1940

1940 stands as a year of both professional formation and theatrical catastrophe for Tennessee Williams, a period that set the stage for the artistic breakthroughs and thematic preoccupations that would culminate in A Streetcar Named Desire. From January through June of that year, Williams studied playwriting with John Gassner at the New School for Social Research in New York City, a formal education that sharpened the craft he would soon deploy in his most celebrated works. The year ended in disaster: on December 30, 1940, Williams's play Battle of Angels, starring Miriam Hopkins, suffered a disastrous first night during its out-of-town tryout in Boston and closed shortly thereafter. This early failure, however, did not deter Williams; it was part of a long struggle to reach the Broadway stage, a struggle that Arthur Miller later recalled as parallel to his own.

Legal and Social Context

The year 1940 also provides the legal and social backdrop against which the conflicts of A Streetcar Named Desire unfold. The Napoleonic Code, which Stanley Kowalski invokes in Scene Two to assert his claim over his wife's property, was the law of Louisiana, the state where the play is set. Stanley's declaration that "what belongs to the wife belongs to the husband and vice versa" reflects a legal reality that would have been in force in 1940, giving his threat to investigate the loss of Belle Reve a concrete legal basis. The racial dynamics of New Orleans, where "there is a relatively warm and easy intermingling of races in the old part of town," were also a feature of the city in 1940, as the play's opening stage directions make clear. The presence of the Negro Woman and the Mexican Woman in the play reflects the cosmopolitan character of the French Quarter, a setting that Williams evokes with a "raffish charm" that is "poor but, unlike corresponding sections in other American cities."

Theatrical and Cultural Milieu

The year 1940 also marks a moment in the broader theatrical culture that would later receive A Streetcar Named Desire. The play's first production, which opened at the Barrymore Theatre in New York on December 3, 1947, was directed by Elia Kazan and produced by Irene Selznick. The copyright for the play, held by the University of the South, dates from 1947, with a renewal in 1957. The legal notices in the published edition, which warn against unauthorized performances and specify the Dramatists Play Service as the licensing body for amateur rights, reflect the commercial and legal structures of the Broadway theater industry that Williams navigated. The play's success, which Miller described as "plant[ing] the flag of beauty on the shores of commercial theater," was all the more remarkable given the prevailing wisdom that "a Broadway play with literary quality could not survive the banal tastes of the New York audience." The audience's response to the play, which Miller recalled as a collective intake of breath when Blanche said the "kindness of strangers" line, demonstrated that the theatrical culture of the late 1940s was ready for Williams's poetic realism.

Thematic Resonance

The year 1940 also resonates thematically with the play's exploration of class, gender, and social mobility. Stanley Kowalski, who proudly declares himself "a one hundred percent American, born and raised in the greatest country on earth," embodies the working-class assertiveness that was a feature of the post-Depression era. His claim that "Every Man is a King!" echoes the populist rhetoric of Huey Long, the Louisiana governor who died in 1935 but whose political legacy lingered into the 1940s. Blanche DuBois, by contrast, represents the fading aristocracy of the Old South, a world that had already been lost by 1940 when Belle Reve, the family plantation, slipped through her fingers. The play's setting in the spring, summer, and early fall of an unspecified year in the late 1940s places its action in a period when the social transformations of the post-war era were just beginning to take shape. The "blue piano" that "expresses the spirit of the life which goes on here" in the French Quarter captures the melancholy and vitality of a city that was, in 1940, still a place where "you are practically always just around the corner, or a few doors down the street, from a tinny piano being played with the infatuated fluency of brown fingers."