单选题
The Play: A Streetcar Named Desire
One of the most enduring masterpieces of the American theatre is Tennessee Williams" play A Streetcar Named Desire. This modem psychological drama comes short on the heels of another successful Williams" play entitled The Glass Menagerie. Unfortunately, Williams never managed to follow up on these early literary successes. Literary critics and the public alike have warmly applauded both The Glass Menagerie, published in 1945, and A Streetcar Named Desire, which came out a few years later and won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1948. Despite this promising start, none of William"s later fictional work ever lived up to the reputation of his debut pieces. A Streetcar Named Desire was nevertheless enough to secure Tennessee Williams a place amongst the greatest writers of his time. It premiered on December 3, I947 at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre on Broadway and ran uninterrupted until 1949. It turned its playwright into a household name.
The plot of the play revolved around the sexually charged conflict between a pretentious Southern belle and a brutish proletarian, who is her brother-in-law. Blanche duBois, who belongs to the fading aristocratic class, looks for shelter at her sister Stella"s house in New Orleans. Fearing the crudeness and vulgarity of her husband, Stanley Kowalski, Stella reluctantly agrees to take her estranged sister in seeing as she suffers immensely from the loss of her ancestral plantation, Belle Reve. The name, which might be translated from French as "beautiful dream," is a subtle allusion to the idealistic world that Blanche lives in. She puts on airs of nobility, and pretends to be charming, educated and refined. Yet all this is nothing but a thin veil to cover her alcoholism and precarious emotional state. In due course, Blanche falls for the aggressive, rough hewn but sensual Stanley, who is at the same time attracted and repulsed by Blanche"s nature. Soon, self-effacing Stella, who has taught herself to love her husband out of a sense of duty and honor, feels betrayed and left out within this curious love triangle. The play comes to a tragic end with Blanche suffering a nervous breakdown and Stanley raping Stella into submission.
The play abounds with symbols and allegoric motifs. The title of
A Streetcar Named Desire
is a reference to the streetcar that Blanche takes in order to reach her sister"s house in the French Quarter of New Orleans. The place where the Kowalski"s reside is ironically termed Elysian Fields after the underworld from Greek mythology. Much like her streetcar journey and doomed stay at Elysian Fields, Blanche"s happiness is short-lived because it steins from pleasure brought about by desire. A S treetcar Named Desire is thus only a prelude to what is to befall Blanche in the near future and the perfect complement to the illusionary world she has built around herself. In actuality, the entire play revolves around the theme of myth and reality. All characters live in a fantasy world, which they have constructed in order to shield themselves from the harsh realities of life and the momentous changes that take place all around them. Blanche deludes herself into believing she is an aristocrat, much like Stella deludes herself into believing she loves Stanley. Stanley himself deludes himself by creating this authoritarian macho-figure who dominates and seduces women, when in fact he is nothing but a self-absorbed loser.
Stanley Kowalski"s character has often been mistakenly assumed to be the epitome of the newly established working class. He appears self-assured, but is in reality rather shallow, vulgar and callous. His narrow-minded obsession with money and building a family, as well as his chauvinistic attitude towards women has nothing progressive in it. Stanley rather reflects the mercantile tendencies of the industrial American middle-class, whose selfishness has swept aside the traditional values of societies. Similarly, Blanche is by no means the blasé bourgeois some critics make her out to be. She is the sad relic of a class in demise, namely that of the Old Southern aristocracy. Hers and her sister"s tragedy is the tragedy of all women of the South bereft of the chivalric values to which they have grown accustomed. Just like in old fairy tales, they need to be rescued, but their tragedy is that in capitalist America there is nobody left to rescue them.
Glossary
revolve:
mainly become the topic of something
proletarian:
relating to proletariat (workers without high status)
estranged:
quarreled with family or friends and are not communicating with them
allegoric:
pertaining to allegory; figurative