Tennessee Williams: A Streetcar Named Desire

Tennessee Williams was born Thomas Lanier Williams III, in 1911, in the state of Mississippi. His parents Cornelius and Edwina Williams also were the parents of Rose and Dakin. He began writing as a way to cope with his illness. He has earned two Pulitzer Prizes, a Tony Award for best play and three New York Drama Critics’ Circle awards for his works. Williams had not always had the best of life. Dealing with many aspects, his family life and social life have not always been in the driver’s seat. His southern style likings with good and bad relationships and who with led him to alcohol, death and suicide. Starting this all was when he moved to New Orleans and fell in love with it.
Williams had always been infatuated with New Orleans.

In fact it was his choice venue for his famous playwright A Streetcar Named Desire. In the very beginning of the play he sets the tone. “The exterior of a two story corner building on a street in New Orleans which is named Elysian Fields and runs between the L & N tracks and the river. The section is poor but, unlike corresponding sections in other American cities, it has a raffish charm.” (Williams 1777) This may be because it gave him a means to modify his life as stated by A&E. “When he was 28, Williams moved to New Orleans, where he changed his name (he landed on Tennessee because his father hailed from there) and revamped his lifestyle, soaking up the city life that would inspire his work, most notably the later play, A Streetcar Named Desire.” (A&E Television Networks) It was not only New Orleans but everything to do with people and music in the southern ambience.
Having a southern atmosphere would become his foundation for multiple plays. It had all the qualities of life that Williams was looking for. “In this part of New Orleans you are practically always just around the corner, or a few doors down the street, from a tinny piano being played with the infatuated fluency of brown fingers. This “Blue Piano” expresses the spirit of the life which goes on here.” (Williams 1778) Even though he put a spot light on the south in a very tempting way, he was never really acknowledged for doing so. “Although many consider Tennessee Williams to be this century's foremost American playwright, surprisingly little has been said about his debt to Southern literary conventions or his regional bias. His criticisms of the South, overt and implied, are often harsh, but his continuing love/hate relationship with the culture he was born into provides dramatic conflict and excitement to everything he wrote.” (King) Along with the southern region fondness, he also enjoyed the innocence of the people, more precisely, the southern belles.
Being a southern belle was more than just being a woman. One had to have manners, charm and purity. Held to a high standard they needed to dress the part as well, just as Blanche was in the play The Streetcar Named Desire. “Her appearance is incongruous to the setting. She is daintily dressed in a white suit with a fluffy bodice, necklace and earrings of pearl, white gloves and hat, looking as if she were arriving at a summer tea or cocktail party in the garden district.” (Williams 1779) This memory or fancy with southern belles might even come from his mother, Edwina Williams. She too was deemed as a southern belle by Margot Manburg in Tennessee Williams: Writing Life into Legacy. “This hobby disappointed his father but delighted his Southern belle mother, who gave him his first typewriter.” (Williams 2014) If his mother is the reason then it could be said that he kept to his roots. His roots also suggest damaging relations.
It is very hard to break away from the habit of being in bad relationships once a person has been raised into that environment. Looking at the sister context between Stella and Blanche it is very clear early in the play that this is not a healthy relationship and has not been for quite some time. “Blanche: …And now you sit there telling me with your eyes that I let the place go! How in the hell do you think all that sickness and dying was paid for? Death is expensive, Miss Stella! And old Cousin Jessie’s rights after Margaret’s, hers! Why, the Grim Reaper had put up his tent on our doorstep!... Stella! Belle Reve was his headquarters! Honey- that’s how it slipped through my fingers! Which of them left us a fortune? Which of them left a cent of insurance even? Only poor Jessie-one hundred to pay for her coffin. That was all, Stella! And I with my pitiful salary at the school. Yes, accuse me! Sit there and stare at me, thinking I let the place go! I let the place go? Where were you! In bed with your- Polack!” (Williams 1785) Some built up anger is clearly the case. Just as in real life like his own parents, Williams engaged in bad relationships, specifically with his lover, Frank Merlo. “Lahr also explores Williams's simultaneous need for and fear of intimacy, and he rightly treats Williams's 14-year relationship with Frank Merlo--his primary companion and on-and-off secretary through the first half of his career--as the de facto marriage of his life. While the marriage was a tumultuous one, wracked by betrayals and separations, Merlo's death was clearly a key catalyst for the writer's later decline.” (Eisler) Just because a relationship is unstable, it does not mean that one does not mourn their lover’s death if tragedy strikes.
The death of a loved one can be devastating or even life altering. An individual may lose sight of everything, even their own mind. Blanche took the death of her husband pretty brutally as shown in the dialogue between her and Stanley. “Blanche: These are love-letters, yellowing with antiquity, all from one boy. Give those back to me! Stanley: I’ll have a look at them first! Blanche: The touch of your hands insults them! Stanley: Don’t pull that stuff! Blanche: Now that you’ve touched them I’ll burn them! Stanley: What in the hell are they? Blanche: Poems a dead boy wrote. I hurt him the way that you would like to hurt me, but you can’t! I’m not young and vulnerable any more. But my young husband was and I-never mind about that! Just give them back to me!” (Williams 1792-1793) As Blanche was ruined by the death of her husband, Williams also lost his lover. “In 1963, his partner Frank Merlo died of lung cancer. Grief-stricken, Williams fell into a depression that lasted for ten years. In 1969, he had a nervous breakdown and his brother Dakin had him committed to a mental hospital in St. Louis, where Williams stayed for three months.” (Manburg) If it hasn’t been pinpointed yet, Williams’s lover was a man. Meaning, they had a homosexual relationship.
In the time frame of the play or in Williams real life, having a same-sex relationship was not one to speak of or make known. Even though it was short and vague, a homosexual relationship appeared in The Streetcar Named Desire. “Blanche: …Then I found out. In the worst of all possible ways. By coming suddenly into a room that I thought was empty -- which wasn't empty, but had two people in it ... the boy I had married and an older man who had been his friend for years ...” (Williams 1819) Williams would later be criticized for not bringing homosexuality to the forefront of the playwright. “Whereas many gays complained that he touched on gay themes too indirectly, Williams' dramatic treatment of homosexuality was actually bold for the time; and most critics believe that the tension Williams created made for better theatre.” (Kepner) Williams did not hide any of his relationships with men and eventually it would be the death of his first love that descended his will to live and eventually be his demise.
Suicide is such an aggressive way to end one’s life.

Carrying so much guilt or anger can apparently bring certain individuals to where they have no will to live. Just as Williams has been through a lot of incidents, his character Blanche has to. In her dialogue to Mitch, she explains her husband’s suicide. “Suddenly, in the middle of the dance the boy I had married broke away from me and ran out of the casino. A few moments later - a shot! I ran out - all did! - all ran and gathered about the terrible thing at the edge of the lake! I couldn't get near for the crowding. Then somebody caught my arm. "Don't go any closer! Come back! You don't want to see!" See? See what! Then I heard voices say - Allan! Allan! The Grey boy! He'd stuck the revolver into his mouth, and fired - so that the back of his head had been - blown away!” (Williams 1819) In certain ways, Blanche’s character conveys Williams’s life with the exception of who committed suicide. Williams took his own life after many times of being institutionalized. “…Tennessee took 'the long swim' in his suite at the Hotel Elysée in New York in 1983, overdosing on prescription drugs before choking, apparently, on the bottle cap…” (Hodgkinson) He was never the same after his lover died and could never kick the habit of drugs or

alcohol.
Alcohol plays a huge role in both The Streetcar Named Desire playwright and in Williams’s life.

From the play, Blanche was constantly but secretly drinking. She would always try not to bring to much attention to the fact and at times even lie about it. A scene between Mitch and her is a perfect example. “Mitch: I told you already I don’t want none of his liquor and I mean it. You ought to lay off his liquor. He says you have been lapping it up all summer like a wild cat! Blanche: What a fantastic statement! Fantastic of him to say it, fantastic of you to repeat it! I won’t descend to the level of such cheap accusations to answer them, even!” (Williams 1829) As Williams invented her need to hide and lie about this, he felt no need to hide his own alcoholism. “In fact, Williams struggled with depression throughout most of his life and lived with the constant fear that he would go insane as did his sister Rose. For much of this period, he battled addictions to prescription drugs and alcohol.” (Williams 2012) Growing up with an alcoholic father probably did not help this

situation.
As his character Blanche eventually went crazy, Williams soon followed. Nothing would matter anymore, not the love he had for New Orleans or even the deep south atmosphere or southern belles. His unhealthy relationships, death of loved ones, homosexuality and alcoholism would lead to his demise. In 1983 he died in a hotel room trying to overdose but instead choked on a lid. He accomplished much in his 71 years of life and many say he captured spirits and turn them into his characters. He pushed the envelope for many dilemmas back in the day even if some say it wasn’t far enough.