In the published edition of his masterwork, "A Streetcar Named Desire", Tennessee Williams uses as an epigraph the following stanza from "The Broken Tower", probably the final poem written by the American romantic poet Hart Crane (1899-1932):

"And so was it I entered the broken world
To trace the visionary company of love, its voice
An instant in the wind (I know not whither hurled)
But not for long to hold each desperate choice."

Crane wrote this difficult poem in 1932, shortly before his suicide. The poem speaks of Crane's efforts to capture the fire of the imagination and the gift of love in the course of an unhappy life. With his passionate romanticism and his lyricism, Crane was a deep and lifelong influence on Williams.

It helped to think about the importance of Crane's lines when I revisited "Streetcar". They capture something of the way we are to understand Blanche DuBois The unhappy heroine of Williams's play did indeed live in a "broken world" of sundered dreams. She lost the remnants of Belle Reve, the family plantation in Mississippi, together with her self-respect. On her fateful visit to her sister Stella and her husband, the coarse, brutal Stanley Kowalski in New Orleans where the play takes place, Stella's world becomes broken again when she loses her last chance at love and her sanity.

All Blanche has are her dreams and her attempt to find "the visionary company of love." She is a woman of illusions who attempts to hide the sordid details of her own past, including the suicide of her young husband, her attendant nymphomania, and her alcoholism from herself and from others. Her illusions cannot survive realistic scrutiny, particularly when they are exposed to Stanley. Blanche is unable to hold on to her last "desperate choice", similarly to the speaker in Crane's poem. As his own life progressed, Williams came increasingly to identify himself with Blanche DuBois, and perhaps these lines from Hart Crane apply to Williams view of himself as well.

With its lurid, pulpy, and melodramatic story, Streetcar has always been a tempting target for critics. But in beautifully poetic language, the play raises certain timeless themes, including the search for love, the powerful and destructive force of sexuality, and the centrality of romance and imagination to give life meaning in a world of brute fact. In a short introduction he wrote to the play called "A Streetcar named Success" Williams suggested, following William Saroyan, that the theme of the play was that "purity of the heart is the one success worth having. `In the time of your life -live!'" The play and Blanche come to a sad end. But capturing Blanche's story in art gives the reader or viewer of the play a power to persevere, similar to the power given to art and love in Hart Crane's "The Broken Tower."

Robin Friedman

Blanche Dubois is the houseguest from hell. She arrives at her sister Stella's cramped New Orleans apartment and showers contempt on the humble surroundings. She ties up the bathroom for hours, drinks all the liquor in the house and covers lightbulbs with paper lanterns to escape the harsh glare that reveals her fading beauty. No wonder Blanche and her brother-in-law Stanley Kowalski don't get along. Stanley is part man, part beast, and his very existence offends Blanche's delicate sensibilities. But Blanche is not as pure as she seems. As the summer wears on, the sordid details of her past come to light, and the paper lantern is savagely ripped off.

[...]
111 Books in 111 Words Each

Obviously, A Streetcar Named Desire is a world-famous play that, along with The Glass Menagerie, made Tennessee Williams a household name (at least in the literary ones). And it thankfully took Marlon Brando to heights that the cinema history has never seen or will never see again. Having written both, it's extremely difficult for me to separate both from each other. The play was made for Marlon Brando, and Marlon Brando was made for the play. When he became Stanley Kowalski, acting was never the same again. What the people thought of Jimmy Cagney is radically changed, and the standards of excellence when it comes to acting changed. The play A Streetcar Named Desire presents to me a very odd story because I am using the thinking of today and transporting it to back then, the way things were. Blanche DuBois, another household name and for comedic purpose (see EdTV), seems to be an alcoholic from the outset who happens to be a sex offender too. So, the conventional thinking is that she needs treatment to take care of her problems. But in the play, the author lets Stanley Kowalski to suggest the admittance to mental hospital for her. But why? At that point, it still doesn't make any sense. Another scene, at the end of scene ten, Blanche DuBois accepts sex from her male counterpart. It was really an implied moment, but in certain ways, some have viewed it as "rape." Even the movie makes a pretense of that. I thought that it also was a very odd moment. Putting the two odd moments together, A Streetcar Named Desire is indeed a strange play to view when applied with today's thinking. However, it is a great play because of the language, the mood, the atmosphere, and the feeling. There is a clash of two cultures: the old and the new as evidenced in Vivien Leigh of Gone with the Wind and Marlon Brando. If you think about how Vivien Leigh used to act as Scarlett O'Hara and apply the idea to A Streetcar Named Desire, it's easy to understand how the rules of acting have changed, and at the same time, the changing of guard had taken place. When you take a look at Marlon Brando's performance in A Streetcar Named Desire and On the Waterfront and compare them to today's movies, there is no comparison, and I honestly don't think there was ever a changing of the guard again. Anyway, Stanley Kowalski and Blanche DuBois are immortalized in this play, and their legacies will always live on forever. Just make sure that you take a special notice of the many implicit messages throughout the play because missing them will cause you to judge the play differently for the wrong reasons.

This was a very passiont film from the south drenched with liquior, romance, and confrontation. By far the best actress in the movie was blanch. She showed every possible emotion a human can have while acting in this play. She sold the movie for me from the second she started speaking. She goes though her up and her downs throughout the whole play. She tries to keep cool and calm throught the whole fil but battles to be considered sane but stanley pushes her over the edge in many parts of this film. From what i have known about this culture and this time the play was played out just the way the times have been presented to me. The male domination with the drinking problem who hits his wife and she comes back and loves him every time. Then you have that one woman who defies everyone and acts like a male almost. This film was very well presented and blanch dubois sold me. This was the beginning of an era in film making.

The choice of copies of _The Streetcar Named Desire_
(required reading for high school academic English
this summer) seemed to narrow down to ones with
lurid covers or this plain one. Unfortunately, the text
is almost like a typewritten script--small print and
a little hard to read.