We feel a sense of community through the way that Stella casually greets her neighbours on the steps, and by the three women: Eunice, the Coloured Woman and the Negro Woman chatting comfortably outside of their homes; the different races mentioned early in the play also show how cosmopolitan the quarter is. The tightness of the community is also shown physically through the immediacy of the inhabitant’s houses, EUNICE: ‘She’s got the downstairs here and I got the up’.
As Blanche arrives in the quarter the residents are nothing but helpful, Eunice immediately asks her, ‘What’s the matter honey? Are you lost?’ The fact that she calls a stranger ‘honey’ shows how comfortable and relaxed in her environment she is. It seems that everybody is everybody’s friend at this point.
Blanche’s initial reaction to the quarter gives us an insight into the social class there. She simply cannot believe that her well to do sister could live in such an area, we see this when the streetcar stops at Elysian Fields for her and she exclaims ‘They mustn’t have – understood – what number I wanted…’ We are shown the difference in the sister’s new social classes when Blanche’s appearance is described as being ‘incongruous’ to the setting, after an explanation of Blanche’s ‘dainty’ yet flamboyant appearance we realise that it is the setting that is of a low class.
The Quarter is depicted as being heavily influenced by its music, in particular the ‘Blue Piano’ which is mentioned throughout this scene and the entire play. This gives the scene a rhythmical and relaxed sense about it which strengthens previous ideas of ‘Elysian’ Fields having a certain luxury about it’s atmosphere, ‘In this part of New Orleans you are practically always just round the corner.. from a tinny piano being played with the infatuated fluency of brown fingers.’
2) A Streetcar Named Desire V.EVANS
Audience members may well see Stanley as an egalitarian hero at the play's start. He is loyal to his friends and passionate to his wife. Stanley's down-to-earth character proves harmfully crude and brutish. His chief amusements are gambling, bowling, sex, and drinking, and he lacks ideals and imagination. He possesses an animalistic physical vitality that is evident in his love of work, of fighting, and of sex. When the audience is first introduced to him he is shouting for Stella in his tough streetwise banter and hurling a package of meat up to her. This underscores his primitive qualities. It is as if he were bringing it back to his cave fresh from the kill. His entrance also underscores the intense sexual bond between him and Stella, which is apparent to the other characters as well. Stanley yells "Catch!" as he tosses the package, and a moment later the Negro woman yells "Catch what!" Eunice and the Negro woman see something sexual and hilarious in Stanley's act of tossing the meat to a breathlessly delighted Stella. Williams makes his nature very apparent right from the beginning if only subtly at first.
His family is from Poland, and several times he expresses his outrage at being called ‘Polack’ and other such derogatory names. During their first encounter inside the apartment Blanche calls him a ‘Polack,’ and he makes her look old-fashioned and ignorant by asserting that he was born in America, is an American, and can only be called ‘Polish’. Stanley represents the new America to which Blanche doesn't belong, because she is from a defunct social hierarchy. Stanley's intense hatred of Blanche is motivated in part by the aristocratic past Blanche represents. Stanley's cocky interactions with Blanche show him to be insensitive—he barely lets Blanche get a word in edgewise as he quickly assesses her beauty. Nevertheless, in this introduction, I think that the audience is likely to sympathize with Stanley rather than Blanche, for Blanche behaves superficially and haughtily, while Stanley comes across as unpretentious, a social being with a zest for life if a little rough around the edges.
The stage directions themselves describe Stanley as a virulent character whose chief pleasure is women. His dismissal of Blanche's beauty is therefore significant, because it shows that she does not radiate his same brand of carnal desire. On the other hand, Blanche's delicate manners and sense of decorum are offended by Stanley's virility. Stanley's qualities—variously described as vitality, heartiness, brutality, primitivism, lust for life, animality— will lead him over the course of the play into an unrelenting, unthinking assault on the already crumbling facade of Blanche's world.
