Displacement and Identity: Music Cues in Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire

초록

While Elia Kazan's premiere of A Streetcar Named Desire has often encouraged readings centered on performance and theatrical effect, the historical context that shape the play's musical language have remained insufficiently examined. This article reconsiders the music in A Streetcar Named Desire as a historically situated and ideologically charged dimension. By re-situating the Varsouviana/ polka, the ‘blue piano’, and the ‘trumpet and drums’ within postwar New Orleans, I argue that the music cues in the play function as a representational system through which displacement, identity, and power are negotiated. Drawing on Stuart Hall's theory on popular culture and cultural identity as constituted within representation, it reads these recurring music cues as competing cultural signs. The blue piano, rooted in boogie-woogie blues, and the trumpet-and- drum music, linked to bebop jazz, registers shifting relations of class, ethnicity, and hegemony, while the Varsouviana encodes Blanche's attachment to a declining southern order. Set against a racially heterogeneous world of New Orleans, the play reveals both aristocratic Blanche and working-class Stanley as differently positioned “Other” within a shared diasporic confusion in capitalism discourse. The play's music, therefore, reveals not only cultural conflicts but also the failure of recognition and integration in postwar American modernity.

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