little castle, where everyone else exists to serve his needs.

As for the Napoleonic Code, it corresponds closely with Kowalski's sense of what's right and wrong. More to the point, he cites it in support of his own self-interest. The Code is used—or rather, abused—to enforce the legal and social domination of men in this traditional society. Although women are technically equal under the Code, in actual fact they're anything but. Instead, the law keeps them in their place, allowing thugs like Kowalski to control their womenfolk as they see fit.

Stanley Kowalski is one of the least subtle characters in Williams's canon and in all of twentieth-century literature. From our perspective he comes across as the archetypal male chauvinist, a man who has little if any regard for the feelings of women and sees them chiefly as sex objects. That said, we cannot really know all that is going on in Stanley's mind. There is no doubt he loves Stella in his way, and it's significant that when she goes into labor Williams's stage direction indicates that "Stanley is with her," meaning that whatever has happened between them, his natural protective instinct has come into play and that he isn't just a totally insensitive brute.

His reference to the Napoleonic Code is somewhat ironic because, though Stanley is emphasizing that "what belongs to the wife belongs to the husband," it also works in the other direction, meaning of course that all Stanley owns belongs to Stella as well. Not everyone as crudely sexist as Stanley would acknowledge this. Stanley is a little Napoleon, a dictator in his own house and his working-class circle. He lords it over his card-playing buddies, but is a genuine friend to them—as Napoleon was to his officers and even his ordinary troops. Part of his desire to expose Blanche's "past" is out of concern for Mitch, since in the male code of honor one is supposed to "protect" a friend from a woman who is considered "disreputable" according to the double-standard morality of the time.

The Huey Long reference is interesting because Long was a hero to the working class and was a man of humble background who attained power in his state and could, possibly, have gone even further politically if he hadn't been killed. Blue-collar people like Stanley looked up to him, and justifiably so. Long was a would-be dictator who aimed to redistribute the wealth of Louisiana and help the poor. Perhaps Williams intends the audience to view Stanley somewhat sympathetically, in spite of his brutish behavior, in the light of Stanley's own humble background and the fact that he's a member of an exploited class. Though there's of course no excuse for the cruelty Stanley inflicts upon both Stella and Blanche, he can be seen as a victim, himself, of an unjust system, one that Huey Long presumably had attempted to rectify, albeit by the wrong methods.

Both of these allusions to political figures reinforce Stanley's dictatorial nature, but paradoxically show him to be not absolutely one-dimensional, as a superficial reading of the play might conclude.