Literary Context Blog: Regionalism

Regionalism plays a significant role in “A Streetcar Named Desire”. This play shows the 20th century south, specifically New Orleans, in an honest way. It shows us issues such as gender inequality and a lack class mobility. This is regionalism because it shows us the good and the bad of New Orleans. Regionalism focuses on everything that creates a place. Things like dialects, customs, and environment. Stories that involve regionalism tend to have similarities. Some of these similarities can be having an unmarried female main character, like Blanche, or having a theme of sentimentality. As its written in “Regionalism in English Fiction Between the Wars”, “What these fictions might share[...] is their sense of regions as points of difference that are linked, if not continuous, with the space of the nation-state and with international and transnational movements” (Hart, 93).

In the first scene of the show when Blanche arrives and Stella and Stanley’s house, we see her reactions to her surroundings. She is horrified that Stella is living in such terrible conditions, or at least terrible by her standards. She seems to feel above it all. When you consider regionalism within this passage, it can really deepen your interpretation of it. This really shows the class divide. The rich live on grand plantations and the poor live in small, shared apartments. Even though Blanche is now completely broke, she still see herself as above the people around her. This shows a reality of life in New Orleans at this time, being that there was a class divide.

What I found the most interesting while doing this research was that 19th century southern regionalism helped to mend tensions after the civil war. Kathryn McKee wrote, “Writers of the postbellum era record the aftermath of the century-splitting conflict in memoirs and Lost Cause laments before rallying around a continued sense of local distinctiveness expressed in regional literature, populated by still rebellious, careworn Southerners trying to find their way into the twentieth century” (McKee, 11). I think this really shows how writing was able to help people understand the world they were living in. I really think that literature is powerful and this is a great example of just how powerful it can be.

Sources

McKee, Kathryn, ed. The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the American South.

1st ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Cambridge Companions

Online.  Web. 02 April 2015.

Matthew Hart. (2009). Regionalism in English fiction between the wars. In: Robert L. Caserio

(ed.) The Cambridge Companion to the Twentieth-Century English Novel. pp. 89-101.

[Online]. Cambridge Companions to Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press. Available from: Cambridge Companions Online [Accessed 06 April 2015].