A Streetcar Named Desire Stereotypes Essay

Tennessee Williams is known to be one of the greatest American playwrights of the twentieth century. Williams’ play A Streetcar Named Desire depicted the female characters as helpless victims in the south’s gender stereotypical and patriarchal society. In Williams’ plays, readers can see the gradual leaning towards violence. Critics have related this to anger and resentment toward his parents for not preventing his sister, Rose Williams, from undergoing the prefrontal lobotomy that left her absent from her formal self. After his sister’s tragic surgery, Williams’ fell into addiction which caused the topics of his plays to be centered around addiction, alcoholism, mental health, and death, all of which forced woman into stereotypes and a patriarchal

According to the Oxford dictionary, a stereotype is "a widely held but fixed and oversimplified image or idea of a particular type of person or thing.” As stated by Saul McLeod of Simple Psychology, stereotypes reduce the amount of processing and thinking that people have to do when meeting a new person or visiting a new place. The positive outlook of stereotyping is the allowance of quick responses to situations that quite similarly have happened before. However, with this simplistic grouping people tend to ignore differences between individuals and make generalizations that might not be true. To elaborate the term stereotyping, there is a multitude of different classifications. The stereotypes that are widely known to society are religious stereotypes, racial stereotypes and gender stereotypes. A gender stereotype is harmful when it limits the abilities of men and woman to develop their own personalities, and pursuit in the working world. According to the UN’s human rights webpage, “a gender stereotype is a generalized view or preconception about attributes or characteristics that are or ought to be possessed by, or the roles that are or should be performed by women and men.” In A Streetcar Named Desire readers are shown a multitude of very obvious forms of gender stereotyping. The stereotype of the submissive wife is portrayed by Stella Kowalski, who is the oversimplified, obedient, and passive wife. Her sister Blanche DuBois was raised as an educated, upper-class woman, who instead of being shown has a respected Southern lady, is shown as a faded and cheap stereotypical southern belle. Both women are portrayed as the weaker sex who are both under the control and authority of Stanley Kowalski, the bombastic, overcompensating