A Streetcar Named Desire

Use these questions or activities to help gauge students’ familiarity with and spark their interest in the context of the work, giving them an entry point into the text itself.

Short Answer

1. Look at these various book covers and theater posters of the play. From their art, what can students infer about the text? What might they imagine the plot to be about? Ask them to consider color scheme, objects, body positioning, etc.

Teaching Suggestion: Point out the recurring color motifs of red and black throughout these images, and ask students to apply adjectives to these colors (red: love, lust, passion, anger, war; black: death, mourning, power, evil, despair). Make a list of the objects that appear in the images (bathtub, alcohol, a lightbulb, a moth, playing cards) and have students free associate what these symbols could represent. Lastly, explain the stock character of the femme fatale, and ask students to list women (real or fictional) who have been understood or portrayed as femmes fatales (Cleopatra, Marilyn Monroe, Cersei Lannister from Game of Thrones, Black Widow from The Avengers, Lady Macbeth from Macbeth, Daisy Buchanan from The Great Gatsby, etc.). 

2. The epigraph to A Streetcar Named Desire comes from Hart Crane’s poem “