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1. Sexual Themes in
A Streetcar Named Desire
Rev. Merle K. Peirce
December 15, 1982

2. Venery plays a rôle of nearly over-riding importance in Elia
Kazan’s production of Tennessee Williams’ A stretcar Named Desire,
as a unifier and a backdrop against which other considerations of
ethical relations and conduct are displayed. All of Williams’
characters are influenced or motivated by some aspect of their own
or other’s sexuality. Ultimately, the sex in Williams’ play loses the
traditional qualities of vitality and renascence with it would be
expected to carry and assumes an almost sterile aspect.
The very name of the play/film is redolent of the lust that
permeates both the Kowalski and DuBois families. A lust that
assumes a varying cachet for each, growing out of its social
standing. Certainly the title is emblematic of one or more of the
sexual themes running through the film. The clever use of the
route name desire also suggests Williams was aware of the Dublin
slang term tramcar (streetcar), meaning prostitute and consciously
phrased the title to imply this.
Kazan/s opening visuals, the inescapable phallicism of the train.
And the vignette of Blanche and the young sailor and the streetcar

3. named Desire all serve to point up the importance of sexual motifs.
Interestingly. It is Blanche and Stanley who are the most affected by
their sexuality: two extremes, two opposites, yet two extremely
strong willed and sensual people. Both also use the sexuality to
achieve mastery of others – Blanche as the Southern coquette and
Stanley as the apish stud.
Blanche’s insistence on remnants of frayed elegance. Her cold
baths, fanciful lightshades and rle as rhe Southern Virgin for Mitch,
all seem to return her to a time when hern world was infinitely
finer, when she has status, power and charm; her fixation on Belle
Reve is a Recherche du Temps Perdus. She uses her old life to
impose on her sister and her brother-in-law, and to entrap a
husband, Mitch, as in the restaurant scene.
On the other hand, Stanley supposes bestiality is reality, and he
moves in a world out of Paul Laurence Dunbar’s Sport of the Gods or
Frank Norris’ The Pit. He is entirely motivated by the grossness of
the flesh. His pleasures are his beer and his bed; his intellectual
Olympus the card game with his friends. He is quite clearly the
epitome of the stereotypical Polack – gross, dumb and strong.

4. Brando’s adenoidal slur helps emphasise the gutter quality of the
character. He does, however, endow it with a uniquely sexual
quality that has the effect of raising our estimation of Kowalski.
With an open lure of sex that must have delighted Williams, Brando
appears frequently bare chested, flexing his musculature. His
blonde hair is always tousled and tantalising. He makes optimum
use of his body and looks. He offers himself to women as a
physically ideal lover; to men as an image of mastery, competence
and rugged beauty. All men will wish to be like him, all women to
be in his arms. He makes Stanley , a thoroughly unsympathetic
character, a male equivalent of Marilyn Monroe’s dumb blonde
rôles.
In quite effective contrast is Karl Malden’s Mitch, portrayed as
an essentially ineffectual and as yet immature male. He is clearly
more sensitive and intelligent than Stanley yet he lacks his stunning
sexuality. Mitch is nearly sexless, subordinated to his mother, until
awakened by his meeting with Blanche at the poker game. Like
Blanche’s first husband, the effeminate boy, he seems rather lost
and lonely.

5. Blanche fails both of them – Alan, because she cannot accept
and understand his sexuality; and Mitch because she cannot live up
to the image of perfection he has of her. Later on, he imitates
Stanley in a mock rape scene, and as the film ends, he matures,
punching out Stanley and accepting Blanche, when it is too late to
matter.
Mitch, unlike Stanley, will suffer because he is intelligent enough
to understand his trouble is caused by his embrace of Stanley’s cult
of bestiality. The Stanley Kowalskis will never truly suffer because
they are incapable of an understanding of the trouble which they
cause or which may surround them.
Stella’s rôle is fascinating because she is quite literally intoxicated
with sex. Stanley has fucked her into a stupor and she no .longer
has any conception of anything. She is completely subdued. This is
made clear in the conversation she has with Blanche about Stanley’s
shortcomings. Only at the film’s end is there the possibility of the
mists lifting from her eyes and that she may leave Stanley.

6. Stanley, threatened by Blanche’s taunting and fierce
independence, decides to subjugate by the same means he used to
stupefy Stella - his body. Yet Blanche has used her body also; to
keep some men at a distance, to draw others quite near. Stanley is
not one of the effeminate young boys she prefers; he is a grotesque
caricature of a man, and his plan plunges her into madness rather
than effectuating her submission.
Sexual themes in Williams seem inevitably to lead to destruction
and loss. No character in A Streetcar Named Desire triumphs, all
merely endure and for each, even the Polack, his or her sexuality is
the gallows on which they must hang.
Alan cannot accept his special sexuality and is devastated and
destroyed because Blanche cannot either. She is haunted by her
failure, and continually reenacts her first love with every young boy
or stranger she can seduce, like a broken, repetitious recording.
Stella is reduced to a mass of quivering, non sentient flesh unable
to respond in any way except sexually; her temptation has become
her snare.

7. Mitch has grown aware, had the woman he needs come within
his grasp, failing to accept her until after she has gone mad and he
remains ever to be tortured by the memory and knowledge of his
inadequacy. In like manner, Stanley becomes part of Williams’
trinity of failure by imagining his service can be for Blanche the
soporific it is for Stella. The great difference, however is that
Stanley, the quintessential male animal, is as far from being a”man”
as Alan. in fact, Williams seems to indicate that cogitation is a
necessary attribute of real manhood and here Alan and Mitch both
eclipse Kowalski, who Williams seems to suggest is a half-man, an
empty image of what the world thinks a man is, and in this film, he
exposes the two haves of man: Alan and Mitch as homo cogitator,
Kowalski as homo erectus.
The sexuality in A Streetcar Named Desire is sterile and
mechanical, destroying the lives of its practitioners. It is in pointed
converse to the primordial rôle of sex as fertile and religious
rebirth, a rattling journey to the end of the line.

8. Filmography
A Streetcar Named Desire, Elia Kazan director, Warner Brothers,
1951. Based on the play A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee
Williams. Starring Marlon Brando as Stanley Kowalski, Vivien
Leigh as Blanche DuBois, Kim hunter as Stella Kowalski and Karl
Malden as Mitch.