Analyzing A Streetcar Named Desire : Note-Taking

To help youwith your understanding of the text, as well as to develop a set of comprehensive notes from which to approach and complete your Paper Two with relative ease and confidence, you are to complete the following table and add to it when you are:

  • reading the play (your own ideas/interpretations)
  • listening to discussion
  • sharing ideas with others on-line
  • note-taking from critiques, articles and study guides

In this way you will be able to locate information at a glance rather than sorting through mountainous pages of notes. Keep your notes brief and to the point.

I have made a start with the table which is by no means complete. Continue to add to it.

KEY ELEMENTS

/

SIGNIFICANCE / MEANING / INTERPRETATIONS

HISTORICAL CONTEXT
CULTURAL CONTEXT
THEMES
Clash of two worlds /
  • Conflict between traditional values and thrusting, aggressive materialism of the new world

Loneliness /
  • Comes from an unfulfilled desire to be loved and needed
  • Blanche and Mitch are desperately attempting to achieve some kind of meaningful human communication and contact, but because of their respective characters and the situation in which they find themselves, are unable to succeed

Illusion /
  • Blanche is not really lost in illusions; rather she uses them as camouflage. She wears them as she wears her clothes and her glass necklaces, in protection from a reality which she finds horrifying.

Desire and Fate
Death
Madness
Gender
Human sexuality
Oppression of women
Power & Powerlessness

SETTING

New Orleans Quarter
Elysian Fields /
  • Characterised by feelings of fading hope, desperation, sensuality, carnality and coarseness.
– epitomized by “the perpetual blues piano”

CONTRASTS

New Orleans Quarter and Belle Reve /
  • Opposition of degradation and beauty
  • Suffering and sexual exploitation are also part of Belle Reve
  • New Orleans has a “raffish charm” that speaks of a faded cultivation which it shares with Belle Reve, and an earthy richness which the old plantation lost.

DuBois and Kowalski /
  • Diversity in backgrounds e.g. refined and coarse

Colours /
  • Stanley needs vividness to prove his physical manhood. He is presented “as coarse and direct and powerful as the primary colours.” His green and scarlet bowlingshirt is an example.
  • Blanche shuns loud shades and selects pastels or white. The directness of bright colours repulses her; she prefers muted, muffled tones.

Zodiac signs /
  • Stanley was born in December under Capricorn the Goat. This brings to mind many obvious associations in connection with Stanley’s personality.
  • Blanche’s sign is Virgo, the virgin. True, she is a very degenerate “virgin,” but in body only. She tries to keep the mentality of a virgin. She believes she is a virgin because the men she has slept with have meant nothing to her; they have not actually taken from her. She has not given of her real self to them.

STAGE EFFECTS

Music /
  • Music marks a change of atmosphere, conveys a menace, underlines a tragic development:
-the “blues piano” in particular can signal a variety of messages;
-the “Varsouviana” polka is specifically linked with the suicide of Blanche’s husband and is heard by her only when she remembers him.
Sound Effects /
  • the blues piano representing the spirit of the rundown quarter,
  • the polka for Blanche’s guilty memories of her husband,
  • harsh discords for the rape and for Blanche’s removal to the mental hospital.

SYMBOLISM & IMAGERY
Desire and Cemeteries
Elysian Fields
Belle Reve /
  • Beautiful Dream
  • The remaining symbol of a life and tradition that Blanche knows in her heart have vanished, yet to which she clings with a desperate tenacity.

Locomotive
“Blues piano” /
  • A symbol of the callous vitality of the Vieux Carré of New Orleans, representing the spirit of the rundown quarter

“Varsouviana” polka /
  • Represents the tragedy in Blanche’s past - her guilty memories of her husband
  • In Scene 11 the polka is “filtered into weird distortion” in Blanche’s mind. The “harsh discords” signalling that the sad memories of the past are about to give way to a cruel institutionalised future.

Light
The paper lantern
“Flores, flores para los muertos”
Distorted shapes and jungle cries /
  • Symbols of human cruelty (Scenes 10 and 11) - grotesque menacing shapes, jungle noises and distorted music are employed to reflect Blanche’s terror.

Spilt coke /
  • Recalling the blood spilt by her husband’s suicide.

Baths
Shep Huntleigh