Misrepresentation and Miscegenation: Reading the Racialized Discourse of Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire

Abstract

Audiences and readers familiar with the plays of Tennessee Williams recognize immediately in the voice, the inflection, and the idiom of characters such as Amanda Wingfield, Blanche DuBois, and Big Daddy Pollitt, a language variety that distinguishes the South from other regions of the United States. What is no less obvious, but seldom noted, is the apparent absence of African American voices from this otherwise realistically depicted discourse community.