In describing Tennessee Williams's artistic presentation
of his play, A Streetcar Named Desire, Arthur Miller wrote that
music served to underline motifs:
[Williams's] rhapsodic insistence that form serve
his utterance rather than dominating and cramping
it...
To maintain the
continuity of his play, Williams has not employed separate acts; instead he has scenes
that are thematic using symbols and music to highlight these motifs. For instance,
Williams uses the blues to connote animalistic pleasure--such as in Scene Four when
Stanley wins Stella back and smiles over her head to Blanche--or in moments of leisure
as the men play cards or when people relax and drink. Blues are also used in highly
charged emotional scenes involving sexual desires, or when Stanley consoles Stella after
she comes down the stairs. It plays during the rape scene. The polka which is heard
only by Blanche signals crucial moments in the play. And, once the audience learns that
this music is what played in the ballroom where Blanche renounced her young husband,
they are alerted to disaster when this music plays.
The
symbolic streetcar is also employed as a literary element. Blanche must ride this
streetcar to arrive at Stella's and she alludes to it in her remark, "Haven't you ever
ridden that streetcar named Desire?" The streetcar continues running, just as Blanche
and the others must see their lives through to the end. For, Blanche must transfer from
Desire to a streetcar named Cemeteries and then come to Elysian
Fields.
These motifs underscored by music and symbol
develop the theme of Class Conflict as Blanche of the
aristocratic South comes into conflict with Stanley Kowalski of the North who is a
factory worker. Her sister's and her Belle Reve, the plantation, have been replaced by
a second story flat in the Vieux Carre of New Orleans and Blanche, as respresentative
of this dreamy and romantic era, is in conflict with the animalistic Stanley who has
his "party of apes" and has taken her sister Stella "down off them columns" and she has
"loved it."
Another theme is that of Gender
Roles. Mitch has elevated Blanche to the Southern lady, and when he
finds out that she does not fulfill this role, he rejects her, causing her the loss of
her final opportunity. Blanche understands the subservient role of women as she
repeats, "I have always been dependent upon the kindness of strangers," but her sexual
desires cause her to say and act outside what is expected of her, a behavior that
effects this conflict.
A third major theme is that of
Violence and Cruelty. When Blanche objects to Stanley's
violent nature, Stella tries to explain to her that "there are things that happen
between a man and woman in the dark" that mitigate the violence. This Blanche does not
understand even though the upstairs residents have the same violence in their
relationship. As the streetcar passes down the street, Blanche tells Stella she is just
talking about hard, cruel desire, "the name of that rattle-trap streetcar." It is a
place where Blanche has been, and the streetcar Desire has brought her to Stella's
apartment. And, it is Stanley's violent rape and cruelty--he tells her, "We've had this
date with each other from the beginning"--which drive poor Blanche to her maddess, an
act that demonstrates the continuity of violence that is hard to
break.
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