Literary Analysis: A Streetcar Named Desire

Literature is a nice way to view American society. Several scholars have analyzed the social and economic forces in American life following WWII. Martyn J. Lee describes this period as involving a “foreclosure of economic contingency via a process of bureaucratic planning and calculation” (Lee 93) that developed “an economy of symbolic or cultural goods […] aligned sympathetically with Capitalism’s fundamental objective” (Lee 18). This alignment required “the agencies of capital to turn their attention towards […] prevailing familial, kinship, gender” and other relations (Lee 67) to ensure the transformation of individuals into consumers (Johnston 105). Poets went against this kind of framework, their drive was counter culture, if there is

The play opened on Broadway on December 3, 1947, and closed on December 17, 1949. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is a play by Edward Albee. The play won both the 1963 Tony Award for Best Play. The play is divided in three acts. It is frequently revived on the modern stage. And how do these two plays criticize American ideals about relationships and family life?
Tennessee Williams’ story is set in New Orleans, the French Quarter, the years following World War II. Blanche DuBois is a fragile and neurotic woman who does not know what her place is in this world. She is exiled from her hometown Laurel in Mississippi, because she seduced a seventeen-year old boy at the school were she taught English. She has a sister, Stella, who lives in New Orleans with Stanley, her husband. Blanche claims she is in New Orleans because of a nervous breakdown. This she claims is the result of a series financial calamities which have recently claimed the family plantation, Belle Reve. Blanche and Mitch start dating and after one date, Blanche reveals something of her past to Mitch and tells him she was married before with a man, who turned out to be gay. He killed himself after Blanche finds him with another man and called him ‘disgusting,’ his death keeps on haunting Blanche. Eventually Stanley finds out what really happened with Blanche and tells Stella the truth that she

“The Text is not a coexistence of meanings but a passage, an overcrossing; thus it answers not to interpretation […] but to an explosion, a dissemination” (Barthes 288). This leads to a productive process, in which the reader has to participate in the story. “Night-Sea Journey” raises a lot of philosophical questions. For example in the second paragraph the narrator asks himself: “Is the journey my invention? Do the night, the sea, exist at all, I ask myself, apart from my experience of them? Do I myself exist, or is this a dream? Sometimes I wonder. And if I am, who am I? The Heritage I supposedly transport? But how can I be both the vessel and contents?” (Barth 2388). And such questions show that the narrator here is viewing himself from a distance, and he has doubts about himself, his identity, his journey, and the world in which he resides. This demands a more active part for the reader. There is also a sense of fluidity and merging of identities. “Sometimes I think I am my drowned friend” (Barth 2392) and so there is a schizoid structure of the narrative, coming from the mind of a schizophrenic. The schizophrenic, as defined and detected by Fredric Jameson, is the postmodern mental illness. This is another proof of the postmodernity of this text and the unreliability of the