A Streetcar Named Desire

Looking back at this play, I see how appropriately named it was! The entire play is focused on the characters' desires and the plot takes us on a little journey through them. 

Stella’s desire is for Stanley, her husband. We get this in the first few lines of the play, when Stanley comes home carrying a package of meat and throws it to Stella. I think the meat symbolizes Stella’s physical desire for Stanley. The play also tells us right after the first line, “Stella comes out on the first floor landing, a gentle young woman, about twenty-five, and of a background obviously quite different from her husband’s”. Using this first clue and many others that follow it, we know that Stella has stepped down in society to be with Stanley and have her “desire”. We get the depth of Stella’s desire for Stanley when she sleeps with him hours, if not minutes, after he aggressively beats her!

Blanche’s desire is easily the most erratic of all in the story. Above all, she desires to be desired. This obsession gets her into huge trouble. Because of her desire, she loses her job, gets chased out of her hometown and has an absolutely filthy reputation. Her reputation is so bad; it even follows her to New Orleans. Her past desires (to be with many men to “help get rid of the loneliness”) cause her to lose her current desire (Mitch). Her desire is so strong, she can’t even learn from her previous mistakes. She still kisses the teenage paper delivery boy, when her previous desires for another teenage boy are what got her fired.

Finally, Stanley’s desires are that of a “red-blooded male”. Williams includes in describing Stanley, “Animal joy in his being is implicit in all his movements and attitudes. Since earliest manhood the center of his life has been pleasure with women, the giving and taking of it, not with weak indulgence, dependently, but with the power and pride of a richly feathered male bird among hens…He sizes women up at a glance, with sexual classifications, crude images flashing into his mind and determining the way he smiles at them”. He even goes so far as to rape Blanche when his wife is in labor! If he was willing to cheat on his wife with her mentally fragile sister, I think it can be assumed that he cheats on a regular basis, consumed by his “red-blooded” desires.

All in all, this story really disgusted me all the way through. The three main characters all acted like animals, having absolutely no sense of reason at all. For me, Stanley raping Blanche at the end was the last straw. 

The Man Who Was Almost a Man

In “The Man Who Was Almost a Man”, Dave is obsessed with becoming a man. This theme is found throughout the entire story from the first paragraph to the last.

“One of these days he was going to get a gun and practice shooting, then they couldn’t talk to him as though he were a little boy.”

“Ah mol enough to hava gun. Ahm seventeen. Almost a man.”

“Shucks. Mistah Joe, Ahm gittin t be a man like anybody else!”

“Ain nothing wrong, Ma. Ahm almos a man now. Ah wans a gun.”

“Lawd, ef Ah had just one mo bullet Ah’d taka shot at tha house. Ah’d like t scare ol man Hawkins jusa little…Jusa enough t let im know Dave Saunders is a man.”

“Ahead the long rails were glinting in the moonlight, stretching away, away to somewhere, somewhere where he could be a man…”

However, for how much Dave proclaims his manhood, his actions do very little to back it up. He acts like more of a child than most seventeen-year-old boys—and that’s quite an accomplishment.

First of all, he’s incredibly insecure. He has a hard time even owning up to his desire for a gun, probably because his reasoning for wanting one is flawed, childish and based around his insecurity.

“Dave looked at the floor, scratched his head, scratched his thigh, and smiled. Then he looked up shyly.”

“When his father and brother had left the kitchen, he still sat and looked again at the guns in the catalogue, longing to muster courage enough to present his case to his mother.”

Secondly, he tends to make a habit of lying & disobeying, then crying when he gets caught.

“He had not come straight home with it as his mother had asked…”

“To avoid surrendering the pistol he had not come into the house until he knew that they were all asleep. When his mother had tiptoed to his bedside late that night and demanded the gun, he had first played possum; then he had told her that the gun was hidden outdoors, that he would bring it to her in the morning.”

“Dave took a deep breath and told the story he knew nobody believed.”

“Then when the point of the plow was stickin up in the air, she swung erroun n twisted herself back on it…She stuck herself n started t bleed. N fo Ah could do anything, she wuz dead.”

“Dave cried, seeing blurred whit and black faces. ‘Ahh ddinn gggo tt sshooot hher…Ah ssswear ffo Gawd Ahh ddin…Ah wuz a-tryin t sssee ef the old gggun would sshoot.’”

Further evidence of his immaturity, he wants his possession to make him a man, instead of earning his way through hard work and good choices.

“One of these days he was going to get a gun and practice shooting, then they couldn’t talk to him as though he were a little boy.”

“In the gray light of dawn he held it loosely, feeling a sense of power. Could kill a man with a gun like this. Kill anybody, black or white. And if he were holding his gun in his hand, nobody could run over him; they would have to respect him.”

Finally, instead of owning up to his mistakes and taking accountability for his actions, Dave blames everyone else and has a pity party.

“N Pa says he’s gonna beat me…He remembered other beatings, and his back quivered. Naw, naw, Ah sho don wan im t beat me tha way no mo. Dam em all! Nobody ever gave him anything. All he did was work. They treat me like a mule, n then they beat me. He gritted his teeth. N Ma had t tell on me.”

In a final act of boyish immaturity, Dave runs away rather than work to right his wrongs.

“Two dollahs a mont. Les see now…Tha means it’ll take bout two years. Shucks! Ah’ll be dam! He started down the road, toward the tracks.”