Williams, Tennessee (Vol. 30) - Martin Gottfried
MARTIN GOTTFRIED
[A Streetcar Named Desired followed The Glass Menagerie] in its concern with the quality of human love, but I do not mean to suggest that it had a literary content as such. There are intellectual points represented in the play, and a conscious interplay of ideas—the pitting of Kowalski's animal life force against Blanche's fragile poetry is the central one. But the play, in true left-wing style, represents the introduction of a new kind of meaning and a new way of stating it into the American theater. Streetcar is about abstract ideas—ways of living. The closest it ever gets to actually stating a point is in saying that "desire is the opposite of death."
That is its guiding point. The breakdown of Blanche DuBois is the breakdown, or death, of a way of life. Beauty and sensitivity are qualities too fragile for their new, hard, healthy but pitiless replacements. The Old South that Blanche and her lost...
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