A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams

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Recommended: Influence of African American literature and importance

Males tend to have love-Hate relationship in Tennessee Williams’ and William Shakespeare’s plays. Stanley from A Street Car Named Desire was a gruff, hardworking blue collar man, who has been living the married life for a decent amount of time to his wife Stella. Othello on the other hand was a man that was a highly ranked in the military, and seen as a highly respected man; Until Othello smothered his newly married wife Desdemona to death. Both of these men may have been from different time periods but they are the same when it comes to their attitudes towards leadership, treatment of women, and their way to confirm assumptions. In Tennessee Williams’ play A Streetcar Named Desire and William Shakespeare’s famous Tragedy Othello, Stanley and Othello sensitivity to their racial stereotypes encourage their strong leadership qualities to disprove the preconceived notions people have about their ethnicity. Both males take out their frustrations about how they are treated on their so called beloved wives. Lastly their low self-worth causes them to doubt their own intuition and rely on confidants to confirm their assumptions.
Racial stereotypes are the driving force for both male leads’ attitudes in these plays. Stanley is seen as being a “different species” (Williams 18) or a “polack” (Williams 81) in A Streetcar Named Desire. Since Americans tend to think racist Polish jokes are funny, they seem to forget that those jokes can “easily be converted into moron jokes” (Morreal 77).Stanley’s need to show people like Blanche that he is not unintelligent explains his hostility towards her because he is used to people trying to “swindled” (Williams 32) him. The same is true for Othello, he knew that his peers undermined him because he was “...

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Works Cited

Adelman, Janet. “Iago’s Alter Ego: Race as Projection in Othello.” Shakespeare Quarterly 48.2 (1997):125-144. JSTOR. Web. 20 Nov.2013.
Berry, Edward. “Othello’s Alienation.” Studies in English Literature 30.2 (1990): 315-333. JSTOR. Web. 31 Oct. 2013.
Gruber, Elizabeth. “Insurgent Flesh: Epistemology and violence in Othello and Mariam.” Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 32.4 (2003): 392-410. MLA International Bibliography. Web. 8 Nov. 2013.
Morreal, John. Comic Relief: A Comprehensive Philosophy of Humor. UK: Wiley-blackwell, 2009.Print.
Sambrook, Hana., and Tennessee Williams. A Streetcar Named Desire. 3rd ed. London: York P, 2000. Print.
Shakespeare, William, ed. E. A. J. Honigmann. Othello. New York: Routledge, 1997. Print.
Williams, Tennessee. A Streetcar Named Desire. Scarborough: New American Library, 1986. Print.

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