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A Streetcar Named Desire
world, Just as phony as it can be
-But it wouldn't be make-believe If you believed in me!" As she sings this song, telling the story of her tendency to believe a more pleasant, warped view of reality over the actual reality, Stanley is telling Stella the horrifying truth about Blanche's scandalous past. The reader is as drawn into Blanche's illusion as much as Stella is, and just as Stella refuses to believe Stanley's harsh words, the audience also does not want to accept that the view they have had of Blanche for a good deal of the play is nothing more than a story made up to hide her unpleasant history. The clearest example of this is also one of the most intense and involving scenes of the entire play. In scene nine, Blanche is confronted by Mitch, who has learned the truth about her past. Mitch tells Blanche that he has never seen her in the light. He tears Blanche's paper lantern off of the plain, bright light bulb, and tries to see her as she really is, and not in a view warped by Blanche's efforts to make herself seem more innocent, young, and beautiful than she is. Blanche responds to this by saying "I don't want realism. I want magic!...I try to give that to people. I misinterpret things to them. I don't tell truth, I tell what ought to be truth...Don't turn the light on!" This intense, frightening scene reveals to the audience the way Blanche views the world. Tennessee Williams's use of this kind of dual view of the world to develop Blanche's character is a perfect example of the way A Streetcar Named Desire makes the audience react to the characters in the play. It is this reaction between the audience and the brilliant characters in the play that makes the play such a valuable literary work.
The literary value of A Streetcar Named Desire is in Williams's ability to create a fantasy world which draws the reader into it as if it was their own reality. In some ways, the setting and conflict of the play is familiar to the reader, but in many ways the conflicting worlds of Stanley Kowalski and Blanche DuBois are too different to share the same reality. Tennessee Williams's world in A Streetcar Named Desire, and the characters within it, become so familiar and fascinating to the reader that every event that occurs in the play affects the reader's reaction to the overall outcome of the play and his opinions of the characters.
The theme of the play does not occur to the reader until after the play's overall experience is concluded, and he is left to reflect on just what Tennessee Williams was trying to say in the play. While the play is being read, the audience is not interested in the overall meaning of the work, but simply in the intriguing action occurring at that moment in the play. However, A Streetcar Named Desire certainly [next page]