🗺️ Entry 7: Setting: Elysian Fields
Entry 7: Elysian Fields as Character — How New Orleans Unbuilds the Old South
New Orleans functions as an active force in the play. Through street sounds, color, and cramped spaces, the setting strips away Old‑South illusions and exposes characters to public scrutiny. “Elysian Fields” becomes an ironic promise: the place is no paradise, but it reveals what people will do when privacy is thin and money and power are close to the door.
Williams introduces the neighborhood as “a cosmopolitan city where there is a relatively warm and easy intermingling of races” and notes that the “blue piano” “expresses the spirit of the life which goes on here” (Williams sc. 1). He stresses exposure and proximity: “in this part of New Orleans you are practically always just around the corner, or a few doors down the street, from a bar‑room” (Williams sc. 1). During poker night, the stage directions turn the apartment electric: “The kitchen now suggests that sort of lurid nocturnal brilliance, the raw colors of childhood’s spectrum” (Williams sc. 3). Later, as Blanche unravels, a street voice pierces the room—“Flores para los muertos”—a phrase the Mexican woman repeats like a tolling bell (Williams sc. 9).
These details make the city a pressure system rather than a backdrop. The “blue piano” announces that the quarter’s rhythms keep playing whether the Lomans—here, the Kowalskis and DuBois—are ready or not; calm never lasts because sound leaks through walls (Williams sc. 1). The “warm and easy intermingling” unsettles Blanche’s class and racial snobberies and pushes her old codes up against a modern, mixed street where performance has less shelter (Williams sc. 1). The short walk to a barroom shrinks the distance between public temptation and private strain; Stanley’s nights out are always one door away from the kitchen argument.
On poker night, the “lurid” palette and “raw colors” turn the small flat into a glare of appetite and competition (Williams sc. 3). That visual temperature amplifies volume, sweat, and conflict, so that Stella’s attempts at gentleness feel outmatched by the room itself. When “Flores para los muertos” drifts in during Scene 9, the city literally speaks a death‑word into Blanche’s space. Because the apartment cannot seal out the street, memory and fear are never private; the setting collaborates with plot, accelerating Blanche’s panic and exposing Mitch’s shift from tenderness to judgment. “Elysian Fields” starts to read as irony: a promised resting place that instead keeps everyone awake.
Contextual and socio‑economic: the multilingual, working‑class quarter undercuts Old‑South gentility and enforces the realities of wage labor, crowded housing, and public nightlife.
Archetypal: the name “Elysian Fields” echoes the afterlife but becomes an inversion—no paradise, only a testing ground where illusions die; these paradise promises tend to have a backside to them and the inversion here to bring that to light does it really well.
Environments with thin walls and constant street noise make private life feel public; when space is tight, tempers and tenderness both intensify.
This is the exact reason I myself don't like the city; I get the same stress that Williams was able to show so well.
This entry draws on Scene One (city description; “blue piano”; barroom proximity), Scene Three (poker‑night color and lighting), and Scene Nine (the repeated “Flores para los muertos”).