IMS PRIVATE SCHOOL AS ENGLISH LITERATURE

Some critics quotes

A Streetcar Named Desire

1. William effectively influences the audience to root for Stanley in the

opening scenes of the play, effectively implicating them in Stanley’s
eventual brutality towards Blanche.
2. A squalid anecdote of a nymphomaniacs decay in a New Orleans slum
– J.C. Trewin.
3. Elia Kazan was one of the first to point out psychological similarities
between Williams and Blanche.
4. Thus most of Tennessee Williams’ plays…especially…’A Streetcar Named
Desire’ – focus on the struggles with homosexuality in a vert straight
society – Frederick Suppe.
5. Tennessee Williams is a master of the guilty-secret-buried-in-the-past –
Gaber
6. Blanche’s awareness of the social distinctions shows itself in the way both
Eunice’s and her neighbours’ acts of kindness. To Blanche these are
services naturally expected of her inferiors.
7. Blanche is a fading Southern Belle, whose pretension to virtue and
culture only thinly mask her nymphomania and alcoholism.
8. Deeply disturbing – a brilliant implacable play about the disintegration
of a woman, or…of a society.
9. Blanche…is wishing to deny the passage of time. She turns to drink and
in Scene 9, she remains gripped by the polka tune in hear head until she
hears ‘the shot’. ‘It always stops after that.’
10. A Streetcar…makes it clear that for Williams the act of fleeing always
becomes the act of reliving the past. Flight forces the presence of the
past on his character – Donald Pease.
11. Write out of love for the south…it is out of regret for a south that no longer
exists that I write of the forces that have destroyed it – Tennessee Williams
IMS PRIVATE SCHOOL AS ENGLISH LITERATURE

12. Tischler regards Blanche as the representative of ‘tradition and idealism,

seeing herself as she would like to be, denying what she is trying to
appear, special and different.’
13. Her progressive insanity is only an extension of that gap in all of us
humans between what we think we are and what we are – Marya
Manees.
14. The Eugene O’Neil of the present period. Like Eugene O’neal, Williams
challenges some of the conventions of naturalistic theatre.
15. Williams’ plays are full of disposed people who we feel were once gentle
but who find the jungle has caught up with their gracious clearings and
spaces and the animals with their civilised pursuits. We hear in it, too, a
kind of self-defeat, self-delusion, a weakness, so that we wonder what
lies behind the gentleness, the civil behaviour – Gareth Lloyd Evans.
16. The play and its author, beg the question of the price of survival.
17. His idea of heaven has turned into a hell of his own making – John Law.
18. Tennessee Williams left a powerful mark on American theatre. His plays
combined lyric intensity, haunting loneliness and hypnotic violence.
19. All of Williams’ plays illustrate a dark vision of life.
20. The reality of the New South is that gentility is dead. A struggle for survival
has replaced it.
21. If the writing is honest it cannot be separated from the writer – Tennessee
Williams
22. His plays reflect his life and his life reflects his plays.
23. I deal with the decadence of the South. I don’t ever deal with the
decadence of the North – Tennessee Williams