Summary: A Streetcar Named Desire

The Desire Line ran through the streets of New Orleans from 1920 to 1948, at the height of streetcar use. The car ran down Bourbon, through the Quarter, to Desire street in the Bywater district, and traveled back to Canal. Inspired by a period of unhappiness surrounding his twenty-fourth birthday, and co-workers he knew at the time, Tennessee Williams set out to write what would become A Streetcar Named Desire. Born Thomas Lanier Williams III in 1911 in Columbus, Mississippi, Tennessee Williams was a sickly young man and was bedridden by his diphtheria, which gave him ample time to think and read. He was given a typewriter shortly after, and this allowed him to begin writing at an early age. His family life, much like the relationships portrayed in his plays, was quite troubled. His mother had been born into a privileged Southern home that had fallen, and his father, who worked as a travelling salesman for a shoe company, was highly abusive and negligent of his ill son. Williams was very close with his sister, Rose, who suffered from mental illness and was administered a crippling failed frontal lobotomy later in life, which cause him a great deal of pain and stress. He based the character of Laura in The Glass …show more content…
The play invited and rewarded risk — sexually, politically, and critically. Streetcar is a play about sexual politics. Its language, simultaneously blunt and scintillating, welcomed taboo subjects — homosexuality, nymphomania, and many forms of desire. Streetcar singlehandedly defined desire in 1947 and continues to in each succeeding decade of performance. Williams’ script celebrated the male form as a sexual icon while boldly investigating feminine desire, and rejoicing in the seduction of both genders. Streetcar flaunted censorship, and continues to in the theatre and in the academic world, defying boundaries around intimacy and