70 pages • 2 hours read
Tennessee WilliamsA Streetcar Named Desire
Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 1947A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Scenes 1-3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Scene 1 Summary
It is early May in on a street in New Orleans in the poor part of town. The piano music of entertainers fills the air, and between the railroad and the river rests an old, white flat. Two women, a landlord named Eunice and an unnamed “Negro Woman,” sit on the steps of the building taking in the evening.
Stanley Kowalski and Harold Mitchell (nicknamed Mitch) walk up to the flat, stopping on the steps. Stanley gives a shout to his wife, Stella Kowalski, a 25-year-old, who then descends the stairs. He playfully throws a package of meat at her, which she catches, and the two men head off to go bowling. Stella follows along minutes later.
Eunice and the Negro Woman are still on the steps when Blanche walks up. Dressed in delicate white clothing that “suggests a moth” (5), she looks up and down from a slip of paper in her hand, appearing confused. After questioning Eunice, she learns she has, indeed, arrived at the proper address. She is Stella’s older sister, visiting from Mississippi. Eunice offers to let Blanche into the apartment, and the Negro Woman walks off to get Stella.
A bit of strained conversation follows between Eunice and Blanche. As Eunice makes gentle small talk, asking Blanche about her career and home, Blanche’s uneasiness becomes apparent. Her single-word answers are followed by her request to be left alone. She is stunned as she sits, alone, in the kitchen. She eventually drinks a pour of whiskey from a bottle she notices in the closet, quietly saying, “I’ve got to keep hold of myself!” (10).
When Stella arrives, the two sisters immediately embrace. Blanche dominates the conversation with an unfiltered stream of dialogue as she criticizes her own appearance, Stella’s weight, and the “horrible place” (11)that is Stella’s home. She pretends to look for alcohol, reopening the closeted whiskey. She simultaneously talks over Stella while blaming Stella for her lack of participation in their talking. She worries that Stella’s friends won’t like her and wonders about Stanley.
Blanche eventually shifts the conversation to their home in Mississippi, the plantation Belle Reve. She turns mournful and hostile, blaming Stella for abandoning her alone there, after which “all the burden descended on [her] shoulders” (20). In an emotional monologue, she reveals that she has lost the property after the deaths of their father, mother, and a woman named Margaret left her penniless and wrecked. Blanche describes the pervasive morbidity and bleakness that preceded and followed Stella’s attendance at the ceremonies:“And funerals are pretty compared to deaths”(21). Stella begins crying and retreats to the bathroom.
Stanley, Mitch, and their friend Steve, Eunice’s husband, return from bowling. Eunice and Steve banter about whether or not he told her he’d be out for such a length of time.
Williams includes a lengthy description of Stanley at this point of the scene: “Animal-joy in his being is implicit in all his movements and attitudes” (24). Stanley’s life revolves around women, drinking, food, humor, male friendship, and his possessions, or “everything that […] bears his emblem of the gaudy seed-bearer” (25).
Immediately following this characterization, he meets Blanche in the kitchen. He offers her a drink, although she declines for the first time thus far. He takes off his sweaty shirt and makes small talk, eventually asking about her husband. She responds distraught: “The boy—the boy died. […] I’m afraid I’m going to be sick!” (28).
Scene 2 Summary
The following evening at six o’clock, Stella and Blanche prepare to go out. Stanley is having friends over for poker, and Stella does not think Blanche will want to stay around the flat.
While Blanche bathes, Stanley and Stella talk in the kitchen. She mentions the loss of Belle Reve, but pleads with Stanley not to mention anything about it until Blanche’s emotional state has stabilized. He wants to see the bill of sale and asks Stella whether or not she’s ever heard of the Napoleonic code, “according to which what belongs to the wife belongs to the husband and vice versa” (32). He suggests they’ve been cheated out of money, but Stella emphasizes that the land has been stolen, not sold.
Stanley begins rummaging through Blanche’s things, pulling out dresses and jewelry and scoffing at what seems to be their extreme cost. He mistakes costume jewelry and a rhinestone tiara for precious stones and threatens to have an “acquaintance” (35)appraise the value of the objects.
Stella goes out to the porch. When Blanche comes out of the bath, she strikes up banter with Stanley, asking him about the evening’s party and wondering whether he’ll button up her dress. He angrily obliges as Blanche proceeds to flirt with him about her appearance and tells him he is “straightforward and honest, a little bit on the primitive side” (39). Blanche sends Stella to the store to get her a lemon-coke.
Stanley confronts Blanche about the Napoleonic code. Blanche declares her innocence, stating that everything she owns is in her trunk. She pulls out a box of papers. Stanley forcefully grabs a hidden stack, and the dismayed Blanche explains that those are old lover letters from her late husband that she’ll now burn, as they’ve been defiled by his touch. After calming down, she explains that the relevant papers prove generations of men in their family have “exchanged their land for their epic fornications” (44).
Stanley will have his lawyer look them over, and he reveals that he is presently concerned with money because Stella is pregnant. Just then, Stella returns home and Blanche’s congratulations are immediately followed by her eager recounting of what happened while Stella was getting the lemon-coke, exclaiming:“Yes, I was flirting with your husband!” (45). As guests arrive for the party, the sisters leave for dinner.
Scene 3 Summary
The atmosphere of the kitchen has come alive with “the raw colors of childhood’s spectrum” (46). The men wear bright shirts and there are vivid slices of watermelon sitting on the table, and a Van Gogh’s Le Café de Nuit hangs on the wall.
Steve, Mitch, Stanley, and their friend Pablo Gonzalez sit around the table playing poker. Mitch tells the others he has to go home soon on account of his sick mother. His friends give him a hard time about this, so he tells them: “You all are married. But I’ll be alone when she goes” (48). He heads to the bathroom and the game continues.
Stella and Blanche return from dinner. Stanley is visibly drunk, slapping Stella’s thigh as she walks toward the bedroom. Blanche meets Mitch on his way out of the bathroom. Struck by his manners, she says to Stella: “This one seems—superior to the others” (52). She asks Stella about Mitch’s job and learns that he works for the same plant as Stanley.
The sisters share some laughs about the men and their wives until Stanley yells at them to quiet down. He becomes more agitated when Blanche turns on the radio, despite his friends’ protests.
The game continues as Mitch rises to leave. He and Blanche strike up a conversation in which he shares that a girl he loved died. Blanche’s interests in him deepens: “Sorrow makes for sincerity, I think” (58). She shares information about her family and about her job as a high-school English teacher.
The evening quickly sours when Blanche turns on the radio again. Stanley storms into the room, tossing the radio out the window. Stella demands everyone leave her home, and Stanley charges her. There is the sound of a blow followed by Stella’s cry, and the men rush to hold him back. As the sister’s gather their clothes to go to Eunice’s, the men attempt to sober Stanley. They put him in the shower and leave.
Upon realizing he’s alone, he begins to cry for Stella. He repeatedly calls Eunice before taking to the street, bellowing Stella’s name. She eventually descends the stairs, and they embrace. Stanley puts his face to her pregnant stomach and carries her into the flat.
Blanche comes down the stairs, worried for her sister. Mitch appears and comforts her. He tells her to “don’t take it serious” (68) and they share a cigarette.
Scenes 1-3 Analysis
The Epigraph to the play is written by Hart Crane, a writer of lifelong importance to Williams. In fact, Williams hoped for his remains to be placed in the sea near Crane’s, who committed suicide by jumping from a ship. Although the excerpt from Crane's poem “The Broken Tower” is full of heavy metaphor and sweeping imagery, it seems to suggest the possibility of hope in a dark or otherwise chaotic world.
With these conflicting emotions in mind, the characters of the play are introduced. Williams immediately establishes the pace of the Elysian Fields neighborhood; although it is rundown, it possesses the liveliness of the blue piano that soaks the air. The scenes brim with liveliness, like Stella’s pregnancy, the poker night, and the boozy banter on the streets, and it is nearing the end of spring.
The groundwork for the play’s relationships is laid in these chapters, and they tend to revolve around Blanche. When Blanche arrives, her judgmental anxiousness immediately sets her apart from the world she’s entered. Aside from providing information about the sisters’ privileged upbringing, her early conversations with Stella introduce one of the central tensions that exist between them. Blanche feels abandoned, and although the conditions of Belle Reve’s fall remain hazy, it is clear that she has been extremely traumatized. Stella, as somewhat of a foil, is aloof and comfortable in the life she’s made for herself. The carefree roughness of Elysian Fields is a far cry from the “great big place with white columns” (9), which is perhaps what attracts Stella to it.
Blanche’s stream-of-consciousness recalling of the events of Belle Reve are laced with visions of death, more specifically the costs of death.
Stanley’s disdain for Blanche is unquestionable from the start, and like Blanche, he makes a strong first impression. As he blazes into the kitchen, Williams characterizes him as a man who loves everything that “bears his emblem of the gaudy seed-bearer” (25). His overbearing, primal masculinity paired with Blanche’s frantic yet highly intellectual demeanor foreshadows what will become a violent relationship: there is only room for one of them. The emotional weight of Blanche’s character brings into question the legitimacy of life at Elysian Fields. Their relationship is further heightened by Stanley’s immediate distrust of Blanche. His claims that she’s secretly reaped Belle Reve’s wealth are unfounded; her “feathers and furs” (34)are, in reality, costume jewelry and cheap clothes.
Although alcohol fuels the play throughout, one of its most consequential moments is the first poker night, in the third scene. Everything in this scene is at its boiling point. The hues of the men’s shirts are vivid, the mood is rowdy, and money is at stake. The painting on the wall, Vincent Van Gogh’s Le Café de Nuit (1888) offers an unexpected piece of impressionistic high-culture. Its distorted perspective, strong reds and greens with rough characters that litter the late-night café, are all too similar to the scene that takes place in the kitchen. The artist, himself, was trying to portray a place he loathed.
Stanley’s outburst and ensuing violence against Stella are misplaced, for it is Blanche who has twice turned on the radio. His need for complete control is apparent, and the world seems to bend around him. His friends help him sober up, and Stella returns to him at the end of the night. There is a brief minute, however, during which this consistency is broken, and he is utterly alone, crying: “My baby doll’s left me” (65).
A calm falls over the preceding madness when Mitch and Blanche meet outside the flat at the end of the Scene 3. They have, thus far, had some of the most straightforward conversations of the play, unsoiled by anger or past drama. Her bending the truth—“Stella hasn’t been so well lately, and I came down to help her for a while”(60)—seem to be driven by a genuine interest in winning Mitch’s affections. His gentleness very much changes the direction of the play and of Blanche’s emotional state toward goodness.
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