Marxist approaches
According to a Marxist view, the plot, characters and themes of Streetcar express the socioeconomic conditions and class struggles of 1940s America. The play’s ‘dialectical’ conflicts and oppositions can be seen as leading towards their resolution. For example, a Marxist reading would view the play as a social drama working out the antagonism between the declining DuBois family and the newly assertive working class, represented by Stanley. It might see Stella’s passivity as an acceptance of the rise of the working class. Similarly, it might see the Blanche–Stanley conflict as a doomed bourgeois attempt to resist working-class energy and realism.
Thus some critics have followed Elia Kazan’s vision of Stanley as the hero defending his home and marriage against the threat represented by Blanche. This approach also relates to that of critics who see the play as depicting a clash between two cultural ‘species’, or in terms of Darwinian ‘survival of the fittest’, with Stanley being the survivor – the ‘gaudy seed-bearer’ (Scene One, p. 13) whose actual seed is embodied in his new son, entering the world just as Blanche is forced out.
According to a Marxist view, the plot, characters and themes of Streetcar express the socioeconomic conditions and class struggles of 1940s America. The play’s ‘dialectical’ conflicts and oppositions can be seen as leading towards their resolution. For example, a Marxist reading would view the play as a social drama working out the antagonism between the declining DuBois family and the newly assertive working class, represented by Stanley. It might see Stella’s passivity as an acceptance of the rise of the working class. Similarly, it might see the Blanche–Stanley conflict as a doomed bourgeois attempt to resist working-class energy and realism.
Thus some critics have followed Elia Kazan’s vision of Stanley as the hero defending his home and marriage against the threat represented by Blanche. This approach also relates to that of critics who see the play as depicting a clash between two cultural ‘species’, or in terms of Darwinian ‘survival of the fittest’, with Stanley being the survivor – the ‘gaudy seed-bearer’ (Scene One, p. 13) whose actual seed is embodied in his new son, entering the world just as Blanche is forced out.
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