Streetcar

« Bak, J.

S.

Ç Criticism on A Streetcar Named Desire  : A Bibliographic Survey, 1947-2003 È, Cercles 10 (2004) : 3-32. CRITICISM ON A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE A Bibliographic Survey, 1947-2003 JOHN S.

B AK UniversitŽ de Nancy II-C.T.U. When A Streetcar Named Desire opened at the Ethel Barrymore Theater on 3 December 1947, it stirred up controversy overnight.

The play met with rave reviews in the following morningÕs papers, like that from Brooks Atkinson who called it Òa quietly woven study of intangiblesÓ and Tennessee Williams Òa genuinely poetic playwright whose knowledge of people is honest and thoroughÓ [First Night , 42].

In the days ahead, Joseph Wood Krutch in Nation , Kappo Phelan in Commonweal , John Chapman in the New York Daily News , John Mason Brown in The Saturday Review , and Irwin Shaw in The New Republic all sounded similar praise for Williams and for Streetcar .

The play was not impervious to negative reviews, however, as Thomas Adler points out in his monograph The Moth and the Lantern , What criticisms the early reviewers did register centered on three issues: the potentially shocking nature of WilliamsÕs material, the seemingly loose way in which he structured it, and the apparently pessimistic stance he took toward human existence.

[Adler, 11] George Jean Nathan, for instance, complained of the playÕs ÒunpleasantÓ nature, calling it ÒThe Glands Menagerie Ó [Nathan, 14], and Mary McCarthy, satirizing WilliamsÕs use of symbolism and flowery rhetoric, said Williams would have been better off writing Òa wonderful little comic epic, The Struggle for the BathroomÓ [McCarthy, 358].

For the most part, though, author and play were critically acclaimed and commercially successful. Streetcar remains the most intriguing and the most frequently analyzed of WilliamsÕ plays. The following is a bibliographic essay digesting much of that theatric and academic criticism devoted to Streetcar since its debut.

Working in tandem with, and not opposition to, other bibliographic essays of its kind on Streetcar ,1 this essay attempts to provide a comprehensive understanding of the main issues that have bothered, troubled, or stumped critics over the years, issues whose own evolutions should be understood specifically as a byproduct of the changing needs of the academic community itself over the years.

To make the abundant and varied criticism on the play more accessible, I have tried to classify these different studies into groups which, I 1 See especially S.

Alan CHESLER, ÒA Streetcar Named Desire : Twenty-Five Years of Criticism,Ó Notes on Mississippi Writers , 7 (1973), 44-53; Thomas P.

ADLER, A Streetcar Named Desire: The Moth and the Lantern , Boston: Twayne, 1990, 10-15; and Philip C.

KOLIN, Tennessee Williams: A Guide to Research and Performance , Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1998, 51-79.

For contemporary condensations of the various critical renderings, see also Felicia Hardison LONDRƒ, ÒA Streetcar Running Fifty Years,Ó 45-66, in Matthew C.

ROUDANƒ (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Tennessee Williams , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Cercles 10 (2004). »