Lecture on ‘Streetcar’:
Love and Hate
Paper 3
The Individual and Society
CA 4: Comparative Analysis of Set Texts
Section B, Elective Paper 3
The Individual and Society
• With close and detailed reference to any two
texts you have studied,
analytically compare the ways they present
• the response of individuals to the demands
and challenges of social pressures and
normative constraints.
Some elaboration of question focus
• Norms of behaviour
• Violations of norms of behaviour
From The Prague Cemetery
a novel by Umberto Eco
Who Am I?
24th March 1897
I feel a certain embarrassment as I settle down here
to write, as if I were baring my soul, at the
command of – no, by God! Let us say on the advice
of – a German Jew (or Austrian, though it’s all the
same). Who am I? Perhaps it is better to ask me
about my passions, rather than what I’ve done in
my life. Whom do I love? No one comes to mind.
I know I love good food: just the name
Tour d’Argent makes me quiver all over. Is that love?
From The Prague Cemetery
a novel by Umberto Eco
Whom do I hate?
I have known Germans, and even worked for them: the
lowest conceivable level of humanity. A German produces
on average twice the faeces of a Frenchman.
Hyperactivity of the bowel at the expense of the brain,
which demonstrates their physiological inferiority. During
times of barbaric invasion, the Germanic hordes strewed
their route with great masses of faecal material. Even in
recent centuries, French travellers knew when they had
crossed the Alsace frontier by the abnormal size of the
turds along the roads . . . and it’s been shown that the
urine of a German contains twenty per cent nitrogen
while that of other races has only fifteen.
(Cont) from Chapter 23
“For the enemy to be recognized and feared, he has
to be in your home, or on your doorstep. Hence the
Jews, Divine Providence has given them to us and
so, by God, let us use them and pray there’s always
some Jew to fear and hate. We need an enemy to
give people hope. Someone said that patriotism is
the last refuge of cowards: those without moral
principles usually wrap a flag around themselves,
and the bastards always talk about the purity of the
race. National identity is the last bastion of the
dispossessed. But the meaning of identity is now
based on hatred for those who are not the same.
Hatred has to be cultivated as a civic passion.
The enemy is the friend of the people. You always
want someone to hate in order to feel justified in
your own misery. Hatred is the true primordial
passion. It is love that’s abnormal. That is why
Christ was killed: he spoke against nature. You don’t
love someone for your whole life – that impossible
hope is the source of adultery, matricide, betrayal
of friends . . . But you can hate someone for your
whole life – provided he’s always there to keep your
hatred alive. Hatred warms the heart.”
• ‘There are things that can be said in fiction
that are unsayable in a work of philosophy.’
- Colin Wilson,
author of The Outsider
Section B
Comparison of Texts Question
The texts used in this section cannot be used in
Section C.
Imagine you have been asked this question:
• Love and hate are the defining characteristics
of individual-society interaction.
Compare the ways and the extent to which
any two texts you have studied represent and
reflect this state of affairs in human
relationships.
Concerns; Techniques; Effects
• Concerns; Issues?
Through the characters, Williams explores issues
concerning a segment of society in the American South;
Williams creates a particular version of this world in order
to foreground problems and issues he recognized in
American society;
• Concerns related to Paper 3 Theme: Individual and Society
• Literary and Dramatic Techniques; (Pattern Awareness)
• Dramatic Effects – what desired effect or
audience response does the playwright wish to achieve?
Internal Effects; External Effects; Overall Effects;
• Comparative Analysis: ‘Streetcar’ and ‘Othello’
Concerns; Techniques; Effects
• What are the central concerns of this or that play
• For example, the theme of Love and Hate
• How are such themes represented to the
audience?
• Through words, gestures, and deeds of characters
• For example through love-speech and hatespeech; imagery representing love or hate;
• And to what effect…audience response –
does the playwright wish or intend to achieve?
Animal; Insect, Bird, and Plant Imagery
Othello
• ‘Wild-cats in your kitchens’
• Were they as prime as
goats, as hot as monkeys /
As salt as wolves in pride
• ‘With as a little a web as
this will I ensnare as great a
fly as Cassio;’
• Hawks ‘If I do prove her
haggard’
Streetcar
• ‘He says you have been
lapping it all summer like a
wild-cat’
• Tiger—tiger!
• Is he a wolf?
• Lilies; and Laurels
• Tarantula
• Flamingos – ironically
suggestive of florid (yet lurid)
and exaggerated displays;
Concepts of Love and Hate?
Different Senses and Degrees
Sources / objects of Hatred; Hatred of what?
• Figures or Symbols of Authority; Conventions;
• Injustice; unfairness; hypocrisy; favoritism;
• Men loving yet hating women;
• Hatred of women, particularly prostitutes;
• Hatred of the ‘Other’
Love of what?
• Love, Lechery, and Lust
• Love of women;
• Love of power, money, and wealth;
love of societal prestige;
Love and Hate
The Love to Hate
• Othello has been described as
‘An invasion of love by hate’,
• and a depiction of the degradation of love
between man and woman.
• (and what of ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’?)
• The theme of Love and Hate is closely connected
with the theme of Good versus Evil, and Jealousy;
• Iago describes love as “merely a lust of the blood
and a permission of the will.’
Love and Hate
Comparative Analysis
OTHELLO
STREETCAR
• Othello’s love of Desdemona
• Iago’s hatred of Othello; yet
ironically Iago declares his love
for Othello; ‘My lord, you
know I love you.’
• Stanley’s love of Stella
• Iago pours pestilence into
Othello’s ears;
• Othello in turn seeks proof
from Iago that his wife is
unfaithful, and a strumpet;
‘Villain, be sure to prove my
love a whore.’
• Blanche’s hatred of Stanley
• Blanche similarly tries to
poison Stella’s mind regarding
Stanley;
• Stanley in turn tries to poison
Stella’s mind re Blanche, on
grounds she is a prostitute;
Love, Hate, and Societal Relationships
• Society’s patriarchal construction / shaping of
acceptable / desirable female identities;
• Society tolerates women of loose virtue in its midst;
Many ordinary, ‘normal’ heterosexual men tolerate and
love their presence in society;
• But not as wives; not as family members, or family
relations in the midst of marriage and the family;
• At the same time, society tolerates men being sexually
unfaithful or heterosexually deviant;
• Masculine identity and morality socially constructed /
shaped differently from that of the feminine;
• Abnormal Love? Abnormal Hate? (and Society)
Love and Hate in Relationships
How are you socially constructed as an individual in terms
of –
• Social class / status; education; wealth; power
• Gender; nationality / ethnicity / race (Moor or Polack)
All of which affects society’s perceptions and
expectations of you;
• You can be loved or loathed by being
male or female; local or foreign; rich or poor; powerful
or powerless; enlightened or ignorant; refined or rough
etc
• Or loved and hated simultaneously,
sometimes in equal measure
All this Love and Hate
Taking Place Where?
• Noteworthy is its invisibility, or lesser visibility;
Taking place in the private sphere
• In the shadow lands of Society
(e.g. the Cyprus of the play, Othello)
• The margins of Society (In Streetcar the poor French
quarter of New Orleans)
• In the private sphere as much as in the public,
Patriarchy is the monarchy of the everyday world
Scene 5 p46
• Blanche: You’re—you’re—so good to me!
And I—
• Blanche: You hate me to talk sentimental. But
honey, believe I feel more than I tell you! I
won’t stay long. I won’t, I promise I—
Scene 6 p55
He hates me
• Blanche: And he has to put up with me,
apparently so much against his wishes. . . .
Surely he must have told you how much
he hates me!
• Mitch: I don’t think he hates you.
• Blanche: He hates me. Or why would he insult
me? Of course there is such a thing as the
hostility of—perhaps in some perverse kind of
way he—No! To think of it makes me . . .
[She makes a gesture of revulsion. Then she
finishes her drink. A pause follows.]
Stella to Stanley in Scene 7 p58
• Stanley, stop picking on Blanche.
• Lately you’ve been doing all you can think of
to rub her the wrong way, Stanley,
and Blanche is sensitive.
Some Significant Encounters
Scene 8
• Mr. Kowalski is too busy making a pig of
himself to think of anything else!
• That’s right, baby.
• Your face and your fingers are disgustingly
greasy.
Go and wash up and then
help me clear the table.
He hurls a plate to the floor
• That’s how I’ll clear the table!
[He seizes her arm.]
Don’t ever talk that way to me!
“Pig—Polack—disgusting—vulgar—greasy!”
them kind of words have been on your tongue
and your sister’s too much around here!
What do you think you are?
A pair of queens?
Remember what Huey Long said—
“Every Man is a King! And I am the king around
here, so don’t forget it!
[He hurls a cup and saucer to the floor.]
The poisoning scene
and Verbal  Dramatic Effects
• Lie Number One: All this squeamishness she puts
on! But Sister Blanche is no lily! Ha-ha!
Some lily she is!
• She is famous in Laurel as if she was the President
of the United States,
only she is not respected by any party!
This supply-man stops at a hotel called
the Flamingo.
• Stella protests: My sister lived at Belle Reve.
But let’s recall Stage Directions
introducing Stanley in Scene 1 p13
Stanley throws the screen door of the kitchen open and
comes in. He is of medium height, about five feet eight or
nine, and strongly, compactly built. Animal joy in his being is
implicit in all his movements and attitudes. Since earliest
manhood the centre of his life has been pleasure with
women, the giving and taking of it, not with weak indulgence,
dependently, but with the power and pride of a richly
feathered male bird among hens. Branching out from this
complete and satisfying centre are all the auxiliary channels of
his life, such as his heartiness with men, his appreciation of
rough humour, his love of good drink and food and games, his
car, his radio, everything that is his, that bears his emblem of
the gaudy seed-bearer. He sizes up women at a glance, with
sexual classifications, crude images, flashing into his mind…
All the while Blanche is singing ‘but it wouldn’t be make-believe if you
believed in me’
• This is after the home-place had slipped
through her lily-white fingers! She moved to
the Flamingo! A second class-hotel which has
the advantage of not interfering in
the private social life of personalities there!
The Flamingo is used for all kinds of goings-on.
But even the management was impressed by
Dame Blanche! In fact they were so impressed
by Dame Blanche that they requested her to
turn in her room-key—for permanently!
Dramatic Effects
Internal? External?
• Stella:
What contemptible lies.
What—contemptible—lies!
Stanley:
Sure, I can see how you would be upset by this.
She pulled the wool over your eyes as much as
Mitch’s!
Stella: It’s pure invention! There’s not a word of
truth in it and if I were a man and this creature had
dared to invent such things in my presence—
Stella draws back upon hearing…
• Honey, I told you I thoroughly checked on these
stories! Now wait till I finished. The trouble with
Dame Blanche was that she couldn’t put on her
act any more in Laurel! They got wised up after
two or three dates with her and they quit, and
she goes on to another, the same old lines, same
old act, same old hooey! But the town was too
small for this to go on forever! And as time went
by she became a town character. Regarded as not
just different but downright loco—nuts.
Note Stella’s response Scene 7
• I don’t believe all these stories
and I think your supply-man was
mean and rotten to tell them.
It’s possible that some of things he said
are partly true.
Iago lies to Othello in Act 4 Scene 1
Iago: Lie –
Othello: With her?
Iago: Lie with her? On her. What you will.
Lie with her? Lie on her. We say lie on her
When they belie her. Lie with her – Zounds,
That’s fulsome. Handkerchief – confessions –
Handkerchief! To confess and be hanged for his
Labour -
Words of Hate in Deed
In the final scenes of both plays
• In Streetcar, Stanley rapes Blanche and thereafter
has her committed to an Institution for the
insane;
• In Othello, Othello following his threat to chop
Desdemona into messes, he smothers her to
death.
• Both female characters are victims of masculinist
hatred and violence for failing to conform to
patriarchal conceptions of ideal womanhood;
Blanche in Scene 10
• But I have been foolish—casting pearls before
swine!
• Yes, swine! Swine! And I’m thinking of not only
you but of your friend, Mr. Mitchell.
And to repeat slander to me, vicious stories
he had gotten from you.
• But some things are not forgivable.
Deliberate cruelty is not forgivable.
It is the one unforgivable thing in my opinion and
it is the one thing of which I have never , never
been guilty.
Othello Act 5, Scene 2
Soft you a word or two before you go.
Speak of me as I am;
Nor set down aught in malice. Then must you speak
Of one that loved not wisely, but too well;
Of one, not easily jealous, but being wrought
Perplexed in the extreme; of one whose hand,
Like the base Indian, threw a pearl away
Richer than all his tribe;