Old South versus New America in "A Streetcar Named Desire."

Old South versus New America in "A Streetcar Named Desire."

Gabi Reigh reveals the conflict running through Williams’ play between a set of values and cultural attitudes deriving from a past era in America’s history and the new, more multicultural and urban world that has superseded it. She shows how the transfer of power is acted out, above all, through the dramatic conflict between Blanche and Stanley.

Through the power struggle between Blanche and Stanley in A Streetcar Named Desire, Tennessee Williams retells a conflict between two cultures which has its roots in the American Civil war, more than 80 years earlier. Williams’ work is a late echo of the Southern Gothic tradition which began in the nineteenth century in response to the South’s loss in the Civil War (1861-1865). Like Williams, fellow Southern writers such as Lillian Hellman, Edgar Allan Poe and William Faulkner depicted the Old South as defeated as much by its own corruption as by the threat of a newly emerging society.

Contrasts of Costume

The contrast between Stanley and Blanche’s social backgrounds is established by Williams from the beginning of the play through the use of costume. Blanche’s arrival at Elysian Fields ‘daintily dressed in a white suit’ as if she were ‘arriving [...] at a cocktail party’ identifies her as belonging to an elite of inherited wealth and privilege, whose life is centred around pleasure rather than work. Commenting on Blanche’s ‘incongruous’ presence at Elysian Fields, Thomas Porter describes Streetcar’s plot ‘[as] an inverted version of the Civil War romance’, where Blanche is cast as the ‘invader’ in an unfamiliar world which resents her and will destroy her (Myth and Modern American Drama). 

Stanley’s costume forms a stark contrast to Blanche’s elegant attire, as his ‘blue denim work clothes’ and ‘bowling jacket’ portray him as belonging to a modern America where hard work is needed in order to succeed and sport and popular culture have replaced intellectual pursuits. 

During the rape scene which forms the dramatic climax of the play, the defeat of the values and culture that Blanche stands for is again symbolically portrayed through costume as Blanche’s glamorous clothes have been replaced by a ‘soiled and crumpled white satin evening gown’, foreshadowing her final humiliation by Stanley, triumphant in his ‘brilliant pyjama coat’.

The Old South

Like other writers of the Southern Gothic, Williams had an ambivalent relationship with the Old South, exposing the corruption which led to its downfall at the same time as lamenting the disappearance of the civilisation and romantic chivalry that died along with it. As an English teacher, Blanche is a staunch defender of the values of ‘art, and poetry, and music’ which she urges Stella to ‘cling to as [the] flag’ of a more civilised world which is quickly being engulfed by the ‘dark march’ of a philistine modern America. However, Blanche admits to Mitch that this task is getting increasingly hopeless as the new generation of ‘bobby-soxers and drug-store Romeos’ which she teaches are no longer interested in ‘Hawthorne and Whitman and Poe’. When Stanley throws out of the window the white radio playing the waltz which Blanche and Mitch dance to, nostalgically trying to recapture a lost chivalric world that they both yearn for, his action embodies the new world’s violent rejection of what it considers irrelevant, ‘hoity-toity’ snobbery.

The decline of Blanche during the course of the play mirrors the crisis of the Old South after its defeat in the Civil War. Blanche, like other characters of the Southern Gothic, is mentally unstable and increasingly marginalised in a rapidly changing world. Images of death, an important trope of the Southern Gothic, abound in the play, suggesting that Blanche is the last survivor of a world destroyed by its own excesses. Williams conveys how the world of the Old South has become merely a distant dream in modern America, symbolised by the name of the DuBois plantation, ‘Belle Reve’ (beautiful dream). Squandered through its owners’ reckless hedonism, their ‘epic fornications’, ‘Belle Reve’ becomes a setting associated with death and slow decline, where Blanche has to nurse various members of her family on her own, the power and privilege of her ancestors clearly vanished as she can no longer even get ‘a colored girl’ to help.

The downfall of the aristocratic DuBois family is reminiscent of an earlier example of Southern Gothic literature, Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher (1839). The image of the grand mansion collapsing over the dead bodies of the last survivors of a once-eminent family destroyed by their own vices has echoes of Blanche’s memories of a place where ‘death was as close as you are’ and where the formerly powerful were ‘burned like rubbish’. Blanche is haunted by these deaths, and the ghosts of her past take on a physical presence in the Mexican woman selling ‘flores para los muertos’. Her refrain punctuates Blanche’s descriptions of her attempts to regain youth and vitality by vampirically preying on young men, as she tells Mitch that the opposite to ‘death [...] is desire’. However, Blanche’s ‘intimacies with strangers’, although momentarily making her feel alive, are also the catalyst of her disgrace and eventual downfall. Despite its seemingly less restrictive mores, the new society of Elysian Fields sees Blanche as ‘unclean’ as a result of her affairs and denies her a place in its world, illustrating that to ride on ‘the streetcar named Desire’ will result in a ‘transfer to [...] Cemeteries’.

New America, New Vitality

Blanche cannot escape death, haunted by the memory of her lost husband which continually revisits her through the polka tune. This motif suggests Blanche is paralysed by the past, and her inability to free herself from the influence of her dead husband has parallels to William Faulkner’s Gothic short story ‘A Rose for Emily’ (1930), where a woman keeps the corpse of her lover in her bedroom until her death. In contrast, Stanley is predominantly associated with images of life and vitality, suggesting that the future belongs to the new world that he represents. Stanley’s power and vivacity is highlighted as he is described as the ‘gaudy seedbearer’, whose ‘animal joy’ and ‘drive’ even make Blanche concede to Stella that 

he’s what we’ve got to mix with our blood now that we’ve lost Belle Reve and have to go on without Belle Reve to protect us.

Indeed, Stanley and Stella’s baby is the ultimate proof of the vital spirit of new America inheriting the future, as Thomas P. Adler argues that 

just as the plantation served as a symbol of the past, Stanley and Stella’s baby stands for the way the ‘working class’ ethos will be carried into the future
Readers’ Guide to Essential Criticism

To some extent, this new society moves away from the iniquities of the Old South. It sees itself as an egalitarian world where ‘every man is king’ and where, as the multicultural gathering of the poker match illustrates, there is ‘a relatively easy intermingling of races’. It is also a world which thrills Stella, who embraces it wholeheartedly through her devotion to Stanley, magnetically drawn back to him even after his violent outbursts.

In contrast, Blanche sees Stanley’s behaviour not as exciting but as emblematic of a brutal, amoral world. Stanley’s desire to use his power to debase those he resentfully sees as belonging to the privileged old world can be seen when he reminds Stella that by marrying her he has ‘pulled her down off [the] columns’ of Belle Reve, forcibly bringing her down to his level. Blanche calls Stanley the ‘survivor of the stone age’, and the primitive motif can be traced from the opening scene of the play, where Stanley, the hunter gatherer, ‘heaves’ the ‘red stained’ meat package at Stella, to its finale, where expressionistic devices such as ‘the inhuman jungle voices’ amplify Stanley’s savage attack on Blanche. New America, though to some extent a more tolerant land of opportunity, is largely portrayed as intellectually and ethically regressive.

The Triumph of the New American

The transfer of power from the old culture to the new begins from the second scene of the play where Blanche relinquishes the legal documents relating to the loss of Belle Reve to Stanley’s ‘big, capable hands’. Dispossessed of any property of her own, Blanche becomes increasingly marginalised in Stanley’s ‘territory’ at Elysian Fields, and her frequent retreats to the bathroom testify to her isolation and alienation in a household where she is not welcome. Finally, she takes refuge in an inner world of fantasy, but even this is invaded and torn apart by Stanley who exposes it as mere ‘lies and conceit and tricks’, bringing about her mental breakdown. In the last scene of the play, every trace of Blanche’s attempt to hold on to the romance of her old world is purged by Stanley as he ‘seizes the paper lantern, tearing it off the light bulb’. With the intruder safely dispatched to the asylum, the inhabitants of the new world are left united, returning to the poker game where 

“Stanley, the master player and Darwinian survivor, controls all.”
Leonard Quirino,’The Cards Indicate a Voyage on A Streetcar Named Desire’