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streetcar - Coggle Diagram
streetcar
desire
Blanche as an object of male sexual desire.. -"what you are talking about is brutal desire - just - desire, the rattletrap streetcar that bangs through the quarter" ... "it brought me here, where I'm not wanted and ashamed to be". - "how much longer I can turn the trick" = reference to prostitution - "don't even admit your existence unless they are making love to you" -"you make my mouth water" = interaction between the young newspaper worker and blache -"stands in her pink silk brassiere in the light through the portiers" = sexualising herself for sexual validation. "Sister blanche is no Lily"
Stella's desire for Stanley
-"they come together with low animal moans"
-"Her eyes go blind with tenderness"
- "He smashed all the light bulbs with the heel of my slipper (she laughs)... "I was - sort of - thrilled by it"
"things that happen between a man and a woman in the dark that makes everything else unimportant"
- "stella has embraced him with both arms, fiercely"
- comparison of Stella's face to "of eastern idols" - suggesting a mystical nature to their attraction, one that a typical modern audience may not be able to understand.
Stanleys sexuality and his masculinity are interlinked
- "since earliest manhood the centre of his life has been pleasure with women, the giving and taking of it"
- "men at the peak of their physical manhood, as coarse and direct as the primary colours", poker night, image of men as blunt and brash.
- "stanley gives a loud whack of his hand against her thigh"
- "he advances and disapears, there is a sound of a blow"= offstage to leave the audience to explore their imagination, censorship and ambiguity
- "takes a step towards her, biting his tounge"
- "he picks up her inert figure and carries her towards bed"
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power dynamics
Masculinity, gender roles in the 1940s
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illusion and reality
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Blanche's relationship with her own reality - plastic theatre, use of polka music is symbolic of blanche's attempts to live in the past
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CONTEXT
- set in the 1940s
- William's was ridiculed by his father for being effeminate and was often called a "miss Nancy" = relates to the idea of compulsive masculinity as shown through the character of stanley
- sister was put into a mental institution, schizophrenia
- father was a drunkard, mother was a snobbish teetotaller
- when asked about the secret to happiness, William's said it was "insensitivity" = represented through blanches skewed sense of reality ?
- William's often sought frequent, anonymous sexual encounters, describing them as "spiritual champagne" = blanche's promsicuity
- William's drew from his own dysfunctional family in much of his writing
- He grew up in the after affects of the American civil war, the south suffered severe economic decline leading to the decaying grandeur of New Orleans. however this added to the romantic appeal. references to the American dream, where every man is born equal and has the possibility to succeed whereas blanche represents the old world where race and class are important
- southern gothic = symbols of decay, deeply flawed characters. Antebellum literature
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