Tennessee Williams and A Streetcar Named Desire: Life and Art

Introduction: Williams, the South, and Streetcar

The playwright Tennessee Williams was known for gritty family dramas and his frank portrayal of sexuality — qualities that seemed sensationalist when many of his plays were first written but have since aged into fine representations of American cultural dynamics. His three most renowned plays all feature an interplay of sexuality and family dynamics: The Glass Menagerie, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and A Streetcar Named Desire. However, Streetcar differs from the others in that its protagonist, Stanley Kowalski, is largely without redeeming features. More than any other character in any of Williams's plays, Kowalski appears to be Williams's opposite in many significant ways, perhaps personifying the things that Williams both adored and hated about the South into which he was born.

Southern Gender Norms and Hyper-Masculinity

To understand any of Williams's plays, it is critical to understand the American South in the period prior to the Civil Rights Movement. It was a place of exaggerated chivalry, and the role of women was seemingly elevated by this system. However, chivalry was, in many ways, a gilded cage for women. Women who violated social norms were considered un-ladylike and therefore, in many ways, fair game for the predatory behavior of males. Furthermore, when men did act as predators toward these women, they were frequently not chastised for that behavior; rather, they were seen as delivering an appropriate punishment to women who defied gender norms.

Women were not the only ones expected to adhere to rigid gender norms in the South during this period. Men were also expected to play a very specific social role — one of dramatic and enhanced masculinity. This hyper-masculinity was considered a hallmark of lower-socioeconomic-class Southern males, and the frequently boorish behavior that accompanied it was not regarded as maladaptive at the time. On the contrary, males who did not exhibit such hyper-masculinity were themselves considered maladaptive.

Williams's Sexuality and the Character of Kowalski

One must consider Williams against the background of the stereotypically hyper-masculine Southern male when examining the impact of his environment on Streetcar. Williams was not a hyper-masculine man. On the contrary, he was an effeminate, bookish individual who had been plagued by childhood illnesses that prevented him from engaging in the physical activities representative of males of his era. Moreover, Williams was a homosexual, which further removed him from the predatory male archetype established in the Southern culture of his time. It should therefore come as no surprise that Kowalski — one of Williams's most complete villains — is such a prime example of predatory male sexuality. Kowalski is a violent, brutal rapist who beats his wife and rapes his sister-in-law, and appears to possess no redeeming qualities.

However, as a homosexual man during a period when homosexuality was considered socially taboo — and in a place where that taboo was even more pronounced than elsewhere in the country — Williams undoubtedly struggled with issues surrounding his sexuality, and these struggles come through in his portrayal of Kowalski. He imbues Kowalski with a brooding sexuality that makes him initially seem appealing, not only to audience members but also to Blanche, the future victim of his violent sexual assault. Moreover, Stanley has managed to earn the love and loyalty of Stella, the character who otherwise appears to be straightforwardly good. Even after Stanley assaults Stella, she continues to love and remain loyal to him.

This portrayal of Kowalski's violent male sexuality as somehow appealing probably speaks to Williams's own experience growing up as a gay man around men like Kowalski. On one hand, Williams may have found such men sexually attractive. At the same time, he almost certainly feared discovery by them and feared what harm they might do to him. Furthermore, some of those fears were likely connected to sexual violence; it seems plausible that certain hyper-masculine men were also homosexuals who used their hyper-masculinity to keep themselves firmly in the closet. Like Blanche, Williams would have served simultaneously as an object of desire and an object of derision for such men. There is, in fact, some speculation that Williams based Stanley directly on one of his own boyfriends.