Kyle Hoffman
November 28, 2010
ENGL 357 – 01
Prof. Richards
Hoffmann 1
False Dichotomy of Class in “A Streetcar Named Desire”
In “A Streetcar Named Desire,” Tennessee Williams comments on the dubiousness of class distinctions in post-World War Two America in much the same way as Mark Twain commented on the racial issues of post-Reconstruction South in
Pudd’nhead Wilson
. Williams creates an ironic class dichotomy that he proves false in his comparison between Stanly Kowalski and Blanche DuBois, critiquing class by showing the lack of true difference between the two, in a very similar way as Twain critiqued race distinctions in
Pudd’nhead Wilson
.
Williams immediately introduces in Scene One the distinction between the lowerclass social standing of “primitive” (40) Stanley Kowalski and the supposed high-class standards of “cultivated” Blanche DuBois (126). When we first see Stanley, he is tossing a package of raw meat up at his wife Stella, and running off to the bowling lanes.
Blanche, conversely, acts as if the Kowalski’s home is beneath her, referring it to Stella as “this horrible place” (19). Blanche claims to be much more used to Belle Reve, the
Mississippi plantation that the DuBois family has owned. Yet this marker of Blanche’s high societal standard is soon shown to be false, as we learn that she no longer lives in the beautiful plantation.
Although Blanche claims of Stanley “Our attitudes and our backgrounds are incompatible,” once we are able to see, as Stanley does, that Blanche’s

Hoffmann 2 high class act is just that, it becomes apparent that Stanley and Blanche have similar attitudes and backgrounds, and it is clear that Williams is making a pointed critique of class distinctions.
A particular point of false class distinction that Williams makes is in Stanley’s and Blanche’s views of sex. Stanley, in his primitive way, is forward and blunt about his sexual urges, telling his wife she loved “having them colored lights going” (112).
Blanche, on the other hand, claims to have “old-fashioned ideals;” saying, “I’m an old maid schoolteacher” (91;55). Yet once her mask of sophistication is removed, Blanche’s sexuality is shown to be far from the purity expected from a lady of Blanche’s supposed class. In truth, she had “gotten mixed up with a seventeen year old boy,” and had so many sexual relations with local Army men she was declared “Out-Of-Bounds” (100-1).
Clearly, Williams set out to undermine the mask of virginity that Blanche, as representative of the high Southern culture, puts on, thereby showing that she is not unlike Stanley in her sexual attitudes, and in fact may be more perverse. As Stanley says of Blanche when she thinks she is better than the Kowalskis, “you ain’t gonna hear nothing you haven’t heard before.”
Economically, the class distinctions are again proven to be false. Blanche admits to being broke, and relies throughout the play on Stanley to house her free of charge.
Despite ordering Stella around as if she employed her, Blanche in fact is reliant on Stella to give her money. The loss of Belle Reve, which, as Stanley says, was partially owned by Stanley through the Napoleonic Code, also raises Stanley’s economic value as compared to Blanche. Belle Reve is symbolic of the loss of the DuBois family social standing; after “improvident grandfathers and father and uncles and brothers exchanged

Hoffmann 3 the land for their epic fornications,” Blanche has been reduced to the same economic and class standing as the Kowalskis (43). In fact, Blanche backhandedly admits to Stella that
Stanley is on the same socio-economic class and standing as Stanley, telling Stella,
“maybe he’s what we need to mix with our blood now that we’ve lost Belle Reve” (44).
One way that Williams attempts to show the commonness of Stanley is in his abuse of Stella. He drunkenly beats her in Scene Three, and yet Stella returns to him passionately. However, the abusive characteristic is not singular to “common” Stanley
(98). Blanche, in fact, is also guilty of violent abuse. After seeing her husband with another man, Blanche, “unable to stop” herself, exclaims to him “’You disgust me,’” after which he “stuck a revolver in his mouth, and fired” (96). Stanley is presented as
“bestial” in a sense, through his physical abuse of Stella and rape of Blanche, but it is clear that by having Blanche herself be verbally abusive, Williams is not condemning the commoners alone to domestic violence (71).
William’s creation of the false class dichotomy between Stanley and Blanche is similar in many ways to Twain’s false racial dichotomy found in
Pudd’nhead Wilson
.
Tom and Valet de Chambers are identical as children, despite Tom being white and
Chambers being one-thirty-second black, so much so that Chambers’ mother Roxy is able to switch the two in their infancy without anyone noticing. As the novel progresses, the gap between Tom and Chambers, now in their opposite roles, grows to an ironic submission of the white Tom to the “enslaved,” black Chambers.
This false binary between the white “slave” and black “master” is similar in the irony found in the class differences between high society Blanche relying completely on
“common as dirt” Stanley (112). As F.R. Lewis says of Roxy in Pudd’nhead Wilson
:

Hoffmann 4
“In saving the child from the consequences of the awful distinction that she assumes to be in the nature of things, she demonstrates its lack of any ground but convention; she demonstrates the wholly common humanity between the “nigger” and the white” (269).
It is fair to assume that Twain would agree with these sentiments. By showing the shallowness of the distinction (simply calling one by the other’s name), Twain is critiquing the presuppositions of racial differences. Although Pudd’nhead Wilson is set in the antebellum South, Twain was writing much later, and therefore the satiric nature of the racial issues can be seen as a critique of the post-war South in which Twain was writing.
This clearly relates Williams’ depiction of false class differences, exemplified by
Stanley and Blanche. Whereas she claims to be “French by extraction,” and acts superior to the “Polack” Stanley, she is in fact financially and morally no different (55). The irony of their class distinctions and the falsity therein is exemplified in the end, where Stanley, despite his “lower class,” is successful and Blanche, despite presenting herself as
“superior,” is sent to a mental hospital. It is not too far of a stretch to connect Blanche’s pretending to be high class with her eventual trip to the mental hospital.
The triviality of racial distinctions in
Pudd’nhead Wilson
is further amplified by
Roxy herself. As Lewis explains: “the conventionality of the distinction is figured by the actual whiteness of Roxy, whose one-sixteenth of Negro blood tells only in her speech”
(266). In this way, it is only something superficial and ductile such as speech that characterizes the former conventions in Twain’s story. Similarly, it is Blanche’s wardrobe of “rhinestone tiaras” and “satin robes” that mark her apparent class, but are

Hoffmann 5 shown to be mere masks covering her true identity; one morally and financially parallel to Stanley.
While Twain was commenting on the ridiculousness of racial distinctions in 19 th century Missouri, Williams seems to have been commenting on the class distinctions of post World War Two America. By setting the play around 1946 New Orleans, and by making both Stanley and Mitch World War Two veterans, Williams is intentionally setting his story in a time of immense social change in the United States. With the return of the male workforce from the War with government payments, there was a huge expansion of the American middle class; which is where the Kowalskis fit in (Richards,
11/22/10).
Stanley’s position in the new American Middle class, albeit a working middle class position, is put in direct juxtaposition with Blanche’s “Old World” Southern hierarchical expectations. Whereas Blanche seems disappointed by where Stella has ended up both in terms of her home and husband, (“Why didn’t you let me know…that you had to live in these conditions!”), Stella is quite comfortable with the Kowalski’s life in postwar America (20). In fact, she revels in the commonality of Stanley, claiming proudly that he “is a different species” (21). Stanley proudly admits that Stella came down to his social level, explaining; “you showed me the snapshot of the place with the columns. I pulled you down off them columns and how you loved it” (112).
If Stanley is read as a metaphor for the War itself, it seems obvious that many women of this older, hierarchical system would have been brought down to this level of commonality as well.
The world that Blanche imagines she is still a part of, with plantations and chivalrous

Hoffmann 6 gentlemen, has been changed by the War, and she cannot mentally adapt to accept that change.
The class dichotomy which Williams proves to be false is in itself a comment on the social changes that accompanied the end of World War Two. Whereas Stella has acknowledged that she cannot “compare [Stanley] with men that we went out with at home” (24) due to her change in circumstance, Blanche has not come to accept her actual class level. When Stella asks of Blanche “don’t you think your superior attitude is a bit out of place?” she is the mouthpiece of Williams, commenting on the end of the class differentiation that marked the end of World War Two (71).

Works Cited
Lewis, F.R.. "Mark Twain’s Neglected classic: The Moral Astringency f Puddn’head
Hoffmann 7
Wilson.." Pudd'nhead Wilson and Those Extraordinary Twins . Norton Critical
Edition. Sidney E. Berger. New York: Norton, 2005. Print.
Richards, Gary. Class Lecture. ENGL 357: Southern Literature. University of Mary
Washington, Fredericksburg, VA. August- December 2010.
Williams, Tennessee. “A Streetcar Named Desire.” New York; The University of the
South, 1975.