The American Dream in Hemingway and Williams

¶ … Streetcar Named Desire and the Snows of Kilimanjaro

The epigraph of Tennessee Williams' classic play A Streetcar Named Desire contains a quote from Hart Crane's poem The Broken Tower: "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" (1947). Ernest Hemingway also elected to preface his timeless short story The Snows of Kilmanjaro with an epigraph, but rather than quote the elegiac poetry of his predecessors, the quintessential American author provides his own cryptic musings on the tallest peak in Africa, before concluding "close to the western summit there is the dried and frozen carcass of a leopard. No one has explained what the leopard was seeking at that altitude" (1938). Although writing from uniquely different perspectives, Williams and Hemingway both employed the epigraph as a rhetorical technique through which to ground the reader's expectations and focus their attention, with the Crane passage used to suggest Blanche DuBois' fractured emotional state and Hemingway's enigmatic opening hinting at the futility of mankind's continual seeking. After a close reading of both works, it has become apparent that Williams and Hemingway imbued their art with a generational impression of the "American Dream," with The Snows of Kilimanjaro reflecting Hemingway's private misgivings during his dalliance as an American expat living in Europe, and A Streetcar Named Desire suggesting William's mourning for the American South's fall from grace during the era of Reconstruction. A textual analysis will demonstrate the clear links between these contributions to the canon of American literature, and the elusive, illusionary concept known as the "American Dream."

Depicting a pair of tragically flawed characters, in the deluded grandiosity of Blanche DuBois and the bitter recriminations of the mortally wounded writer Harry, each of whom has been suddenly forced to confront their own shattered illusions through an existential crisis, both stories reflect the privately held misgivings of their authors during an era when American supremacy was far from assured. Written during an uncertain time for American relations abroad, after the cessation of hostilities in WWI, and just as the devastation of the Great Depression was beginning to become endemic, Hemingway's grievously wounded writer Harry represents what many at the time believed to be America's failed potential. Brimming with talent and ambition, but bound by his inherent laziness and apathy, the dying Harry provides a telling condemnation of his own existence, admitting that "he had destroyed his talent by not using it, by betrayals of himself and what he believed in, by drinking so much that he blunted the edge of his perceptions, by laziness, by sloth, and by snobbery, by pride and by prejudice, by hook and by crook" (Hemingway, 1938). With the "American Dream" being stripped from millions of families due to the arrogance, dishonesty, and thievery of an unregulated banking system, it is clear that Harry's death Hemingway's way of warning a wounded nation.