Symbolism and Motifs in A Streetcar Named Desire

The Night Cafe 1888 Vincent van Gogh

Tennessee Williams was a brilliant playwright who combined literature with visual artistry. Taking symbolism and motifs from his palette, he created a work of art, with layers of complex feelings and emotions for the human condition in his masterpiece entitled A Streetcar Named Desire. He used light and dark to represent the theme of reality versus illusion, as well as color to further define the characters and emotionality of the play. Through conflicts in sexuality Williams brought awareness to the complexity of life. The recurring demise of characters through their sexuality is apparent from the beginning of the play. Possibly from experiences within his own life, Williams used symbols and motifs to explore and raise awareness of tragedies and conflicts in human and social interaction.

Tennessee Williams used light and dark as symbols of reality and illusion, a theme throughout the play, which Blanche Dubious struggles with. Upon Blanche’s first arrival to visit her sister, Stella gives Blanche a compliment on her looks and Blanche exclaims, “God love you for a liar! Daylight never exposed so total a ruin,” (12). She says this because she would rather be lied to about her looks than hear the truth that she may not look her best. The daylight, or any light is her enemy, exposing the truth. During the poker night, Blanche tells Mitch, “I bought this adorable little colored paper lantern at a Chinese shop on Bourbon. Put it over the light bulb! Will you, please? I can't stand a naked light bulb…” (54). What she is really asking Mitch when she asks him to affix the Chinese paper lantern is to cover the harsh reality of the light bulb. The light is a motif reinforcing the theme of reality versus illusion. She is afraid the bright light will show the reality of her aging face, with the lantern dimming the light bulb, simultaneously, reality is dimmed and she creates an illusion of youth, which helps her to exist. Blanche relies on her looks to feel good about herself it is her highest priority.

Blanche believes how others perceive her is the way she really is. She explains, “I never was hard or sell-sufficient enough. When people are soft--soft people have got to shimmer and glow--they've got to put on soft colors, the colors of butterfly wings, and put a--paper lantern over the light.... It isn't enough to be soft. You've got to be soft and attractive. And I--I'm fading now! I don't know how much longer I can turn the trick,”(82). All her life Blanche has presented an illusion about herself to others. The illusion is who she is. When youth was on her side, it was easy, but now she is aging and she fears she doesn’t have much longer before the illusion is gone. Later in the play when Mitch demands to see her in the light without the paper lantern she exclaims, “I don't want realism. I want magic,” (127). But at this point he confronts her with all of the realities she has been hiding, stripping her of her illusions. Not only is she hiding from the light’s exposure to her physical looks, she is hiding from it exposure of her past. She is hiding in the darkness from the realities of her life, which she does not want to face. In reality, Blanche feels shame for her past, filled with infidelities, and the loss of her position at the school. She is in despair, having lost her home, having no money and no future. Her illusions are her survival. Without fantasy Blanche cannot live in a world of reality and retreats further and further into the darkness of her own mind. After Stella has Blanche committed to an institution, in the last scene Stanley strips away her illusions for the last time. “He crosses to dressing table and seizes the paper lantern, tearing it off the light bulb, and extends it toward her. She cries out as if the lantern was herself,” (152). The lantern had created a darkness filled with illusions. When Stanley tears the lantern off the light bulb, the bright light sheds the reality of her aging, without a home or money, and without love. Similar to the symbolism of light and dark, is the symbolic meaning of colors in the play.

Color is used throughout the play symbolically to express personality of the characters. When Stanley’s character is introduced in the play in scene one he is throwing a“red-stained” package of meat at Stella. Red is symbolic of his coarseness and raw uncivilized animalistic sexuality. Again, red is used when Blanche wears the satin robe in scene two to symbolize sexuality while she is flirtatious with Stanley. When Blanche is first introduced to Mitch, so he can remember her name, she tells him, “…Blanche means white…” (54). White is symbolic of pureness and virgin like qualities, which Blanche wants others to believe, she has. Blanche is often wearing white through out the play to symbolize how she wants to appear to others. When Stanley is telling Stella of Blanche’s promiscuity after losing Belle Reve he says, “This is after the home-place had slipped through her lily white fingers! She moved to the Flamingo!” (107). Stanley is sarcastic when he refers to her fingers being lily white, because she presents herself as pure, meanwhile he has found out that she was having sex with many men in the hotel he names the“Flamingo.” Again, in the end of the play color is used as a symbol when Blanche discusses the color of her jacket, while dressing to be unknowingly taken away to the institution, “You're both mistaken. It's Della Robbia blue. The blue of the robe in the old Madonna pictures…” (147). Williams ends the play with Blanche wearing the symbolic color of purity that Christ’s mother is often depicted wearing in paintings. Colors are not only used as symbols of character traits, they are symbolic of emotion.

Symbolic meaning of color is used to represent the emotionality of the play. Williams wrote, “There is a picture of Van Gogh’s of a billiard-parlor at night. The kitchen now suggests that sort of lurid nocturnal brilliance, the raw colors of childhood’s spectrum,” (41). Williams set up scene three, the poker night, to mimic the colors of van Gogh’s famous painting, “The Night Café, recreating an intense evening, with the use of primary colors. Primary colors of the childhood spectrum, which he refers to, are red, green, yellow and blue, raw color, not softened into lighter or darker hues to produce feelings of mellowness, but color to provoke intense feelings of emotions on edge. Williams set the stage with colors used in the painting, with the yellow of the linoleum in the kitchen, the vivid green in the glass shade and the blue, and red in the men’s shirts. He wrote, “…and they are men at the peak of their physical manhood, as coarse and direct and powerful as the primary colors,” (41). He used primary colors symbolically, to represent the ugliness of life, raw and realistic, which play out in this scene, with cursing, drinking and the awful blows that Stanley gives to his pregnant wife, Stella. Conflicts in sexuality are addressed with Stella’s sexual desire for Stanley, allowing her submissiveness in a dysfunctional, abusive relationship to continue.

Sexuality contributes to the conflicts that the characters face. When Blanche arrives in New Orleans to visit her sister she says, “They told me to take a streetcar named Desire, and then transfer to one called Cemeteries and ride six blocks and get off at--Elysian Fields,” (3). Her first lines tell of the recurring theme of doom attached to sexuality and desire for love. When Blanch tells Mitch of her first husband’s suicide she says, “It was because--on the dance-floor--unable to stop myself--I'd suddenly said--"I saw! I know! You disgust me..."(103). Williams addressed the feelings of humiliation and shame attached to homosexuality in the nineteen forties with Blanche Dubois’s young husband, Allan Grey, who commits suicide after his wife accidently sees him with his lover. Blanche confesses her guilt to Mitch for having caused this horrific tragedy. Williams also brought out the homophobic attitude in America with Stella’s line, “This beautiful and talented young man was a degenerate,” (110), referring to Allan’s sexual orientation. Blanche explains to Mitch, “Yes, I had many intimacies with strangers. After the death of Allan--intimacies with strangers was all I seemed able to fill my empty heart with.... even, at last, in a seventeen-year-old boy,”(128). This reality revealed of Blanche’s promiscuity leads to her only hope out of her desperate situation, to fail.

Tennessee Williams’ use of symbols and motifs throughout his masterpiece, The Streetcar Named Desire added another dimension to assist the audience in their understanding of the play. Whether underlying messages were from his own life or just ideas to give more thought to, have been reasons for people to interpret the play over time in many ways. Possibly that was his idea, as in visual art, the interpretation is personal. With the aide of symbols and motifs, he artistically presented material, especially of the time he wrote the play, and even of today, that brought awareness to social conscience and the complexity of the human condition, which cannot be understood without much thought.