A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE
Tennessee Williams most famous play set on a street in New Orleans, which is named Elysian Fields. New Orleans is a cosmopolitan city. The city is the music of the piano can be heard anytime in this street. In this play, ‘a woman’s pathetic fantasies of primness and respectability are stripped down and violently exposed in New Orleans’. Williams like the poet is concerned with the reality of the broken world. Form his drama is the imitation of the individual search for a way to restore a crushed universe. Quoting Hart Crane he rightly says on the frontpiece of A Street Car Named Desire : And so it was I entered the broken world To trace the visionary company of love, its voice
An instant in the wind [I know not whither hurled]
But not for long to hold each desperate choice.(P.XII)
In this play, ‘A Street Car Named Desire’ depicts the shattering of souls, the destruction of a young woman who years to lead the mythic life of the South before the war. She meets with nothing but despair and frustration. She seeks asylum in her sister’s house but is raped by her brother-in-law and ends up in asylum. Williams characters exhibit qualities that are pathetic. Pathos at times yields to a sort of modern Gothic mélange in which Williams preoccupations have been stylized into fashionable nightmares of castration, incest and homosexuality. One of Williams favourite themes was the ruthless destruction of idealists and artists. This has often caused him to be