A Streetcar Named Desire

Scaffolded/Short-Answer Essay Questions

Use these essay questions as writing and critical thinking exercises for all levels of writers, and to build their literary analysis skills by requiring textual references throughout the essay.

1. Strict gender roles of the time dictate much of the action and dialogue of the play.

• How does this play reinforce or destabilize gender roles? (Topic sentence)
• What influence does gender have on the action and dialogue of the play? Identify at least three specific scenes and use details from the text to support your ideas.
• How do gender roles impact forms of power and the meaning of desire? (Conclusion)

2. If we assume the play is set during the time it was written, it takes place in 1947. Certain references to music and politics provide contextual clues to the times as well. 

• How does Elysian Fields reflect or contrast with the larger context of mid-1940s America and the world at large? (Topic sentence)
• Consider, compare, and contrast Elysian Fields within a larger national and global historical context.
• How might the characters have behaved differently if they lived in today’s world? (Conclusion)

 3. Poker is a card game that the men repeatedly play in the text.

• Why do you think Williams chose poker as opposed to another card game or form of entertainment as a central event of the play? (Topic sentence)
• Analyze the scenes when poker is played (scenes 3 and 11). What changes across the scenes? Include the specific game of seven-card stud somewhere in your discussion.
• How does poker connect to the theme of imagination versus reality? (Conclusion)

Essay Assignments

1. Sounds and actions on the street constantly interrupt or backdrop the dialogue taking place within the Kowalski flat. What are the purposes of these various interruptions? How do the sounds amplify what is happening on stage? How might reading them on the page differ from seeing them enacted on stage?

2. Whenever Blanche talks about Belle Reve, her language becomes dreamlike—loose and associative. What can you piece together about her experience there given the visceral details she provides? How do this trauma and the past traumas of her life influence her manner of moving about the world? Why does her final trauma--when Stanley rapes her--compel a complete psychotic break?                                                        

3. Consider Williams’ decision to make Blanche an English teacher. Her manner of speaking is often lofty, touching on subjects that surpass the experiences and knowledge of those around her. How does her education hinder or help her in forming relationships with the people of Elysian Fields? How does it help Blanche escape to a world of imagination versus reality?