is self
destructive, yet the victims of an overpowering passion are carried along helplessly,
unable to escape. Blanche’s fate is preordained, this is not only stressed in the streetcar
image but several key moments in the play indicate that there cannot be a happy
conclusion to Blanche’s story. The incident with the ‘young man’ collecting money and her
elusive and dishonest drinking reveal the uncontrollable forces that drive her. Throughout
his life Tennessee Williams was driven from one sexual encounter to another, exactly like
Blanche, and like Blanche he too seemed incapable of committing himself to a permanent
relationship, in his case homosexual. When Blanche longs for Mitch to marry her, she is
After half a century of critical and public acclaim, Streetcar is so much a part of theatrical
heritage that it is hard to imagine it being called anything else. But it is worth remembering
that what seems natural and inevitable now did not seem so to Tennessee Williams when
he wrote the play. His string of working titles suggests the final choice was not glaringly
obvious. Desire as a driving force is clearly a central concern of the play, but the so is the
idea of fatal attraction suggested by ‘The Moth’, or of ruthless cat and mouse competition
suggested by ‘The Poker Night’. And, while those titles connect closely to patterns of
imagery permeating the play’s action, dialogue and stage effects, my contention is that the
title finally chosen does not.
Limited Journeys
On the one hand, the metaphor of experience as a physical journey has a long literary
history. And the kind of travel particularized by a streetcar fits well with the play’s
representation of desire as a driving force taking characters to destinations which are, at
best, very approximate choices. On arrival, Blanche refers to her bewildering tram ride,
and Williams uses the New Orleans districts – Desire, Elysian Fields, Cemeteries – as
indicators of her fears and compulsions. With her departure, the playwright reintroduces
the traveling metaphor with Blanches tragic ‘Please don’t get up. I’m only passing through.’
On the other hand, by the time the play opens, Blanche is near the end of her journey; in
fact we ware watching her last chance road-stop. Between her arrival and departure – the
opening and closing moments of the play – Williams has created a fixed interior in the two
rooms of the Kowalski flat, with exterior stage areas also strongly suggesting a specific
location. There is limited opportunity within that stage space to make use of streetcar-
related props and imagery. One exception occurs in scene 8, when Stanley hands Blanche
a bus ticket back to Laurel, signifying his determination that she will be defined by her past
– and by the seediest part of it. (He could have spent the money on a journey to any
destination, but Laurel is the only place where Stanley can be sure that Blanche will be
labeled as depraved.) Other than that, vehicular allusions seem somewhat dragged in, for
example in scene 6 ‘Is that streetcar named Desire still grinding along the tracks at this
hour?’
True, the dialogue at time alludes to life as geographical movement. This, I think, is why
Williams makes Stanley a worker who travels. Stella describes him as the ‘one of his
crowd that’s likely to get anywhere.’ Compare Mitch, employed on the appropriately chose
spare-parts bench. The Kowalski’s flat faces the L&N tracks because they are connected
to an industrial future, while the sound effect of a locomotive is always a threat to Blanche.
It is first heard when Stanley enters in scene 4, thunders past with glaring lights as she
relives Allan’s death in scene 6, and the engines roar makes her crouch as Stanley
approaches menacingly in scene 10. However, the symbolic relevance of the train is much
reduced by Williams changing his earlier intention that Blanche would die by throwing
herself under the wheels of a locomotive.
Lighting the stage
Despite the play’s allusions to life as a journey, scrutiny of the text shows Williams actually
makes scant use of the streetcar because – banal as it sounds - they play is set neither in
a bus station nor on a tram. In contrast, if we turn to one of his working titles, The Moth,
Williams’ stage setting allows him to introduce the light symbolism and related props with
effortless skill. Take, for example, the Chinese lantern. Naturalistically, it seems just the
purchase Blanche would make: frivolous, elegant and blurring the shabby surroundings
,she longs to obscure. Dramatically, in scene 3, it changes the lighting effect as Blanche
exerts her influence over Mitch, and sets one half of the stage in opposition to the lurid
light over the poker players. The contrasting effects define two opposing territories from
which Blanche and Stanley wage a tug-of –war over Mitch during scene 3.
Symbolically, the lantern shields Blanche from the ‘merciless glare’ of a bare bulb, itself
connected through the dialogue to acts of deliberate cruelty or vulgarity, and to a harsh,
unforgiving attitude. Later, Mitch angrily snatches off the shade, complaining he has been
deceived, but Williams’ stage business in scene 3 shows Mitch’s deceptions are as much
self-induced as anything. His willingness to put up the lantern signifies his active collusion
in the romanticized version of herself that Blanche constructs. In contrast, Stanley’s refusal
to participate, his view of Blanche’s yearning for magic and glamour as mere trickery, is
expressed in his ironic reference to the lantern: ‘You come here and sprinkle the place with
powder and spray perfume and cover the light-bulb with a paper lantern and lo and behold
the place has turned into Egypt and you are the Queen of the Nile’
I could go on to examine how Williams uses the lantern in the final scene, but I think the
point is made: some elements of the play seem effortlessly woven into its fabric,
naturalistically and symbolically; the play’s title is not one of them.
Life Luggage
Having said that, one travel-related property works supremely well: Blanche’s trunk.
Seamlessly integrated into the play’s action, it unifies the literal and metaphorical
meanings of Blanche’s journey. Travelers have luggage, and experience also brings
psychological and emotional baggage. Both are evident in the contents and arrangement
of Blanche’s trunk, whose importance is made clear by her comment, ‘Everything I own is
in that trunk.’ Clearly, the compartments represent areas of Blanche’s past experience –
ones she would no doubt prefer to keep separate – and highlight the contradictions in her
situation and in her psyche: glamour overlaying the debt, tributes from conquests
overlaying vulnerability and pain. And Stanley’s intrusion into the trunk marks the
beginning of his invasion of Blanche’s self, which does not ease until the ultimate
penetration – rape.
In scene 2, Stanley starts to rummage through Blanche’s possessions for proof she has
misappropriated the family assets. Immediately visible are the glamorous clothes and
accessories which Blanche takes refuge in to bolster her crumbling sense of self worth.
She tells Stanley ‘clothes are my passion’ and in a sense they are – a sublimation of other
passions Blanche has learned to fear and tries to repress. But the trunk also contains
Allan’s love letters, and it is when these, not the clothes, are handled that Blanche
expresses a sense of desecration. Allan’s letters are romanticized by Blanche’s description
of them as ‘yellowing with antiquity’. Yet they are beribboned not simply because they are
precious but because they are taboo, connected to repressed feelings of guilt: ‘I hurt him
the way you would like to hurt me, but you can’t! I’m not young and vulnerable anymore.
But my young husband was and I – never mind about that.’
Stanley’s ravaging of Blanche’s trunk prefigures his raking over of her past to get ‘the
dope’ on ‘sister Blanche’. The rough handling begins behind her back (as do his enquiries
through Shaw) while she bathes. When he spots the relics of her marriage tucked beneath
other papers, Stanley, the wary poker player, mistakes secrecy for subterfuge: ‘What’s
them underneath/ (He indicates another sheaf of paper.)
,He ends by ‘ripping’ the ribbons from Allan’s letters, which are scattered to the floor. And
what Stanley accidentally uncovers here about Blanche’s distant past is of absolutely no
interest to him., just as it is not in scene 7. There he crows about the scandals he has
unearthed: Blanche’s affair with a student and her stay at the Hotel Flamingo. Stella’s plea
for understanding falls on deaf ears. Stanley’s only response to her account of Blanche’s
marriage is: ‘All we discussed was recent history. That must have been a pretty long time
ago.’
Unpacking the past
It is fitting that the trunk makes a second major appearance in scene 10 – dragged into the
centre of the stage again. In the patterning of the dramatic structure, the second and
penultimate are mirror scenes. Both cover the only significant periods of time when
Stanley and Blanche are alone and Stella is out of the flat. In the former scene Blanche is
‘unpacked’ and by the latter she is packing. Her tiara and gowns are again on display, this
time crumpled and soiled, symbolising the damage that Stanley has inflicted on her self-
image and her image in Mitch’s eyes. This degradation is also reflected in Stanley’s
scornful description of Blanche’s costume. Earlier, his suspicions about being swindled are
voiced in deliberate exaggerations: ‘genuine fox fur pieces, a half mile long’; ‘bracelets of
solid gold’; ‘a crown for an empress’; but there is also, perhaps, a grudging admiration. By
scene 10 Stanley assess Blanche’s costume with confident mockery: ‘Take a look at your
self in that worn-out Mardi Gras outfit, rented for fifty cents from some rag-picker.’
Under his ‘merciless glare’ Blanche is stripped of all dignity. She drops the bottle in defeat
when she sees even her resistance construed as whorehouse posturing: ‘So you want
some rough-house! All right, let’s have some rough-house!’
In summary, then, Blanche’s trunk represents aspects of her self: her inherited
circumstances, her experiences, her memories, losses and aspirations. Stanley’s intrusive
investigation and dismissal of its contents show his contempt for all these aspects of
Blanche.
An exploration of Williams’ use of this prop, as with the Chinese lantern, shows how
naturally symbolic meanings seem to emerge from the drama, so much so that these
meanings can be summed up idiomatically. In scene 3, the radio shows that Mitch literally
and figuratively ‘dances to Blanche’s tune’; in scene 5 coke spilling on her white dress
reveals Blanche’s fear of ‘staining her image’; in scene 5 the young man’s lighter illustrates
the temperamental ‘spark of attraction’. Likewise, Blanche’s trunk shows her ‘psychological
and emotional baggage’. In contrast, the play’s title does not seem to emerge from the
drama itself. Instead, the characters have to import it by reference to a world beyond the
stage. This reflects the way the author himself arrived at the title, looking out through his
New Orleans window: ‘Down this street, running on the same tracks, are two streetcars,
one name Desire, the other Cemetery. Their indiscourageable progress up and down
Royal struck me as having some symbolic bearing of a broad nature on life .. And that’s
how I got the title.’
, Themes in ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’
Three themes are very prominent throughout the play:
· Desire and Fate
· Death
· Madness
Desire and Fate:
This is a dominant theme that runs throughout the play and is particularly prominent in the
title itself. Williams himself was intrigued by the names of two streetcars that carried the
words ‘Desire’ and ‘Cemeteries’ as their destination. Whilst living in New Orleans in 1946
Williams mentioned these aptly named streetcars in an essay he wrote:
Their indistinguishable progress up and down Royal Street struck me as having symbolic
bearing of a broad nature on the life in the Vieux Carre – and everywhere else for that
matter.’
A streetcar running directly to its destination on a predetermined course could easily be
seen as a symbol of fate. For Williams, however, the streetcar’s destination, ‘Desire’,
spoke more than an undefined force of fate. This force clearly drives Blanche, her sexual
passion and desire overwhelms her at moments in the play, we see her clearly driven by
forces more powerful than her. She acknowledges Stanley’s masculinity and animal
passion from the onset of her visit. She openly flirts with him and teases (not necessarily in
a sexual way always, but she often seeks a reaction or attention) him as the play
develops.
The image of the streetcar is used in scene 4 when Stella and Blanche discuss sexual
desire. Stella asks Blanche, ‘Haven’t you ever ridden that streetcar?’ Stella is clearly a
passionate woman too, perhaps driven by the same force as Blanche. She did after all
abandon her life on a country plantation and succumb to the passionate love of Stanely. Is
the final destination for Stella shown in Eunice perhaps?
There is another image of fate in the play. In scene 4, 6 and 10 Williams introduce a
roaring locomotive at a dramatic moment: Blanche’s condemnation of Stanley; her
description of her husband’s death and just before the rape. However, the random
introduction of the locomotive as a symbol of fate does not carry here the impact of the
streetcar metaphor. It could be that Williams had originally intended the locomotive as the
leitmotiv (dominant, or lead, motif) of his play, but considered the ironic predetermined
course of a lurching streetcar to be far more dramatic.
The idea that Williams is trying to convey seems to be that to be drive by desire is self
destructive, yet the victims of an overpowering passion are carried along helplessly,
unable to escape. Blanche’s fate is preordained, this is not only stressed in the streetcar
image but several key moments in the play indicate that there cannot be a happy
conclusion to Blanche’s story. The incident with the ‘young man’ collecting money and her
elusive and dishonest drinking reveal the uncontrollable forces that drive her. Throughout
his life Tennessee Williams was driven from one sexual encounter to another, exactly like
Blanche, and like Blanche he too seemed incapable of committing himself to a permanent
relationship, in his case homosexual. When Blanche longs for Mitch to marry her, she is
