Critical Analysis Of A Streetcar Named Desire

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A Streetcar named Desire written by American playwright Tennessee Williams is a Marxist play that depicts the socio economic status of the characters and people living during that time. The play was written in 1947, two years after the second world war. The historical time leading up to the Second World War known as the Interwar period from 1918-1939 was an era classified with economical difficulties for a majority of American citizens. After the new economic system based upon capital emerged succeeding the Industrial Revolution, the United States saw a massive prosperity in the early twentieth century only to be demolished by the stock market crash of 1929 also known as Black Tuesday (source). These unsuccessful stock markets were one of the signs that showed that the new system, which depended on an extensive labor force and an open and unregulated market, was not as reliable as previously thought, this period was known as the Depression. Regardless of the large scale industrialization that helped the United States regain relative economic stability, there still existed a strong, radically socialist movement within the United States. In his play, A Streetcar Named Desire, Tennessee Williams focuses on material possessions as well as the socioeconomic class tensions between characters to accentuate the forces of exploitation and oppression that exists and form a capitalist society. Social class is better explained by German economist and sociologist Karl Marx who theorised