A History of American Literature

The American Century: Literature since 1945 685

his absence. In a series of impressionistic scenes, intimate remembrances of things

past, Tim conjures up for us how he brought a visitor to the house, “an emissary

from a world that we were somehow set apart from,” and how the visit ended in

disaster. And he remembers how he finally left home, never to return. Williams

presents the Wingfield family as unable to function in reality, this “socalled world of

ours.” But this seems more of a virtue than a weakness: the alternative space or place

they inhabit seems as special and seductive as the world of glass animals that gives

the play its title. Driven by guilt over his desertion of his mother and sister, Tom

comes to realize this. “Oh, Laura, Laura,” Tom cries to his lost sister, “I tried to leave

you behind me, but I am more faithful than I intended to be!” He is doomed to relive

the past and to recognize that that is where, if anywhere, the emotional truth resides:

a truth he has betrayed.

The intensely heightened realism, the poetic impressionism of feeling and method

that characterizes The Glass Menagerie marks all of Williams’s finest work. It is there,

above all, in his finest play, A Streetcar Named Desire (1947). Set in New Orleans, the

plot is devastatingly simple. Blanche Dubois visits her sister Stella and finds her

married to what she calls an “animal,” the crude, intensely physical Stanley Kowalski.

Another faded Southern belle, Blanche has come “to the last stop at the end of the

line,” as the director of the first Broadway production of the play, Elia Kazan, put it.

This is her last chance. She struggles for control of Stella with Stanley. She also

struggles for a new life, a new romance with Stanley’s friend Mitch. She fails. After a

violent and sexual confrontation with Stanley, she is defeated and broken. And the

play ends with Blanche being taken off to the asylum and Stella and Stanley still

together. Williams explained once that the idea for the play came from a time when

he himself was living in New Orleans. Near where he lived ran “two street-

cars, one named DESIRE and the other named CEMETERY.” For him, the “undis-

courageable progress” of the two seemed to have “some symbolic bearing,” to

express the opposing fundamentals of experience. And they are certainly the

tensions that threaten to tear Blanche apart. Blanche Dubois is torn between death

and its opposite desire, “the long parade to the graveyard” as she calls it and the

desperate longing to live and perhaps love. Torn and driven within, she is also driven

into a wrenching, tearing conflict with Stanley. Resisting death, reaching out to

desire, she engages in mortal combat with her brother-in-law for somewhere to be,

somewhere where things might just make more sense. She “tries to make a place for

herself,” as Kazan put it. But there is no place for her.

A Streetcar Named Desire has the elemental force of a struggle for survival. It

begins when Blanche invades the space occupied by Stanley and Stella. It lasts for the

duration of a primitive fight for that space between Blanche and Stanley. It ends

with Blanche’s defeat and departure. So it signals a fundamental need that humans

share with all animals: the need to secure territory. Building on this foundation,

however, Williams weaves a complex tapestry of oppositions, as he describes the

conflicting, contesting personalities of Blanche and Stanley. In a series of eleven

tight, cinematic scenes, he uses every resource of theatrical language to tell us what,

essentially, this man and woman are, and mean. Blanche is a Southern lady in a

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