The Motif Of Violence In Tennessee Williams A Streetcar Named Desire

The motif of violence is manifest throughout Williams’ ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’, not only in the form of acts that are explicitly forceful and destructive, but in the implicit conflicts that are explored within the play, whether between men and women, light and dark, reality and fantasy or the Old South and the New South. Violence is most often associated with the character of Stanley, who progresses violent behaviour and exudes a sense of brutishness that contributes to the play’s overall parallelism to an “urban jungle”, in which Blanche will inevitably become a victim.
Sexual violence is a prevalent facet of the play, which makes eminent the subordination of the female characters under the claimed prerogative of men. In particular, domestic …show more content…
The Kowalski’s poker table seats "men at the peak of their physical manhood" who are at their sexual prime. During the game, Stanley “gives a loud whack of his hand on [Stella’s] thigh”, which is met by laughter from the other men. The performance of this action before an audience of virile spectators suggests that it is not an act of lust, but rather a reinstating of male entitlement. The scene also introduces a pivotal animalistic quality to the character of Stanley. He “stalks fiercely” towards Stella while she refers to him as a “drunk–drunk–animal thing”, implicating that Stanley acts chaotically, without contemplation or control. Progressively, the play culminates to a point of climactic sexual violence, wherein it is inferred that Stanley rapes Blanche. He “grins as he knots the tasselled sash about his waist”: a malevolent, inverted smile that recalls the same smirk that he gives at the end of Scene IV after listening to Blanche’s speech concerning his primitivism. As the tension heightens, the once “barely audible” blue piano starts to “drum up louder... into the roar of an approaching locomotive”. Williams uses sound and music to …show more content…
This is advocated from a New Historicist perspective. New Orleans is a city that embodies the thrusting, rough-edged, physically aggressive materialism of the new world. Stanley personifies this new civilisation in several ways: he is perceived as a foreigner, he works as a manual labourer, he is dirty and coarse, and he is satiated with a virile energy that contrasts starkly with Blanche’s desperately fabricated gentility. Stella and Blanche condemn his lack of refinement through instances of vilification, hurling derogative phrases at him: “pig—Polak—disgusting—vulgar—greasy!” Yet Stanley recognises his own vulgarity, telling Stella “I was common as dirt... I pulled you down off them columns and how you loved it, having them coloured lights going!” In this light, Stella is a character trapped within the transformation of the South. She is simultaneously a product of her respectable, bourgeois upbringing and an emblem of the thrill and ardent that Stanley’s sexual prowess ignites. This conflict between tradition and materialism, or pre-modernism and industrialisation, is closely entwined with a conflict between femininity and masculinity. Hence, once again, Stanley and Blanche are at odds with each other, and Stella is caught violently in between them. She can only retain a balance of power for so long before she effectively becomes a strategic pawn in the dichotomy