The Kindness of Strangers: Eugenics and Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire

Abstract

This article argues that Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire offers a broad critique of eugenic ideology, epitomized in Williams’s choice to end the play with Blanche DuBois’s forced institutionalization. By comparing the published 1947 play with eight distinct draft Streetcar scenes archived at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, I recover Williams’s dramatic critiques of the cruelty of twentieth-century American eugenic social policy. Over the course of Streetcar’s drafts, Williams accentuates Blanche’s increasing loss of reproductive and bodily control, emphasizes the stigmatization of her mental health, exposes pervasive eugenic assumptions articulated by Blanche herself, and explores the eugenic potential of a DuBois-Kowalski child born to either Blanche or her sister Stella. This article thus proposes a feminist, anti-eugenic reading of Streetcar attuned to the impact of the sexist, ableist, racist, and classist rhetoric of the American eugenics movement on the play and then-contemporary US social policy.