Discussion Questions and Tasks. 1. What are the sources of conflict between Stanley and Blanche?

1. What are the sources of conflict between Stanley and Blanche?

2. Read the remarks from the given scenes and comment on them.

2.1. How do they characterize the characters?

2.2. In what emotional states are the characters?

Scene one

Blanche tells Stella that they have lost Belle Reve, the family plantation. Stella is astonished, and Blanche accuses her sister of having left her alone, of shirking her family responsibilities. Blanche tells of how she has taken care of the dying members of the family paid off the funeral expenses of the dead family. Belle Reve is lost because of the debts.

BLANCHE: I, I, I took the blows in my face and my body! All of those deaths! The long parade to the graveyard! Father, mother! Margaret, that dreadful way! So big with it, it couldn’t be put in a coffin! But had to be burned like rubbish! You just come home in time for the funerals, Stella. And funerals are pretty compared to deaths. Funerals are quiet, but deaths – not always.

Scene two

Stanley examines Blanche’s wardrobe. He thinks that Blanch has cheated her sister and takes her share of money after selling the family mansion. Blanche soon comes back from the bathroom. He tells her that he is not taken in by her charms, and her “Hollywood glamour stuff.” Stanley demands to see the bill of sale in order to check up on Blanche. He forces her to show him the papers from the sale of belle Reve. When Blanche hands him a tin box, he pulls out the love- letters written by her dead husband and examines them. Then he asks what they are, she answers:

BLANCHE: Poems a dead boy wrote. I hurt him the way that you would like to hurt me, but you can’t! I’m not young and vulnerable any more. But my young husband was and I – never mind about that! Just give them back to me!

Blanche shows all of the estate papers to Stanley, saying:

BLANCHE: There are thousands of papers, stretching back over hundreds of years, affecting Belle Reve as, piece by piece, our improvident grandfathers and father and uncles and brothers exchanged the land for their epic fornications – to put it plainly! The four-letter word deprived us of our plantation, till finally all that was left – and Stella can verify that! – was the house itself and about twenty acres of ground, including a graveyard, to which now all but Stella and I have retreated. Here all of them are, all papers! I hereby endow you with them! Take them, peruse them – commit them to memory, even! I think it’s wonderfully fitting that Belle Reve

Scene 4

Stella is alone on the bed, looking contented. Blanche enters the room; she is worried. She wants her sister to leave the husband. Stella tells her to stop making a mountain out of a molehill and defends Stanley (The day before he was very rude and bit Stella). Stella tells he was too drunk to know what he was doing. Her husband has always been “macho” and violent, and she has accepted these traits and is bewitched by them. When Blanche calls Stanley “a madman”, Stella protests strongly. Blanche tries to convince her that her marital life is awful and that she should part with him. Blanche remembers an old admirer, Shep Huntleigh, whom she says she met on a vacation in Miami. Shep is a very rich Texas oilman. She tries to contact Shep, he might give them enough money to set up a shop somewhere. Stella has no intentions of leaving Stanley.

STELLA: ... there are things that happen between a man and a woman in the dark – that sort of make everything else seem – ­unimportant.

BLANCHE: What you are talking about is brutal desire – just – ­Desire! – the name of that rattle-trap street-car that bangs through the Quarter, up one old narrow street and down another...

STELLA: Haven’t you ever ridden on that street-car?

BLANCHE: It brought me here – where I’m not wanted and where I’m ashamed to be...

Scene 11

Stella and her husband send Blanche to the state institution. Stella is packing Blanche’s clothes while Stanley and his friends Steve, Pablo, Mitch are playing poker. Stanley is in high spirits because he is winning. The Doctor and his female assistant arrive. Blanche wants to flee into the bedroom. The nurse is sent in after her. Blanche screams but the nurse catches her arms. The assistant asks the Doctor if he needs the straitjacket. He replies, that it is not necessary. He takes off his hat and becomes more human. Blanche’s mind is made up. Finally, the doctor manages to calm her, and as Blanche is led off to the mental institution, she holds tight to the doctor’s arm, saying,

Blanche: Whoever you are – I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.

Stella cries bitterly. Stanley is soothing Stella. Steve’s closing remark,

Steve: This game is a seven card stud.

3. Discuss the three main relationships in the play: Stella–Blanche, Stanley–Stella, and Blanche–Mitch.

4. Blanche stands for a faded and useless way of life, doesn’t she?

5. Does Williams like more Blanche’s world of traditional Southern gentility or Stanley’s world? Explain the end of the play.

6. Call the main and minor themes of the play.

7. How do the minor characters contribute to the themes of the play?

8. Explain how Tennessee Williams shows the loss of traditional values in a modern, industrial world in the play “A Streetcar Named Desire”.

9. Explain the title of the play.

10. Do the themes of the play have contemporary relevance?

11. Do William Faulkner and Tennessee Williams have some common features in reflecting “Old South”?

Plastic theatre

Tennessee Williams created a new drama that was more than just a picture of reality. He proclaimed that his ideal theatre makes use of all the stage arts to generate a theatrical experience more than pure Realism. Williams used non-realistic styles like expressionism, surrealism, and absurdism, in his search for a new reality. He was famous for his distinctive ­new style of drama. In his notes to the play “The Glass Menagerie” Tennessee Williams introduces a concept that describes the theatre for which he was writing: “Being a “memory play,” The Glass Menagerie” can be presented with unusual freedom of convention. Because of its considerable delicate or tenuous material, atmospheric touches and subtleties of direction play particularly important part. Expressionism and all other unconventional techniques in drama have only one valid aim, and that is a closer approach to truth. When a play employs unconventional techniques, it is not, or certainly shouldn’t be, trying to escape its responsibility of dealing with reality, or interpreting experience, but is actually or should be attempting to find a closer approach, a more penetrating and vivid expression of things as they are. The straight realistic play with its genuine Frigidaire and authentic ice-cubes, its characters who speak exactly as its audience speaks, corresponds to the academic landscape and has the same virtue of a photographic likeness. Everyone should know nowadays the unimportance of the photographic in art: that truth, life, or reality is an organic thing which the poetic imagination can represent or suggest, in essence, only through transformation, through changing into other forms than those which were merely present in appearance.

These remarks are not meant as a preface only to this particular play. They have to do with a conception of new, plastic theatre which must take the place of the exhausted theatre of realistic conventions if the theatre is to resume vitality as a part of our culture”. [3:xix-xxii].

Williams’ stage directions in the original script of “Glass Menagerie” called for plastic elements, which aim was to create an artistically imagined reality. Plastic theatre uses such elements of other arts as slide projections, film-like soundtrack music, sound effects, dissolving and fading lighting, color, scenery, stylized dance-like movements, design etc. Such use of plastic elements is symbolic and, not just realistic in its effects. Many critics pay attention to the fact that Williams’ “plastic theatre” make use of all resources of the stage of his period. All these means (plastic elements) form an artistic unity, reflecting the cinematic aspects of Williams’s plays. Williams borrowed the idea of plastic space from painting. According to it, space is not simply a kind of background or something inert. Space is alive. It must not be empty or unoccupied. Space must be active with the life of its own. According to Williams’s scripts this space must be full of extra-verbal, non-literary elements (plastic elements).

In one of his letter Williams accused the theatrical critic of “... a lack of respect for the extra-verbal or non-literary elements of the theatre, the various plastic elements, the purely visual things such as light and movement and color and design, which play, for example, such a tremendously important part in theatre ... and which are as much a native part of drama as words and ideas are… I have read criticism in which the use of transparencies and music and subtle lighting effects, which are often as meaningful as pages of dialogue, were dismissed as “cheap tricks and devices.” Actually all of these plastic things are as valid instruments of expression in the theatre as words” [s.p.].

By manipulating of various plastic elements it is possible to reflect the theme, the message, the inner world of the characters. For example, in “A Streetcar Named Desire” setting must be called a plastic element: an act of violence between a man and a prostitute is seen through the transparent walls of the apartment just before Stanley rapes Blanche. The usage of plastic elements is an attempt to come in contact with human’s subconsciousness.