Essay on Literature into Film. "A Streetcar Named Desire" from Tennessee Williams

Abstract or Introduction

"A Streetcar Named Desire" is a play that was written by famous American playwright Tennessee Williams in 1947. The play received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama the next year after it was written. The play opened on December 3, 1947 on Broadway and was closed on December 17, 1949 in the Ethel Barrymore Theater. The Broadway production stares Marlon Brando, Kim Hunter, Karl Malden and Jessica Tandy and was directed by Elia Kazan.

The story was set in the French Quarter of New Orleans during the years that followed World War II. It is a story of Blanche DuBois who is a fragile and disturbed lady who is on a desperate search for a place to call her own. After being exiles from her hometown in Mississippi for seducing a teenage boy at school where she was an English teacher, she appears on the doorstep of her sister’s home in New Orleans to live with her and her husband Stanley.

At the beginning of the play, Williams introduces three terms in which do not reveal their symbolic meaning directly but along the play, the audience will come to realize in their own sense the importance of these terms. In the first scene Blanche describes to her friend Eunice her journey of how she came to her sister’s place. as quoted in the play, Blanche said, “They told me to take a streetcar named Desire, and then transfer to one called Cemeteries and ride six blocks and get off at – Elysian Fields” (Williams, 2000, pg. 117).

The “streetcar” refers to her journey to New Orleans and it represents her own life. Still struggling with the loss of her husband, “desire” would be her first step in a new life. She is in desperate need of love, but she ended up leading a life where she would have sex with random men who never cared about her. This promiscuous lifestyle of hers will lead her to trouble and thus “cemeteries” will represent death.