Desirability: Perpetuating Racism and Marginalization with A Streetcar Named Desire You’ve rode a streetcar named Desire, just descended from another called Cemeteries after riding six blocks to an avenue with the unlikely name of Elysian Fields, and alighted to the two room apartment of the Kowalski’s.
You are in New Orleans with its streetcars, the blistering heat, everything all moving in slow motion underneath the mouths of shady summer trees.
The cacophony of jazz and footsteps fill the silence.
There is a heaviness to the air; its thick with the warmth of the sun, and tenuous clouds form from the smoke of Lucky Strike cigarettes.
You are both Blanche Dubois: a remnant of the fanciful plantation-era South that may not have existed in the first place; and you are the viewer: experiencing the work of Williams’ southern gothic piece ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’.
•
With a social milieu of a deplorable childhood, the Great Depression, and the violence and destruction of the World Wars, Tennessee Williams wrote characters that were cornered face-to-face with forces willing, and ready, to annihilate them. With Blanche Dubois, we have a young girl being raised by decaying values of what it means to be a woman in the antebellum South. With Blanche Dubois, we have a woman on a journey to the end of her line.
…show more content…
The system of segregation was held in the hands of children because their participation ensured that it would last and continue for decades to come (DuRocher). There was a socialization of children in the Jim Crow South that raised them to be racists, and one way of upholding this was through gender roles and beauty. A woman’s worth was placed on her desirability from the male gaze, and this effected everyone regardless of their gender, race, or