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Street Car Named Desire Context - Coggle Diagram
Street Car Named Desire Context
Tennessee Williams
mental health
Depression took its toll and Williams suffered a nervous breakdown.
Surrounded by bottles of wine and pills, Williams died in a New York City hotel room on February 25, 1983.
Plays
In 1940 Williams' play, Battle of Angels debuted in Boston. It quickly flopped, but the hardworking Williams revised it and brought it back as Orpheus Descending, which later was made into the movie, The Fugitive Kind
On March 31, 1945, a play he'd been working for some years, The Glass Menagerie, opened on Broadway.
Two years later, A Streetcar Named Desire opened, surpassing his previous success and cementing his status as one of the country's best playwrights.
Family
Had a complicated relationship with his father, a demanding salesman who preferred work instead of parenting.
:
He got taken out of university by his father
Sister had schizophrenia
Achievements
A Street Car Named Desire earned Williams a Drama Critics' Award and his first Pulitzer Prize.
Geographical background
New Orleans French Quater
The Southern Belle
Plantation life
On the plantation slaves continued their harsh existence, as growing sugar was gruelling work. Gangs of slaves, consisting of men, women, children and the elderly worked from dawn until dusk under the orders of a white overseer.
Style
Link to Blanche Dubois
Tennessee Williams’ representation of the Southern Belle is best embodied by the character of Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire, a faded and fallen Southern Belle adrift in the modern world: she has become sexually promiscuous since the suicide of her first husband, and the forced selling of their plantation home
Decline of the south following American civil war
Race relations in the 1920s- 1950s
The 'Jazz age'
The Jazz Age was a period in the 1920s and 1930s in which jazz music and dance styles rapidly gained nationwide popularity in the United States.
New Orleans and multicultural context
New Orleans is world-renowned for its distinct music, Creole cuisine, unique dialect, and its annual celebrations and festivals, most notably Mardi Gras. The historic heart of the city is the French Quarter, known for its French and Spanish Creole architecture and vibrant nightlife along Bourbon Street.
Background to slavery in the south