[A Streetcar Named Desired followed The Glass Menagerie] in its concern with the quality of human love, but I do not mean to suggest that it had a literary content as such. There are intellectual points represented in the play, and a conscious interplay of ideas—the pitting of Kowalski's animal life force against Blanche's fragile poetry is the central one. But the play, in true left-wing style, represents the introduction of a new kind of meaning and a new way of stating it into the American theater. Streetcar is about abstract ideas—ways of living. The closest it ever gets to actually stating a point is in saying that "desire is the opposite of death."
That is its guiding point. The breakdown of Blanche DuBois is the breakdown, or death, of a way of life. Beauty and sensitivity are qualities too fragile for their new, hard, healthy but pitiless replacements. The Old South that Blanche and her lost plantation represent had to collapse and Williams does not flinch from that necessity. But he weeps for the betrayal of the lovely and the refusal of the new world to allow Blanche "a cleft in the rock of the world that I could hide in."
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