Tennessee Williams' Appeal for Selfhood Wholeness: Androgyny Aspiration Expressed Through Characters in A Streetcar Named Desire

Tennessee Williams, one of the most well-known American playwrights in 20th century, created Blanche in typical female temperament, and Stanley, with typical male features, in his play A Streetcar Named Desire(hereinafter referred to as Streetcar). The radical contrast and conflict between these two main characters are controversially discussed by scholars at home and abroad, most of whom connect the work with Tennessee William's homosexuality identity or contradictions of cultural values between the North and the South in America. However, few studies on Streetcar set foot on the androgyny aspiration of the playwright. With Virginia Woolf's claim in her work A Room of One's Own that androgyny is an ideal condition for a writer to be creative, it is plausible to interpret main characters in Streetcar, therefore, to understand Tennessee Williams' worship on androgyny and his longing for an intact selfhood.