Throughout the play, sexual desire is linked to destruction. While Stella is at the hospital giving birth to his child, Stanley rapes Blanche: the culmination of his sexual act with Stella coincides with the tragic culmination of his destined date with Blanche. Although he hits Stella, she continues to stay with him and to submit to his force. Stanley’s sexuality asserts itself violently over both Stella and Blanche. Stanley’s sexuality and his masculinity are extremely interconnected: he radiates a raw, violent, brute animal magnetism. When Blanche is horrified that Stanley beats Stella, Stella explains that the things that a man and a woman do together in the dark maintain their relationship.
Even though Stanley is violent to Stella, their sexual dynamic keeps them together. Stella is pregnant: her sexuality is deeply tied to both womanliness and motherhood. Stella is drawn to Stanley’s brute, animal sexuality, and he is drawn to her traditional, domestic, feminine sexuality. Stella’s desire for Stanley pulls her away from Belle Reve and her past. To Blanche, perhaps motivated by her discovery that her first husband was in fact homosexual, losing her desirability is akin to losing her identity and her reason to live. Blanche clings to her sexuality more and more desperately as the play progresses. Blanche dresses provocatively in red satin, silks, costume jewelry, etc: she calls attention to her body and her femininity through her carefully cultivated appearance.
When Blanche meets Stanley’s poker-playing friends, she lights upon Mitch as a possible suitor and adopts the guise of a chaste lover for him to pursue.īlanche nearly attacks the Young Man with her aggressive sexuality, flirting heavily with him and kissing him. Blanche tells Stella that she and Stanley smoothed things over when she began to flirt with him. Her interactions with men always begin with flirtation. Much of Blanche’s conception of how she operates in the world relies on her perception of herself as an object of male sexual desire. The power of sexual desire is the engine propelling A Streetcar Named Desire: all of the characters are driven by “that rattle-trap street-car” in various ways.
Many critics believe that Williams invented the idea of desire for the 20th century.
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