1Illusion versus reality
Blanche survives by softening everything: paper over the bulb, imitation furs presented as real, a telegram spun into a rescue cruise. She admits it herself—'I don't tell truth, I tell what ought to be truth.' Stanley deals only in the bare, lit truth: paperwork, receipts, the past dug up and read aloud. When Mitch tears the lantern off the bulb, he strips her last defense and finds a woman he judges 'not clean enough.' The play's point is cruel: magic may be a sin, but the people who demand realism are not gentle with what they find.
Characters:Blanche DuBoisStanley KowalskiMitch
2Desire as destruction
The play's title is a literal streetcar line—Desire, then Cemeteries, then Elysian Fields—and a map of Blanche's life. Desire killed her young husband after she told him 'You disgust me'; desire keeps Stella bound to a man who beats her, because what happens 'in the dark' makes everything else seem unimportant; desire, in the end, is what Stanley acts on when he rapes her. Williams keeps asking whether raw desire is life or annihilation, and lets Stella's answer—she stays—stand as the most disturbing reply.
Characters:Blanche DuBoisStanley KowalskiStella Kowalski
3The Old South against the new America
Blanche arrives dressed in white, invoking a genteel Southern background, into a two-room apartment where a Polish-American veteran strips off his sweaty shirt and talks bowling. Stanley is 'a one hundred percent American'; Blanche's world of plantations and parlor manners is already forfeited, like Belle Reve itself. Their war over the trunk, the papers, and the bus ticket back to Laurel is a war over which America gets to define truth. The new America wins, and it is not merciful.
Characters:Blanche DuBoisStanley Kowalski
4Loneliness and the need for someone
Nearly everyone in the play is starving for a person. Mitch, living with his sick mother and carrying a cigarette case from a dead girl, tells Blanche plainly: 'You need somebody. And I need somebody, too.' Blanche's flirtation with the newspaper boy, her fantasy of Shep Huntleigh, even her final surrender to the doctor's arm—all of it is the same hunger. Her last line, about depending on the kindness of strangers, is both a plea and a diagnosis: she has never had anyone whose kindness did not have to be bought with a performance.
Characters:Blanche DuBoisMitch