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ASND context - Coggle Diagram
ASND context
Personal
Tennessee is a nickname. He was given this name by an ignorant college friend who mistook Mississippi with his birth place.
His mother Edwina was a typical spoilt Southern Belle who valued beauty over almost everything else.
Belle Reve being colored by his mother’s reminiscences of the South- the sordid deaths and intrusion of drunken sailors being Williams’ own contributions.
Southern Gothic appealed to Williams- the ripe charms of decay fired his imagination but the broken, damaged society appealed to his dislike of the South due to his mother’s love of it.
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In 1928 Williams experienced reprieve from his warring family on a trip to Europe with his grandfather’s parishioners
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His father Cornelius was an abrasive, aggressive, drunk who raped his mother and beat her.
He was influenced particularly by playwrights such as Anton
Chekhov, August Strindberg and Henrik Ibsen.
In 1931, Williams suffered a nervous breakdown due to the Depression
1937 his sister Rose was subjected to a prefrontal lobotomy due to her ‘mentally unstable’ ‘sexually motivated desires’ after accusing their father of attacking her.
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His partner Frank Merlo remained there for him despite the string of affairs Williams had in his frenetic search of sexual satisfaction
Desire often leads to disaster is a theme in his plays reflecting his own urge to seek pleasure, however destructive.
Some critics argue Williams himself disliked himself for his homosexuality, believing a conflict existed between his morality and his sexuality
Environmental
ASND was first staged 2 years after WW2 ended, however Williams makes barely an reference to it- the only one being the understanding Stanley made his place in America by fighting for them and his brief reference to the Salerno landings in Scene 11.
Political changes which follow such as the cold war are made no reference to in order to create a more claustrophobic quality to his pays- they exist in a world much their own.
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The Civil War in America was largely economical. It surrounded the issue of slavery, which the North saw as a social evil and the South as essential for the continuation of their cotton and tobacco trade.
The breakup of the union became a reality as anti-slavery feelings grew stronger and Confederate states seceded
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The civil war ended with Confederate surrender in April 1865, by then much of the South lay
in ruins
For the greater part of his life homosexuality was still illegal, though tolerated in areas such as New Orleans
Some critics believe that Williams deals only with class snobbery in a general sense and instead wants to look at social issues and power displacement- despite the reason behind it
The romanticizing of the South grew into the 20th century with plays such as ‘Gone with the Wind’ by Margaret Mitchell portraying the south as a lost way of life
August Strindberg’s ‘Miss Julie’ may have influenced ASND in its equation of class antagonism and sexual tension.
Plantation culture shown with the depiction of Belle Reve can be paralleled with the household of Madame Ranevska in Anton Chekhov’s ‘The Cherry Orchard.’
other
‘A Streetcar Named Desire’ was given many names before he settled, including: ‘The Moth,’
‘Blanche’s Chair to the Moon’ and ‘The Poker Night.’
‘Southern Gothic’ became its own sub-genre. It describes texts which has an awareness of belonging to a dying culture- dashing, romantic, but at the same time based on dep injustice