Over a decade later for the male protagonist in Streetcar. It also became the name he would remember and use It was Stanley Kowalski who made Williams feel less lonely during this (44)Ĭornelius uprooted his son from college and placed him in a blue-collar factory His name was Stanley Kowalski, and his family survived in St. Soon, however, the man married, and about ten years later he died. He became Tom’s closest companion of the warehouse, and with him Tom apparently felt accepted, even protected from some of the harshness that otherwise surrounded his life. He was everything the young poet was not-at ease in crowds and with strangers, sure of his strength and confident of his ability to charm the ladies. Little is known about the real Stanley Kowalski, butĭonald Spotto provides a helpful depiction of him in his biography of Williams:Īt International Shoe, there was a dark, burly, amiable worker assigned to a job near Tom. Good friends”-a man he worked with at the International Shoe Company in St. Was the character Stanley Kowalski namedĭecided to name his male antagonist Stanley Kowalski after one of his “very His character is a stereotypical Polish-American man as well as a composite of many men including Williams’s co-worker, Stanley Kowalski his ex-lover, Pancho Rodriguez y Gonzalez and his father, Cornelius Coffin Williams. The antithesis of the southern gentleman, Stanley first appears onstage carrying “his bowling jacket and a red-stained package from a butcher’s” he brazenly shouts, “Meat!” as he “heaves the package” at his wife, Stella.

The iconic character of Stanley Kowalski in Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire is a stereotype of the Eastern European male-a card player and drinker who is macho, working class, and brutish.

When Blanche Met Brando by Sam Staggs