Tennessee Williams’ New Orleans, Where Desire Will Always Live

As a writer and card-carrying bluestocking, I am aware of how fortunate we are to have inherited New Orleans’ rich and colorful literary legacy. To walk these streets is to follow in the footsteps of literary giants. As such, in the upcoming issues, I will dive into some iconic New Orleans writers and some lesser-known ones who made our fair city a part of their lives and work.

I can’t hear the high-pitched screech of a streetcar and not think of Tennessee Williams and the tragic and fragile Blanche DuBois from A Streetcar Named Desire. Tennessee Williams, who called New Orleans his spiritual home and muse, arrived in his twenties, making his home on Toulouse Street in the French Quarter, where he lived and wrote intermittently until his death.

The haunting words and complex emotions of A Streetcar Named Desire were found in the sultry corners of the French Quarter apartment, as well as other famous haunts, including the Hotel Monteleone’s Carousel Bar, where he was said to enjoy eavesdropping on conversations.

Williams’s love for New Orleans was welldocumented in his work. A Streetcar Named Desire, without a doubt, reflects his affinity for the Crescent City; however, the less famous Vieux Carré and Suddenly Last Summer are also two works that vividly reveal his great passion for New Orleans. Although these two plays differ in structure and tone, they are both steeped in the spirit of the city and reveal the profound connection Tennessee Williams felt to its debauchery, strangeness, and emotional transparency: three characteristics that drew him back for decades.

In Vieux Carré, Williams looks to his earliest memories of New Orleans, setting the play in a weathered French Quarter boarding house similar to his apartment on Toulouse Street. Suddenly Last Summer doesn’t take place entirely in the city, but its characters, dripping in Southern elegance, are unquestionably New Orleans natives.

The simple words of Blanche still make me pause when she speaks of a New Orleans that today doesn’t exist. “They told me to take a streetcar named Desire, and then transfer to one called Cemeteries and ride six blocks and get off at Elysian Fields!” These iconic words outline a transit route that is long gone, but still part of the area’s vernacular. Dig a little deeper into the text and the literary metaphors; you’ll see these streetcar stops could symbolize Blanche’s tragic, timely spiral: Desire as the passion leading to emotional doom; Cemeteries, obviously, death; and Elysian Fields, the afterlife. Referencing these symbolic streetcar stops is a forever reminder that, for Mr. Tennessee Williams, New Orleans was never just a setting, but also a feeling. It was (and is) a feeling that gets into bones, creeps into hearts, and never really lets go.

As the great thief of time hurls the world into a cold and contemporary existence, it is a gift to claim Tennessee Williams as New Orleans’ own. He captures the countless contradictions, the nostalgic scraps of the past, and the charms of New Orleans, where, regardless of the swift pass of time, they live forever.