Stanley Calls for Stella

Stanley Calls for Stella is the raw, transformative climax of the poker-night violence in A Streetcar Named Desire, the moment when the Kowalski marriage reveals its deepest nature: a cycle of brutality and erotic reunion that Blanche DuBois cannot comprehend and that ultimately seals her fate as an outsider in her sister's home.

Causes and Background

The scene follows directly from the poker-night explosion in the Kowalski apartment. Stanley, drunk and losing at cards, had grown enraged by the women's presence in the bedroom—Blanche had turned on the radio and begun to waltz with Mitch, and Stella had protested his rough treatment of her. In a fury, Stanley snatched the small white radio off the table and hurled it out the window, then charged after Stella when she confronted him. A blow was heard, Stella cried out, and Blanche screamed that her sister was going to have a baby. The other men—Steve, Pablo, and Mitch—grappled Stanley into the bedroom and forced him under a cold shower, while Blanche rushed Stella upstairs to Eunice Hubbell's flat. The poker game broke up, the men swept their winnings off the table and fled, and Stanley was left alone, dripping wet in his clinging polka-dot drawers, to realize that his wife had left him.

What Happens

Stanley stumbled half-dressed out onto the porch and down the wooden steps to the pavement before the building. There he threw back his head like a baying hound and bellowed his wife's name: "Stella! Stella, sweetheart! Stella!" The cry was drawn out into a long, heaven-splitting howl—"Stell-lahhhhh!"—that cut through the night. Eunice Hubbell, leaning down from her upper apartment, shouted at him to quit howling and go back to bed, warning him that he could not beat a woman and then call her back, especially a woman who was going to have a baby. She called him a stinker and a whelp of a Polack, hoping the police would turn the fire hose on him as they had the last time. Stanley, humbly now, insisted he wanted his girl to come down with him. Eunice slammed her door. But then the door upstairs opened again. Stella slipped down the rickety stairs in her robe, her eyes glistening with tears and her hair loose about her throat and shoulders. They stared at each other. Then they came together with low, animal moans. Stanley fell to his knees on the steps and pressed his face to her belly, curving a little with maternity. Her eyes went blind with tenderness as she caught his head and raised him level with her. He snatched the screen door open, lifted her off her feet, and bore her into the dark flat.

Consequences and Aftermath

Blanche, who had come out on the upper landing in her robe and slipped fearfully down the steps, stopped before the dark entrance of her sister's flat and caught her breath as if struck. She rushed down to the walk before the house, looking right and left as if for a sanctuary. Mitch appeared from around the corner and told her not to be scared—Stanley and Stella were crazy about each other. Blanche, trembling, said she was not used to such violence. Mitch offered her a cigarette and they sat on the steps. She looked up at the sky and said there was so much confusion in the world, then thanked him for being kind. "I need kindness now," she said. The next morning, Stella defended Stanley's behavior to Blanche, explaining that when men were drinking and playing poker anything could happen, that he was as good as a lamb when she came back, and that he was very ashamed of himself. She even revealed that on their wedding night Stanley had snatched off one of her slippers and smashed all the light bulbs with it—and that she had been sort of thrilled by it. Blanche, horrified, called Stanley a madman and an animal, but Stella insisted she was not in anything she wanted to get out of. The scene thus establishes the fundamental rift between the sisters: Stella accepts the violent passion as part of her marriage, while Blanche sees it as proof of a brutishness that must be escaped. Stanley's call for Stella is not merely a drunken plea but a demonstration of the erotic power that binds the Kowalskis together, a power that Blanche can neither match nor survive.