WILLIAMS' JOURNEY TO 'STREETCAR': AN ANALYSIS OF PRE-PRODUCTION MANUSCRIPTS OF 'A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE'

This study provides both historical and critical information on the evolution of A Streetcar Named Desire based on materials held in the Tennessee Williams Collection of the Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin. Seven hundred thirty-eight pages of authorial manuscripts and typescripts, professional typescripts with authorial emendations, and stage manager's scripts are examined in detail to recreate the composition process from the earliest available drafts to the script used for the premiere performance on December 3, 1947. Physical and textual evidence, as well as information in Williams' correspondence, is used for arriving at and defending an ordering of the manuscript materials.;In addition to the establishment of chronology of composition and critical analysis of the evolutionary process, this dissertation includes transcriptions of some fifty pages of early drafts of the play.;Streetcar's evolution apparently spanned a period of over four years. Begun as a brief film scenario, it was transformed into a fragment of a one-act play that was revised several times before it was expanded to full-length. After its expansion, it underwent numerous alterations as the playwright struggled with characterization, theme, and dramatic technique. Originally set in an Italian-American section of Chicago, the play was for a time located in Atlanta before its setting was established as New Orleans' French quarter. Particularly enlightening is evidence of Williams' experimentation with various expressionistic devices as he searched for the means to portray the disintegration of Blanche's mind within an external world that remains totally coherent. The ending of the play appears to have presented Williams with the greatest difficulty. Until very late in the composition process, he was considering two possibilities: in addition to the ending that appears in Streetcar, he worked with a version in which Blanche and Stanley, on the morning after their sexual encounter, reflect on the unexpected and intense pleasure of the previous night and discuss their course of action for the future. The most striking observation arising from this analysis is the size of Williams' accomplishment: almost without exception, his revision constituted improvement; thus, he was able to begin with early drafts which are quite poor and, through a painstaking process of experimenting, discarding, and rewriting, arrive at a final text that is one of the finest works of American dramatic literature.