Autobiographic Sources
We talked in the podcast about some of the autobiographic sources in Tennessee Williams’s own life for the characters and themes in the play. Primary among these is the tragic story of Williams’s beloved sister Rose, who suffered from schizophrenia and spent much of her life in psychiatric institutions. Rose’s trauma is reflected in the physical disability and chronic shyness of Laura in Wiiliams’s earlier play The Glass Menagerie, and in Blanche’s nervousness and ultimate fate in A Streetcar Named Desire. While Rose was not an exact prototype for Laura and Blanche, Williams was haunted by her tragic affliction, and his characters’ fragilities may also have been an expression of his fears for his own mental stability.

Features of Williams’s mother and father are also identifiable in the characters in Streetcar. Williams’s mother, Edwina, was the daughter of a southern preacher, and although she wasn’t actually born in the south, she adopted the airs of a southern lady. Williams’s father, Cornelius, was a volatile character, who enjoyed drinking and playing poker, not unlike Stanley. The Williams family lived in fear of his temper. Cornelius also had no time for his wife’s southern pretensions, an aversion which Stanley replicates in his impatience with Blanche.

The origins of Blanche’s snobbishness about where Stella and Stanley live can be traced to Edwina’s despair with her reduced circumstances when the Williams family moved from Mississippi to St Louis.  It felt like a tremendous step down for Edwina, and the description of their apartment in St Louis sounded very like the tenement building we see in Streetcar and The Glass Menagerie.

There is perhaps a less obvious influence from Williams’s life evident in Streetcar. We talked in the podcast about the multiple references to death in the play, centred of course on the awful suicide of Blanche’s young husband. But Blanche refers more than once to deaths in the family back at Belle Reve, the grim sordidness of which she was unable to escape. And in a lyrical speech near the end of the play she slips into a dream-like reverie imagining her own death at sea, with her “hand in the hand of a nice-looking ship’s doctor, a very young one with a small blond moustache and a big silver watch…and I’ll be buried at sea sewn up in clean white sack and dropped overboard – at noon – in the blaze of summer – and into an ocean as blue as my first lover’s eyes.” The detail in her vision is transporting. The play’s absorption with death may have been an expression of Williams’s own anxiety at the time, because when he was writing Streetcar he believed that he was dying of pancreatic cancer.

Although not literal translations, it is clear that the characters and themes in Williams’s play were effusions of his own psychological landscape.