AO5 for A Streetcar Named Desire

Blanche's personal tragedy manifests itself in the universe, proving its universality (we all have a Blanche inside us)

Stella and Stanley's child represents the future, ultimately leaving it a Kowalski future, rather than a DuBois future

Blanche and Mitch's courtship mirrors Mary Magdalene's eventual redemption

Streetcar is simply an exploration of Blanche with no sociopolitical aspects

Marlon Brando's performance as Stanley aped iconic images of American soldiers in WW2

Stanley didn't want to rape Blanche, but was forced to by her refusal to bargain with him on his level

Stella has found a sort of salvation in Stanley, but at the tremendous cost of ignoring her own unhappiness

Blanche's problem is her clinging to Southern tradition that insists she need a man for protection

All of Williams' plays focus on marginalised characters seeking refuge from a society that brutalises them

Williams builds up archetypes only to destroy our preconceived notions of them, reflecting life in this way

Desire is the most important theme of the play -- Blanche, who initially seems to represent purity, is destroyed by the desires of herself and others

Stanley and Stella's relationship challenged traditional, literary and social notions of love through its animal lust

Stella is genuinely in love with Stanley, a choice expressive of the reality of domestic abuse

Blanche is a 'failed Whitmanian'

Found three major archetypes within Williams' work: the Gargoyle, the Adonis and the Failed Ingenue

Blanche's respectful speech symbolises her adherence and her connection to the past; Stanley's disrespectful speech shows his freedom and liveliness

Stanley is more creative than destructive, and in this way symbolises the vitality lost from the Old South

Stanley believes Blanche feels she's above him, and his rape is an attempt to get her to understand that she is simply a sexual animal, like him

Stella lives an illusory life, much like Blanche; she believes that life with Stanley can satisfy, and will even doom her own sister to preserve it

The illusions of the play are solely for self-preservation, and, by ignoring the Aristotelian link between the communal and personal ethic, they ensure they will never find fulfilment

Blanche's trunk unifies the poetic and realist realms of the play: it is representative of journey, both emotional and physical

The poeticism of the play finds deeper psychological reality than a realist play would

Viewing the play within Aristotelian terms means accepting that the act of destruction upon which the climax rests was performed by Stanley, rather than Blanche as classical drama demands

Psychopathology substitutes for fate within the play in terms of directing actions

Blanche is a camp character who represents male homosexuality

The play is a "myth for our time" through its portrayal of man's search for transcendence and its attribution of religious significance to the human

Blanche lives in the aesthetic stage, while Stanley lives in a (misguided) ethical stage; interestingly, no character exists within the religious stage

The trauma that underpins Blanche's existence is not that she married a 'degenerate', as Stella believes, but that she caused Allan Gray's suicide

The play is an allegory for the experience of the divine soul (Blanche) when subjected to the brutality of matter (Stanley)

The card game reflects Williams' conception of fate and the way it can be manipulated by a skilled player (Stanley, both times)

Blanche symbolises art, as she veils herself from truth and is ultimately of a different type of people than those who exist in the 'reality' of Elysian Fields

The play is decidedly not a classical tragedy--Blanche is pathetically soft, not a tragic figure, and the audience leaves the theatre, rather than soothed from the moment of catharsis

The play is a collection of one-act plays, rather than a traditional and coherent whole

Blanche is an extreme example of the Apolline as one who avoids life completely in favour of dreams and Stanley is an example of the Dionysian, giving in entirely to his basest instincts

Sex equalises all characters within the play

Blanche uses sex as a refuge from the harsh realities of the world

As the play focuses on the eros and thanatos drives (even within the symbol of the streetcars) Freud believed defined the human, the play perfectly encapsulates the human

The conflict between Blanche and Stanley is a conflict between effeminate culture and masculine libido

Many plays in the 40s and 50s concerned themselves with the failure of the American Dream

Williams linked Stanley with the (at-the-time) modern and destructive railroad; he once considered ending the play with Blanche throwing herself in front of a train