1907

1907 marks the year of the marriage of Cornelius Coffin Williams and Edwina Estelle Dakin, who wed on June 3 in Columbus, Mississippi. This union established the family into which their son, the playwright Tennessee Williams, would be born four years later, and it set in motion the domestic dynamics that would later inform his work. The year also stands as a distant historical reference point for the legal framework that governs the Kowalski household in A Streetcar Named Desire: the Napoleonic code, which Stanley Kowalski invokes to assert his claim over any property belonging to his wife, Stella Kowalski.

The Williams Family Marriage

On June 3, 1907, Cornelius Coffin Williams and Edwina Estelle Dakin were married in Columbus, Mississippi. This marriage produced three children: Rose Isabelle Williams, born in 1909; Thomas Lanier Williams III, the future playwright, born in 1911; and Walter Dakin Williams, born in 1919. The family's move to St. Louis, Missouri, in 1918 would prove a significant dislocation, and the tensions between the parents—the father's often absent, demanding presence and the mother's genteel aspirations—would later be refracted through the characters and conflicts of Williams's plays. The marriage itself, formed in the early years of the twentieth century, belongs to a social world of Southern propriety and expectation that would be radically challenged by the events of the following decades.

The Napoleonic Code and the Kowalski Marriage

In A Streetcar Named Desire, the Napoleonic code is introduced by Stanley Kowalski as a legal principle that, in his understanding, makes a wife's property her husband's property and vice versa. He explains to Stella that "in the state of Louisiana we have the Napoleonic code according to which what belongs to the wife belongs to the husband and vice versa." This law becomes the basis for his aggressive interrogation of Blanche DuBois about the loss of Belle Reve, the family plantation. Stanley suspects that Blanche has somehow swindled Stella out of her share of the property, and he demands to see the papers. The Napoleonic code thus serves as a tool of masculine authority and economic suspicion, pitting Stanley's working-class pragmatism against Blanche's evasive gentility. The year 1907, though distant from the play's 1947 setting, anchors the legal tradition that Stanley wields to assert his dominance within the household.

Social and Racial Context

The year 1907 also belongs to the broader historical context of New Orleans, the city where the play is set. The play's stage directions describe a "cosmopolitan city where there is a relatively warm and easy intermingling of races in the old part of town," a social reality that had been shaped by decades of history preceding 1907. The presence of the Negro Woman and the Mexican Woman in the play reflects this intermingling, as does the music of the "blue piano" that emanates from a barroom around the corner. The year 1907, as a marker of the early twentieth century, stands at the beginning of a period of profound social change in the American South, changes that would eventually produce the world of the Kowalskis and the DuBois sisters.

Thematic Significance

1907 functions in the play's world as a distant temporal anchor, a year before the birth of the playwright and long before the events of the drama. It represents a pre-war, pre-Depression era of relative stability, a time when the social hierarchies of the Old South—embodied by Belle Reve and the DuBois family—still held sway. By the time of the play, that world has collapsed, and the Napoleonic code, a relic of an earlier legal order, is used by a man of the new industrial working class to dismantle the last remnants of the old plantation aristocracy. The year 1907 thus marks the beginning of a trajectory that leads, forty years later, to the confrontation between Blanche's faded gentility and Stanley's raw, legalistic power.