"Stanley represents the macho forward-driving America of the future" - Explore this view of 'A Streetcar Named Desire'

As a protagonist, Stanley certainly represents the machismo and capitalist drive which characterised Tennessee Williams’ post-war America, informed by social tensions arising out of the upheaval of World War Two. In 'Streetcar' Stanley represents a new America, in which a man can be whatever he wants to be regardless of his background. When the play debuted in 1947, such questions were at the forefront of the new American consciousness. In Stanley’s case, this is the background of a lower-class immigrant worker. When discussing his background with his wife Stella, who has come from a monied family in the Old South, he tells her ‘I was common as dirt. I pulled you down off them columns…and how you loved it!” (Scene 7). In this singular quote, Williams demonstrates how Stanley epitomises a ‘macho forward-driving America.’ He triumphantly reclaims his roots, and proudly admits to being ‘common as dirt,’ but demonstrates pride in having pulled Stella ‘down off them columns.’ The columns, representing Belle Reve, Stella’s childhood home are no threat to Stanley, as he pulls her down from them in a quasi-sexual show of dominance which she ‘loved.’ Thus we can see the way in which Stanley goes against pre-war hierarchies of North and South, upper class and lower class, in order to claim Stella as his own. In this we can quite clearly see his status as the ‘macho, forward-driving’ and capitalist America of the future, in which a man can claim whatever he wants, regardless of his class background. Stanley’s alignment with a heavily masculine image of the American future is further emphasised by Williams’ presentation of Blanche. Blanche comes to act as a dramatic foil for Stanley, with Williams’ positing her as his total opposite. This is even emphasised in Williams’ use of different lighting for the two characters. While his stage directions emphasise that Blanche possesses a ‘delicate beauty’ which must ‘avoid a strong light,’ Stanley is seen in ‘lurid nocturnal brilliance’ in a number of scenes (Scene 1, Scene 3). Blanche represents the Old South, rather than the ‘macho forward-driving America of the future,’ as emphasised by her fixation on Belle Reve, the old plantation her family once owned. Literally translated, the name means ‘beautiful dream,’ with Williams emphasising the untenability of the prelapsarian dream in its very name. As Oklopcic notes, Blanche can be seen as representing ‘the last representative of the old aristocracy.’ Blanche clings to such old hierarchies as a means of elevating herself about Stanley, describing him as ‘sub-human’ and a ‘Polack’ at various points within the play. Despite Blanche’s attempts to disparage Stanley, he tells her ‘I am not a Polack…But what I am is a one-hundred percent American, born and raised in the greatest country on earth’ (Scene 7). While some may argue that Blanche, with her non-immigrant background is a more ‘traditionally American’ character, she represents the Old South, and a pre-war America, obsessed with old codes of conduct and the fact that she is ‘French by extraction.’ By contrast, Stanley proudly claims his status as an American man, and is the character to eventually expose her ‘lies and conceits and tricks’ in the climactic confrontation between them in the penultimate scene of the play (Scene 10). In having Stanley rape Blanche, Williams emphatically demonstrates not only that Stanley represents the ‘macho forward-driving America of the future,’ but also that in order for this future to exist, the Old South must be vanquished and dominated. In this case this is physically represented on stage by Stanley’s rape of Blanche, which the audience are forced to watch. Stanley, the macho new American male, sexually dominates Blanche in a show of masculine aggression, over the old faded South. Thus through Stanley’s proudness in his American identity and lower-class background, as well as through contrasting him to the faded Southern Belle Blanche, Williams highlights to his audience that Stanley does indeed represent the ‘macho forward-driving America of the future’