The Importance of Power in ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’ Anonymous 12th Grade

Power is essential theme not just throughout Tennessee Williams’ oeuvre, but the canon of Western literature as a whole. As such, Williams presents power through his characterization of Stanley throughout ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’ in order to present his morning of the loss of Old Southern values against the hyper industrialization of new America in the postwar period.

The most important male character is Stanley Kowalski, who we see as the epitome of the lionized American male, with him characterized as a decorated army engineer who is now a literal “blue-collar’ worker, with the importance of this highlighted in his first introduction to the audience in Scene One, where he is dressed in “rough blue denim” and exclaims “Meat!” before throwing Stella a blood-stained parcel of meat. This synthesis of precise stage directions and coarse, effective dialogue shows that Williams will revise Todorovian structure, with the play beginning in media res. Functionally, this creates a sense of heightened drama in the audience, who now understand the unpredictable structure of the play, which will allow for sudden and unexpected shifts in plot and character development.

This mise-en-scene is important when considering male power as, in the...