perfectly the disintegrating Compson family. Benjamin is the youngest son

described as being "sold into Egypt" in the Appendix to the novel; here

Shegog lectures on the Israelites who "passed away in Egypt" (295).

Matthews notes that Jason is a "wealthy pauper" (11), fitting Shegog's

description: "wus a rich man: whar he now, O breddren? Wus a po man: whar

he now, O sistuhn?" (295). He has embezzled thousands of dollars from his

sister, yet he lives like a poor man. Even Mrs. Compson, Matthews claims,

is described in Shegog's sermon: "I hears de weepin en de lamentation of de

po mammy widout de salvation en de word of God" (296). Matthews even

suggests that Quentin is implied in the voice of one congregation member

that rises "like bubbles rising in water" (11).

Much has been made of the religious symbolism in this chapter. Aside from

Shegog's sermon there is Benjy's age: he is 33 years old, the age Christ

was when he died. Like Christ, or like a priest, he is celibate. And he

seems to be one of the only "pure" members of the family, incapable of

doing anything evil merely because of his handicaps. But he is not the only

Christlike member of the family. Quentin, the daughter of the woman whose

brother wanted to remember her as both virginal and motherly, has an

unknown father, just as Christ, the son of the Virgin Mary, had no earthly

father.

Like Christ, Quentin suffers a misunderstood and mistreated existence. But

most compelling is the fact of her disappearance on Easter Sunday. Just as

the disciples found Christ's tomb empty, the wrappings from his body

discarded on the floor, Jason opens Quentin's room to find it empty: "the

bed had not been disturbed. On the floor lay a soiled undergarment of cheap

silk a little too pink, from a half open bureau drawer dangled a silk

stocking" (282). If Quentin is a Christ figure, however, she seems to have

a very un-Christlike effect on her family. Whereas the pure and virginal

Christ's disappearance signaled the end of death and the beginning of new

life in heaven, the promiscuous Quentin's disappearance signals the

destruction of her family.

Other elements of the section seem more apocalyptic: there is Shegog's

name, for instance, which sounds much like the Gog and Magog mentioned in

the Book of Revelation. There is the story's preoccupation with the end of

the Compson family: Jason is the last of the Compsons, and he is childless,

his house literally rotting away. And finally there is Dilsey's comment

that she has seen the first and the last, the beginning and the end:

although the meaning of this statement is unclear, she seems to be

discussing the end of the Compson family as well as her life, and perhaps

the end of the world. Dilsey has borne witness to the alpha and the omega

of the Compson family.

Nevertheless, none of this religious symbolism is particularly well-

developed. It is impossible to tell who, if anyone, is the Christ figure in

this Easter story. It is impossible to know what will happen to Quentin, or

if the family will really dissolve as Dilsey seems to think it will. Nor is

it particularly clear why Reverend Shegog's sermon has such an effect on

Dilsey or what his actual message is; he has seen the recollection and the

blood of the Lamb, but why is this important? What should the congregation

do about it? What can they do in order to see this themselves?

The problem with this last section is that it doesn't satisfactorily bring

the story of the Compson family to a close. The reader is left with a

glimpse of the family's psychology and slow demise, but no real answers, no

redemption. We don't know what will happen to the family or its servants:

will Jason send Benjy to Jackson? Will Dilsey die? Will Quentin get away?

John Matthews has pointed out that the story doesn't really end but keeps

repeating itself.

This is partially due to its nature as a stream-of-consciousness

narrative; none of the three brothers' sections is purely chronological,

therefore when the story ends their memories continue on. Matthews claims

that the fourth section does not "[complete] the shape of the fiction's

form" or "retrospectively order" the rest of the book; in fact it does not

have much to do with the first two sections at all (9). The Compson clock

ticks away toward the family's imminent demise, but it chimes the wrong

hours, mangling the metaphor. Reverend Shegog's sermon does not have the

intended effect, so he modifies it and tells it again: it "succeeds because

it is willing to say, and then say again" (12). The story doesn't end; its

loose ends are not tied together. Instead it constantly repeats. Faulkner

himself said that the novel grew because he wrote the story of Caddy once

(Benjy's section), and that didn't work, so he wrote it again (Quentin's

section), but that wasn't enough either, so he wrote it again (Jason's

section), and finally wrote it again (Dilsey's section), and even this

wasn't good enough. The story of Caddy and the Compsons does not end, but

repeats itself eternally in its characters' memories.

The Streetcar Named ”Desire”

Context

Tennessee Williams was born Thomas Lanier Williams in Columbus,

Mississippi, in 1911. Much of his childhood was spent in St. Louis. The

nickname Tennessee' seems to have been pinned on him in college, in

reference to is father's birthplace or his own deep Southern accent, or

maybe both.Descended from an old and prominent Tennessee family, Williams's

fatherworked at a shoe company and was often away from home. Williams lived

with mother, his sister Rose (who would suffer from mental illness and

later undergo a lobotomy), and his maternal grandparents.

At sixteen, Williams won $5 in a national competition for his essay, "Can a

Wife be a Good Sport?," published in Smart Set. The next year he published

his first story in Weird Tales. Soon after, he entered the University of

Missouri, where he wrote his first play. He withdrew from the university

before receiving his degree, and went to work at his father's shoe company.

After entering and dropping out of Washington University, Williams

graduated from the University of Iowa in 1938. He continued to work on

drama, receiving a Rockefeller grant and studying play writing at The New

School in Manhattan. During the early years of World War Two, Williams

worked in Hollywood as a scriptwriter.

In 1944, The Glass Menagerie opened in New York, won the prestigious New

York Critics' Circle Award, and catapulted Williams into the upper echelon

of American playwrights. Two years later, A Streetcar Named Desire cemented

his reputation, garnering another Critics' Circle and adding a Pulitzer

Prize. He would win another Critics' Circle and Pulitzer for Cat on a Hot

Tin Roof in 1955.

Tennessee Williams mined his own life for much of the pathos in his drama.

His most memorable characters (many of them complex females, such as

Blanche DuBois) contain recognizable elements of their author or people

close to him. Alcoholism, depression, thwarted desire, loneliness in search

of purpose, and insanity were all part of Williams's world. Certainly his

experience as a known homosexual in an era and culture unfriendly to

homosexuality informed his work. His setting was the South, yet his themes

were universal and compellingly enough rendered to win him an international

audience and worldwide acclaim. In later life, as most critics agree, the

quality of his work diminished. He sufiered a long period of depression

after the death of his longtime partner in 1963. Yet his writing career was

long and prolific: twenty-five full-length plays, five screenplays, over

seventy one act plays, hundreds of short stories, two novels, poetry, and a

memoir. Five of his plays were made into movies.

Williams died of choking in an alcohol-related incident in 1983.

Characters

Blanche { Stella's older sister, until recently a high school English

teacher in Laurel, Mississippi. She arrives in New Orleans a loquacious,

witty, arrogant, fragile, and ultimately crumbling figure. Blanche once was

married to and passionately in love with a tortured young man. He killed

himself after she discovered his homosexuality, and she has sufiered from

guilt and regret ever since. Blanche watched parents and relatives{all the

old guard{die off, and then had to endure foreclosure on the family estate.

Cracking under the strain, or perhaps yielding to urges so long suppressed

that they now cannot be contained, Blanche engages in a series of sexual

escapades that trigger an expulsion from her community. In New Orleans she

puts on the airs of a woman who has never known indignity, but Stanley sees

through her. Her past catches up with her and destroys her relationship

with Mitch. Stanley, as she fears he might, destroys what's left of her. At

the end of the play she is led away to an insane asylum.

Stella Kowalski { Blanche's younger sister, with the same timeworn

aristocratic heritage, but who has jumped the sinking ship and linked her

life with lower-class vitality. Her union with Stanley is animal and

spiritual, violent but renewing. She cannot really explain it to Blanche.

While she loves her older sister, and pities her, she cannot bring herself

to believe Blanche's accusation against Stanley. Though it is agony, she

has her sister committed.

Stanley Kowalski { Stanley is the epitome of vital force. He is a man in

the ush of life, a lover of women, a worker, a fighter, new blood{a chief

male of the ock, with his tail feathers fanned and brilliant. He is loyal

to his friends, passionate to his wife, and heartlessly cruel to Blanche.

Mitch { An army buddy, coworker, and poker buddy of Stanley. He is the

sensitive member of that crowd, perhaps because he lives with his slowly-

dying mother. Mitch and Blanche are both people in need of companionship

and support. Though Mitch is of Stanley's world, and Blanche is off in her

own world, the two believe they have found an acceptable companion in the

other. Mitch woos Blanche over the course of the summer until Stanley

reveals secrets about Blanche's past.

Eunice { Stella's friend and landlady. Lives above the Kowalskis with

Steve.

Steve { Poker buddy of Stanley. Lives upstairs with Eunice.

Pablo { Poker buddy of Stanley.

A Negro Woman { Two brief appearances. She is sitting on the steps talking

to Eunice when Blanche arrives. Later, in the 'real-world-struggle-for-

existence' sequence, she ri es through a prostitute's abandoned handbag.

A Doctor { Comes to the door at the play's finale to whisk Blanche off to

an asylum. After losing a struggle with the nurse, Blanche willingly goes

with the kindly-seeming doctor.

A Nurse { Comes with the doctor to collect Blanche and bring her to an

institution. A matronly, unfeminine figure with a talent for subduing

hysterical patients.

A Young Collector { A young man (seventeen, perhaps), who comes to the door

to collect for the newspaper. Blanche lusts after him but constrains

herself to irtation and a passionate farewell kiss. The boy leaves

bewildered.

A Mexican woman { A vendor of Mexican funeral decorations who frightens

Blanche by issuing the plaintive call: Flores para los muertos. The Mexican

woman later reprises this role in the underrated comedy Quick Change

(1990), starring Bill Murray and Geena Davis.

Summary

Stanley and Stella Kowalski live on a street called Elysian Fields in a run-

down but charming section of New Orleans. They are newly married and

desperately in love. One day Stella's older sister, Blanche DuBois, arrives

to stay with them, setting up the drama's central con ict: an emotional tug-

of-war between the raw, brute sensuality of Stanley and the fragile,

crumbling gentility of Blanche. Truth be told, it is not an even match, for

Blanche is already sliding down a slippery slope. Blanche and Stella are

the last in a line of landed Southern gentry. Stella has renounced the worn

dictates of class propriety to follow her heart and marry an uncultured

blue-collar worker of Polish extraction. Meanwhile, Blanche has played

nursemaid to the old guard on its deathbed and watched the family estate

slip through her fingers into foreclosure. Her professed values are those

of an older South, of charm and wit and chivalry, gaiety and light,

appearance and code.

Blanche claims she has been given a leave of absence from her high school

teaching job to recover from a nervous breakdown. She settles in with the

Kowalskis but things do not go smoothly. Her disapproval of Stanley and the

station in life her sister Stella has chosen is obvious, though she strives

to be polite. Her feelings against Stanley are galvanized when she

witnesses him strike Stella in a fit of drunken rage. Stanley's feelings

for her are similarly hardened when he overhears her describe him as animal-

like, neolithic, and brutish. Blanche's imposition, her airs, and her

distortions of reality infuriate Stanley. He begins to chip away at her

thin veneer of armor.

Of Stella's and Stanley's friends, one seems to stand above the rest in

sensitivity and grace. This is Mitch, who works at the same factory as

Stanley, and lives with his sick mother. He has no refinement, but his

native gentleness and sincerity inspire Blanche to return his afiection.

The two seem to need each other They see a great deal of one another as the

summer wears on, but Blanche places strict limits on their intimacy. She

has old-fashioned ideals and morals, she tells him. Meanwhile, Stella's

first pregnancy progresses and Stanley continues his subtle campaign of

intimidation against Blanche.

Blanche's past catches up with her. When she was younger, she fell in love

with and married a man whom she later caught in bed with another man. When

she confronted him, he killed himself for shame. This knocked the

foundations out from under her, and the subsequent poverty and emotional

hardships were too much for her. She sought solace or oblivion in the

intimacy of strangers; apparently many intimacies with many strangers, and

a disastrous afiair with a seventeen- year-old student at her high school.

Blanche departed Mississippi in disgrace and arrived in New Orleans with

nowhere else to go. Stanley discovers this sordid account. He tells Mitch

and efiectively ends the budding relationship. For Blanche's birthday,

Stanley presents her with a one-way bus ticket back to Mississippi. And

then, while Stella is in labor at the hospital, Stanley rapes Blanche.

Stella cannot believe the story Blanche tells her about the man she loves.

And Blanche's grasp on reality is otherwise shattered. So, with supreme

remorse, Stella has Blanche committed. In the final scene of the play,

Stella sobs in agony and the rest look on indifierently as a doctor and a

nurse lead Blanche away.

Scene 1 Summary

The scene is the exterior of a corner building on a street called Elysian

Fields, in a poor section of New Orleans with "rafish charm." The building

has two ats: upstairs live Steve and Eunice, downstairs Stanley and Stella.

Voices and the bluesy notes of an old piano emanate from an unseen bar

around the corner. It is early May, evening.

Eunice and a Negro woman are relaxing on the steps of the building when

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