A Streetcar Named Desire: How the Work Responds to Southern Literature

  

A Streetcar Named Desire: How the Work 

Responds to Southern Literature

The Old South and the New South

The story of the DuBois and Kowalski families depicts the evolving society of the South over the first half of the twentieth century.

DuBois family is the Southern plantation owners, southern noble in 19 century. In the play, the degeneration of Southern aristocracy leaves Blanche and Stella, the remnants, nothing except the manners and pretensions. Stella accepts the reality and then marries to a working class man, while Blanche is difficult to accept such truth so she imagines a fantasy world with manners and lives in her illusion. Honestly, Blanche represents the old, elegant, but dead society of South.

As for Kowalski family, it is the new blood Southerners because they are foreign immigrants. Stanley Kowalski, the son of Polish immigrants, belongs to working class that implies the industrialization of the South. However, in the play, Stanley, the symbol of New South, is depicted as a cruel, violent, and rude worker. Williams shows the concept which the new society might be not so kind through such depiction.

     In the end of the play, that Stanley rapes Blanche symbolizes the final destruction of the Old South’s genteel fantasy world by the cruel but vibrant New South. At that time, New South, which possesses animal instinct, wins over the Old South, the ideal and romantic world. Besides, the madness of Blanche suggests that the value of South changes from gentility to people's  struggle for survival.


Sources from:

http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/streetcar/study.html#explanation3

http://www.gradesaver.com/a-streetcar-named-desire/study-guide/major-themes/