For Private Circulation Only.

In A Streetcar Named Desire symbolism becomes overwhelmingly powerful.

The play can be read at more than one level and readers may feel free to interpret it as representing a clash between
culture (Blanche) and a rude power/animality (Stanley), domesticity and free-wheeling individual spirit, as picture of
a helpless insecure woman brutalized by masculine power, or about a sensitive lyrical girl lost in the jagged terrain of
a valueless anarchic society. The very open-endedness of all these factors suggests the symbolic potential of the
chief characters.

On the overt plain, we cannot miss the symbolism of primary devices such as the single bulb covered with a paper
shade to which Blanche feels deep aversion; the roar of a railway train as it cuts through the droning speech of
Blanche, her unnerving fright of sharp glaring light symbolically evokes that side of her character which is vulnerable,
ready to crack at the slightest strain that her own psycho-conflicts generate. Throughout the play this terror of light
runs like a streak of unavoidable presence which she cannot will away. Tennessee Williams uses expressions like
lurid nocturnal brilliance (Scene 3), bedroom is relatively dim with only the light that spills between the postures
and though the window on the street (Scene 3) which create an atmosphere of emotionally variable moods. Such
method is ostensibly seen in The Glass Menagerie. Scene Six presents a critical point in the budding relationship
between Blanche and Mitchel. Poetic tenor dominates the development of this dialogue with its subtle swings in the
heroines moods. A little warmth from anyone tends to open sluice gates of her sentiments; she gets into
reminiscing state and reels off the past experiences, those tragic incidents which weigh so oppressively on her heart
and must be expressed to anyone who leans sympathetically toward her. Precisely where the tragic crescendo
reaches in her narrative:

a locomotive is heard approaching outside. She claps her hands to her ears, and crouches over. The headlight of the

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locomotive glares into room as it thunders past. As the noise recedes she straightens slowly and continues
speaking. The brief interruption sums up her inner turmoil much more effectively than detailed explanation would
do. She is a woman who remains half in dark and half in light. What she hides must be brought to light by Stanley,
Stella and Mitchel, but she resists with her full might. Her gravest tragedy is symbolized when He crosses to the
dressing table and seize the paper lantern tearing it off the light-bulb, and extends it toward her. She cries out as if
the lantern was herself.
J.S
In the famous rape scene, the author makes use of light in a suggestive manner, bringing out the pathetic reduction
of the girl to the most humiliating moment of her life.

Stanley is beside himself with his evil intention. He laughs aloud, T sayHaHa !Do you hear me ? Hahaha !
[He walks into the bedroom].

BLANCHE: Dont come in here!

[Lurid reflections appear on the walls around BLANCHE. The shadows are of a grotesque and Menacing form ..]

A little later another stage direction in parenthesis reads, The shadows and lurid reflections move sinuously as
flames along the wall spaces. A bestial quality in Stanley, hidden deep in his character to which Blanche had hinted
in her conversation with Stella suddenly spills over uncontrollably which is accentuated by this artistic use of light
and shadow play and inhuman voices like cries in a jungle.

The sound of locomotive is also very meaningfully used, as we have seen in earlier passage. Once again in Scene Ten
this symbol emerges with its full suggestive force. The barely audible blue piano begins to drum up louder. The
sound of it turns into the roar of an approaching locomotive. BLANCHE crouches, pressing her fists into her ears until
it has gone by. The symbol of the locomotive is one of the most articulate and novel devices used in the play, often
associated with the luckless girls moments of tragic dive into further rupture.

Music

Like the use of light, music also has been Tennessee Williamss favourite device, setting the mood and atmosphere.
Blue Piano music continues like a theme music. According to the author himself, This blue piano expresses the
spirit of life which goes on herb. In Scene One when Stella and Blanche are discussing the loss of Belle Reve The
music of the blue piano grows louder. In the beginning of Scene Two also the door is

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 For Private Circulation Only.
kept open on the perpetual blue piano around the corner, This scene ends with Blanches ironical remark, The
blind areleading the blind! and the scene ends with a bellowing laugh from the interior of the flat. Then the 'blue
piano and the hot trumpets sound louder, as if to accentuate the savagery of the entire discussion between the
two. Music symbolically lends an edge of irony to this dialogue. Scene Four also concludes with a moving
combination of lingering brightness and the music of the 'blue piano and trumpet and drums, It continues to
punctuate scenes meaningfully at critical points with an expressive power which only can come from Tennessee
Williamss wonderful pen.

Another piece of music associated with Blanches memory of the painful past is 'Varsouviana which seems to vivify
the dark and sinister past It is a piece of music which was playing when Allan, her young husband shot himself in the
hotel. With the memory of the past it is played out as a symbol of Blanches inability to unscramble her present from
her past. It expresses the essential critical dilemma of Blanches situation in a way which renders verbal description
unnecessary, acting as a more potential form of expression than words. Other pieces of music which the playwright
uses in this play is polka, the trumpet and drums and Blanches own singing a tune that comes out from the
bathroom in her self- absorbed state of mental elation and sense of well-being. Bathroom becomes for her a place of
personal world, away from the intruding gaze of others, hence frequent recourse that she takes to it. She gains
freedom in that place which is denied to her outside. She can be master of time there in a way that is unavailable to
her anywhere else. Blanche in bathroom, therefore, becomes an expressive symbol in this play.

Card Game

Originally when Tennessee Williams conceived of the play he gave it the name The Poker Night which suggests that
apparently, he regarded the game of cards as centrally significant. A considerable amount of criticism has been

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written about the symbolic importance of this game. It functions as a framework with people who are more or less
on the side lines present all the time while the central drama is enacted, and stepping into it once in a while to
remind us of the broad social presence. Their hobby of card playing suggests the social rank to which the Kowalskis
belong, rough sort of people who speak and behave not in the refined manner, yet are quite closely concerned with
the personal life of the three major characters, and always ready to lend a helping hand as they do when a crisis
develops in the wake of Stanleys beating up of his wife and towards the end in the final climactic scene when
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Blanche is carried off to lunatic asylum.

Does the game of cards, poker have a particular symbolic significance in the general nature of Blanches personal
crisis? It is a game of chances, and chance is what Blanches life is based upon. She takes risks all along

her job in Belle Reve and its loss, the loss of family property itself, her chancy wedding, Allan's accidental death, her
taking of big chance of coming to her sister's home when as it would happen she meets a man, Stanley who hastens
her to ultimate ruin, her dependence on chance for achieving happiness in life when she meets Mitch but is rejected
which was also a chance. Chance plays an important role in this play. Blanche, uncertain and unsure as she is,
plunges blindly into chance taking gamble at every turn. Shakti Batra observes, M... the tactics and ceremonial of
games in general, and poker in particular, may be seen as constituting the informing structural principle of the play
as a whole. Pitting Stanley Kowalski the powerful master of Elysian Fields against Blanche Du Bois, the ineffectual ex-
mistress of Bell Reve, Williams makes the former the inevitable winner of the game whose stakes are survival in the
kind of world the play presents. For the first four of the eleven scenes of A Streetcar Named Desire, Blanche, by
reason of affectation of gentility and respectability, manages to bluff a good hand in her game with Stanley; thus, in
third scene Stanley is continually losing, principally to Mitch, the potential ally of Blanche, in the poker game played
on stage (143).

According to this point of view there is an analogy between the actual poker game being played by men, and the real
drama in which Blanche and Stanley are locked in a game of showdown, with the chances, swinging sometimes to
her advantage and sometimes to his. This, however, need not be stretched too far. Structurally, the card game
points to the peculiar game of one-upmanship being played out between Blanche and Stanley. He seeks to know the
real identity of her cards and she goes on hiding it, thus generating the intense dramatic tension.

The title of the play is equally loaded with symbolic meaning.

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 For Private Circulation Only.
Streetcar is the vehicle that carries one to destination as well as away from a point of embarkation: the mythic
archetype of the voyage. In Scene One when Blanche alights at her sisters house she meets Eunice who asks her,
whats the matter, honey? Are you lost? to which Blanche replies, with faintly hysterical humour, They told me
to take a streetcar named Desire, and then transfer to one called cemeteries and ride six blocks and get off at
Elysian Fields! It is an interesting statement, the names connoting both the real things and the symbolically
suggestive meanings. There is a lot of concealed sense of the words Desire, Cemeteries, and Elysian Fields which gain
deeper meaning later on. Desire in the context of Blanches perpetual quest for happiness, peace and stability fits
into the meaning of vehicle which is on its journeythis desire is never fulfilled. Cemeteries evokes the idea of
death which she looked at close range, with her elders passing away agonising at Belle Reve, her husband blowing
his brains with a pistol shot, and the broader sense of her own once ebullient spirit getting killed under brutal
suffocating air of her sisters home. Elysian Fields is paradoxically the name of the place where they are conjuring up
all the impressions of an idealized concept of dwellings where one finds ones dreams realized. These names are
mockingly ironical hence accentuate the heroines tragic situation and her continual decline into abysmal darkness of
personal wilderness all the more sharply. The title of the play is far too evocative of the undercurrent of the tragic
paradoxes which Blanche meets.

The smell of death is brought out rather disturbingly more than once by the use of the voice of flower-selling
Mexican women with her cries of Flores para los muertos, floresflores ... at a time when it dawns upon Blanche
that all the doors appear to have closed upon chance of finding a safe passage to happiness. It is a death knoll tolling
her hour, so hauntingly does it occur, like the Varsouviana tune, it also serves to tell us what is happening inside
her mind. This memory worms its way to the forefront of her consciousness when she is recalling her husband and
when she feels emotionally threatened, and serves to highlight her disintegrating sanity. The playwright has been

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successful in creating an eerie atmosphere by means of these two significant factors connected with her debacle
the death of her dear ones, and her own disintegration. In a way life for Blanche becomes synonymous with death.
In the words of Shakti Batra, Opening with her arrival in the land of life and death, the play chronicles the human
souls past and present excursions in the only vehicle that fate provides her, the rattle-trap Street Car of the body;
the play closes with the souls departure for incarnation in another asylum, another kind of living death.

We must remember that the Streetcar is a kind of challenge to the conventional musicals which ruled the roost for
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such a long time. He wrote plays that were personal history of characters like Anton Chekhovs lonely figures.
Summer and Smoke (1948), Camino Real (1953), and The Glass Menagerie (1944) among others, provided some of
the early testing ground for Williamss innovations. The Glass Menagerie uses music, screen properties, and lighting
effects to create the haunting and dream-like atmosphere appropriate for a memory play. Like Eugene ONeills
Emperor Jones and Arthur Millers Death of a Salesman, Williamss plays explore ways of using the stage to depict
the interior life and memories of a character.

These symbols, only a few of the various symbolic markers have been discussed here, not only help the audience get
a better view of the inner world of the characters mind, they also serve to introduce at significant places
appropriate dramatic intensity and thus create sufficient interest. In Scene One Blanche restlessly tells Stella, And
turn the over-light off! Turn that off! I wont be looked at in this merciless glare! Her fight of the naked light,
mentioned later also, accentuates these dramatic moments. She calls her sister Stella for Star! which is also
indicative of the distance that she is unable to reduce or bridge. Stella is the Latin word for Star and immediately
reminds us of Charles Dickenss charming girl named Estella in his famous novel Great Expectations wherein her Star-
like attraction and unreachable quality torments the hero Pips heart. The thundering noise of passing train
dramatizes the scenes in which a disturbed Blanche is either pleading with her sister to leave her savage, sadistic
husband after the violence that he unleashes, or in a fit of tragic, depressed mood tells Mitchel about her failed
relationship with Allan. The noise of the train works like an eerie bordering to the dark narrative of Blanche and
dramatizes it with an energy which only this element could release. This occurs in Scene Six, which begins with her
lighting soft-candles again symbolically functioning to create the romantic air when only she and Mitch are present
in the empty house and she has already begun to toy with idea of love relationship with him. The use of French
Voulez-vous couchez avec mo ice soir? Vous ne comprenez pas? is also significant. The soft light of the candles can
be dramatically juxtaposed to the fierce headlight of the locomotive ... into the room as it thunders past. This only
indicates how significant is the use of various types of light for Tennessee Williams. These symbols bring out the
inner conditions of the character and their changing degrees of intensity.
J.Sir
 For Private Circulation Only.
It is important to note that Tennessee Williams does not use symbols as similes or metaphors in the sense of poetic
devices which are stuck at places. For him symbols which we have considered constitute a far more organic element
that must be interwoven in the text in such a manner that would appear as an inseparable aspect of the total work.
A close reading of Anton Chekhov, D.H. Lawrence, Stanislavsky and others revealed to him the essential function of
symbols in their natural growth within the text, taking place, as it were, in the compulsions of the inner creative
heat which William Wordsworth emphasizes so arduously in Preface to Lyrical Ballads. Something of that Romantic
treatment of the symbol appealed to Tennessee Williams inspiring him to take his plays to the region of artistic
composition where plot becomes secondary, and external realities are also magically transformed as in this play also
the card-game and its players, and several other external situations, not only as pictures of inner mental conditions
but into a phantasmagoria chimera-like context which quite appropriately reveal the inner voyage of the
characters. Tennessee Williams proves himself to be a masterful artist in making grand success of it. His single
remarkable achievement, if one can venture this observation, has been restoring the supreme importance of
symbols on the stage as the prime source of dramatic meaning which in the Elizabethan dramatic held such a
supreme place.

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J.S

J.Sir