A Streetcar Named Desire

This is American drama at full power: a collision between Old South illusion and postwar working-class reality, fought out in one cramped apartment. Williams gives Blanche the most heartbreaking defense of fantasy ever written—'I want magic'—and makes Stanley's brutality feel terrifyingly real. Read it if you care about desire, delusion, or the price of truth; it's on every shortlist of the finest American plays of the twentieth century.

1. 1

   Act 1

   Arrival on Elysian Fields

   Blanche DuBois arrives in New Orleans at her sister Stella Kowalski's cramped two-room apartment on Elysian Fields Avenue in the French Quarter, dressed in white and looking delicate and out of place. She explains her route: 'They told me to take a street-car named Desire, and then transfer to one called Cemeteries and ride six blocks and get off at—Elysian Fields!' Inside, she tells Stella about the loss of Belle Reve and the deaths of their relatives. 'I took the blows in my face and my body! All of those deaths! The long parade to the graveyard! Father, mother! Margaret, that dreadful way!' Stanley Kowalski, Stella's husband, is a working-class Polish-American who works as a traveling salesman for a firm supplying parts for automobile generators; he is a former master sergeant in the Engineers' Corps decorated for bravery in World War II. He strips off his sweaty shirt and makes small talk about bowling while Blanche flutters and drops hints of her genteel Southern upbringing. When she mentions he is Polish, he snaps: 'What I am is a one hundred percent American, born and raised in the greatest country on earth and proud as hell of it, so don't ever call me a Polack.'

2. 2

   Act 2

   Trunks, Poker Night, and the Animal

   Stanley wants to know where the plantation money went. He tells Stella about the Napoleonic Code: 'In the state of Louisiana we have the Napoleonic code according to which what belongs to the wife belongs to the husband and vice versa.' He rummages through Blanche's trunk, pulling out furs, jewelry, and love letters from her dead young husband. She snatches them away: 'The touch of your hands insults them!' Blanche shows Stanley the legal papers showing the forfeiture of Belle Reve to pay off the family debts. She shows him her trunk of clothes and furs, which she explains are mostly imitation, and he discovers a receipt for a fur stole she bought for herself. Stanley is suspicious that she has kept money for herself, saying: 'I have an acquaintance that deals in this sort of merchandise.' During a poker night at the Kowalski apartment, Stanley's friends are present, among them Mitch, a large, kind-hearted man who lives with his sick mother. He shows Blanche a silver cigarette case with an inscription from a dead girl. Blanche turns on the radio, and Stanley, drunk, throws it out the window and strikes the pregnant Stella. The other men restrain him, and Stella and Blanche retreat upstairs to Eunice's apartment. Then comes the scene that defines the marriage: Stanley, now remorseful and soaked from a shower, stumbles outside and bellows for Stella: 'Stell-lahhhhh!' Stella comes down the stairs and they embrace passionately, sinking to their knees, as Blanche watches from the landing, horrified. The morning after the poker-night violence, Blanche begs Stella to leave Stanley, calling him an animal: 'He acts like an animal, has an animal's habits! Eats like one, moves like one, talks like one! There's even something—sub-human—something not quite to the stage of humanity yet!' She calls him a 'survivor of the Stone Age.' Stella listens calmly but refuses, telling Blanche, 'But there are things that happen between a man and a woman in the dark—that sort of make everything else seem—unimportant.' Stanley overhears Blanche's criticism of him from outside the apartment. When Stella runs to him, he grins at Blanche over Stella's shoulder, pretending not to have heard.

3. 3

   Act 3

   Magic, Lies, and the Birthday Ticket

   Blanche sets her sights on Mitch. A young newspaper collector comes to the door, and Blanche flirts with him and kisses him on the mouth before sending him away, murmuring, 'I've got to be good—and keep my hands off children.' Blanche tells Stella she wants Mitch to marry her, saying, 'I want to deceive him enough to make him—want me...' She tells Stella she has received a telegram from Shep Huntleigh, a former suitor who is now rich, and she fabricates it into a fantasy of a rescue cruise. After a date, Mitch and Blanche return to the apartment. Blanche tells him about her young husband, Allan Grey, a sensitive boy who wrote poetry. She found him in bed with an older male friend. Later that night, on the dance floor at Moon Lake Casino, she told Allan, 'You disgust me,' and he ran out and shot himself in the head. She says the polka music she now hears in her head stopped only when she heard the gunshot. Mitch tells Blanche that he needs her, saying, 'You need somebody. And I need somebody, too. Could it be—you and me, Blanche?' They embrace, and Blanche says, 'Sometimes—there's God—so quickly!' Then Stanley shatters it. It is Blanche's birthday. Stanley has learned the truth about her past in Laurel, Mississippi, from a traveling salesman named Shaw. He tells Stella that Blanche was fired from her teaching job for having an affair with a seventeen-year-old student and that she lived at the disreputable Flamingo Hotel, where she was known for entertaining many men. At Blanche's birthday dinner, Mitch fails to show up, and Stanley cruelly presents Blanche with a one-way bus ticket back to Laurel as a birthday present, telling her she is not welcome in his house anymore. Blanche, humiliated, runs to the bathroom and vomits. Stella, furious and in labor pains, is rushed to the hospital, leaving Blanche alone with Stanley.

4. 4

   Act 4

   The Lantern Torn, the Doctor's Arm

   Later that evening, Mitch arrives, drunk and unshaven, and confronts Blanche about her lies. He tears the paper lantern off the light bulb, forcing Blanche into the bare light: 'I don't think I ever seen you in the light. That's a fact!' He tells her, 'I don't think I want to marry you any more... You're not clean enough to bring in the house with my mother.' He tries to force himself on her, but she screams 'Fire!' and he flees. Blanche tells Mitch: 'I don't want realism. I want magic! Yes, yes, magic! I try to give that to people. I misrepresent things to them. I don't tell truth, I tell what ought to be truth. And if that is sinful, then let me be damned for it!' Stanley returns from the hospital where Stella is in labor, drunk and triumphant, while Blanche, also drunk, is dressed in a tattered evening gown and tiara, fantasizing about a Caribbean cruise with Shep Huntleigh, a millionaire. Stanley corners her, telling her that Mitch has told him about her confessions and that all her schemes have failed. She threatens him with a broken bottle top, which he easily knocks from her hand. As the shadows and jungle sounds close in, he says, 'We've had this date with each other from the beginning!' and carries her to the bed, raping her. Weeks later, Stella is preparing to have Blanche committed to a state mental institution while a poker game goes on. Stella tells Eunice she cannot believe Blanche's story about the rape: 'I couldn't believe her story and go on living with Stanley.' Eunice replies, 'Don't ever believe it. Life has got to go on. No matter what happens, you've got to keep on going.' Blanche, disoriented, believes that Shep Huntleigh has sent for her to go on a trip. When the doctor and matron from the state institution arrive, she resists violently until the doctor gently helps her up, and she takes his arm and allows him to lead her away. Blanche says to the doctor: 'Whoever you are—I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.' As Blanche is led out, Mitch breaks down sobbing. Stanley comforts the sobbing Stella with physical caresses, while the poker game resumes. The play ends with Steve saying, 'This game is seven-card stud.'

• BBlanche DuBoisA faded Southern belle who lost Belle Reve, her family, and her teaching job, and arrives in New Orleans clinging to soft light and invented romance. She nearly escapes through marriage to Mitch, but Stanley exposes her past, rapes her, and she is committed to a mental institution.
• SStanley KowalskiStella's husband: a working-class Polish-American salesman and decorated war veteran, brutish, proud, and territorial, who sees through Blanche's pretensions. He destroys her engagement, rapes her, and keeps his wife by refusing to believe her.
• SStella KowalskiBlanche's sister, pregnant and devoted to Stanley despite his violence. She chooses life with him over belief in her sister's story, and commits Blanche to keep her marriage intact.
• MMitchStanley's poker friend, a large, kind-hearted man living with his sick mother, who hopes to marry Blanche. When Stanley tells him her past, he tears the paper lantern from the bulb, rejects her, and weeps as she is taken away.
• EEuniceThe upstairs neighbor who shelters the sisters after poker night. She counsels Stella never to believe Blanche's rape story, because life has to go on.

The streetcar named Desire

A real New Orleans streetcar line Blanche rides—Desire, transfer to Cemeteries, get off at Elysian Fields. The route is her biography: desire leading to death leading to a false paradise. It stands for the destructive force of raw physical desire that brought her down.

The paper lantern

Blanche covers the naked bulb to soften harsh reality, hide her age, and keep her past in shadow. When Mitch tears it off, he violently strips away her illusions and forces her into the light she fears. The lantern's fate is the play's plot in miniature.

The Varsouviana polka

The music playing at Moon Lake Casino the night Blanche told her husband 'You disgust me' and he shot himself. It surfaces in her mind under stress and stops only at the sound of the gunshot—a wound that keeps replaying, audible to no one else.

Belle Reve

The lost plantation whose name means 'beautiful dream.' Its forfeiture papers become the object of Stanley's suspicion and his excuse to rummage through Blanche's trunk. The family's beautiful dream is gone, sold off debt by debt, and what remains is a bus ticket back to Laurel.

The ending refuses to comfort you. Stella chooses to disbelieve her sister's rape story because believing it would cost her Stanley and her whole life; Eunice's advice—'Don't ever believe it'—is wisdom and damnation at once. Blanche's final line, 'I have always depended on the kindness of strangers,' can be read as tragic self-knowledge or as her last delusion: the doctor is not a suitor, he is her captor, and she walks off on his arm as if he were Shep Huntleigh. The poker game resuming around her is the coldest stroke—life goes on, cards are dealt, Steve calls seven-card stud, and the woman who wanted magic is carried into an institution. Whether you read Blanche as a victim destroyed by brutality or as a liar complicit in her own ruin, the play makes both readings feel true, which is why it still lands.

1. 1.Is Blanche a victim of Stanley's brutality or an architect of her own downfall through lies and the affair that got her fired—can the play hold both at once?
2. 2.Stella chooses not to believe the rape 'and go on living with Stanley.' Is her choice survival, complicity, or both—and what does Eunice's counsel tell you about the world Williams depicts?
3. 3.Blanche says she tells 'what ought to be truth.' Is her magic a moral failing, a defense mechanism, or a legitimate response to a reality that has given her only deaths and disgrace?

Anyone who wants to know why this play sits on every shortlist of the finest American drama of the twentieth century. It is essential for readers drawn to desire, delusion, family loyalty, and the fault line between the Old South and modern America.

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