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Wider reading article : the setting of a street car named desire - Coggle…
Wider reading article : the setting of a street car named desire
Historical context
Stanley Kowalski is a symbol of this modern world, a masculine world
Women were expected to enrol back in their conventional domestic roles as during wartime they were in farms and factories
A world of machines and harsh indivdiualist brutality, this urban working class male, his overalls stained grease, when he encounters Blanche
Blanche comes from an old aristocratic rural culture-
She is 'antebellum' like many of the New Orleans mansion houses that Williams lived in
That is she is a relic of a time before the Civil War that divided America.
Her connections with that vanished world of genteel white gentlefolk presiding over a slave economy, are signalled in the nature of the estate she had a stake in Belle Reve , a beautiful dream which like a dream is insubstantial
America in this postwar world needed to face up to this old class divide but it also needed to deal with the new kinds of gender relations challenging the traditional demands of a largely patriarchal society
A lighting conductor
The play caused these grounded in powerful lighting flashes of emotional energy
It relieved a pressure by giving form to necessary truths
sexual desire
-gender relations
-historically rooted class divisions for an America pulling itself out of the trauma of war and facing a new world- industrialised which disrupts the traditional family and culture structure
These matters that had been dealt with before in American drama, but never before in such an emotionally raw and sexually frank way
Tony Coult argues that while its important to place Williams work in its historical context, it is an appreciation of geography that illuminates the play, as its setting could be set nowhere else but New Orleans
Context of place
Williams went to live in the city of New Orleans in 1938, drawn by its liberal, sexually - tolerant ethos
The stage directions are richly detailed and fluidly readable and clear to understand
The exterior of a two-storey corner building on a street in New Orleans which is named Elysian Fields and runs between the L & N tracks and the river.
A Central Character
New Orleans is a character in the play, one that holds anxieties, passions and historical past in the fabric of its streets, leaves and riverbanks
Its 'raffish charm' and 'atmosphere of decay' create an atmosphere and a sensual grounding for the complex interactions between Stanley, Stella and Blanche
There is a sensuous particularly : about the space William wants the actors and designer to create
Sex, Death and Desire
What makes New Orleans so power? theres a rather arcane science called pyschogeography
The setting plays a very active role. The title gives a cue - out towner Blanche arrives in the city to catch the strretcar whose terminous is Desire street
Its the one with the 'Desire' on the front
She arrives at Elysian fields which in Greek mythology is a resting place of the souls of the heroes who dies
Blanche is already deeply damaged emotionally and economically and is vulnerable, she has come in search of a hero who can rescue and protect her, only to suffer full blown mental breakdown at the hands of Stanley and anti-hero
Vitality, Flexibility and Variety
New Orleans is a port city historically a source of vitality fertility and variety