How are past and present intertwined in a streetcar named desire?

Williams uses the domestic setting and naturalistic character exploration as a microcosm for wider elements of social change and tensions in post war America. In this reading of the play Blanche represents the old world values and Stanley represents the new world values. Blanche is described as a ‘southern belle’ and stands for past American values of refinement, manners, aristocracy and high culture. This is illustrated through her constant references to music and literature. Williams’s links her character with the past through the structure of the play in which Blanche becomes increasingly susceptible to flashbacks. Her character is also linked with an older form of theatre, melodrama, through sudden bursts of emotion and grand statements such as ‘I don’t want realism I want magic!’ Conversely the character of Stanley is grounded in the new naturalistic form and talks in colloquial language. This character embodies the post war values representing social change, power and the patriarchy. The new world view that Stanley embodies can be summed up by the Poker game scene in which he yells, ‘come on! Are you in or out?’ The violence of the scene and the metaphor of life as a competition goes a long way in presenting the rise of the working class and the corruption of the old ideals.

These two characters clash throughout the play on a personal level but also act as a two sided argument for Williams to examine ideas of the corruption of the concept of ‘civilization’ after the horrors of the war. Williams seems to position Stanley and thus post war values as primitive. Stanley is linked with base desires throughout the play with Blanche referring to him as a ‘survivor of the stone age.’ The animal imagery that surrounds Stanley throughout the play, such as ‘ape’ and comments that ‘he acts like an animal, has animal habits,’ suggest that Williams’s point is that present American values are actually a regression. Prominent theatre critic Harold Clurman suggested at the time that Stanley presented ‘a real social threat’ and goes so far as to suggest that Stanley represented the rise of fascist power that had seen across Europe throughout the 40’s thus illustrating the danger of the eradication of old world values. Stanley’s literal domination and destruction of Blanche through the ultimate rape acts as a metaphor for the new rise of violent masculine activity destroying the older more genteel values of the past that Blanche represents.