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1. General Attitudes toward Mental Health

Mental illness was often seen as shameful or a moral failing. Families would hide or deny relatives’ conditions to protect social reputation.

Little public understanding: Terms like “nervous breakdown” or “hysteria” were used casually without clear medical meaning. Emotional distress was often dismissed as weakness, especially for women.

Gender bias in diagnosis: Women’s mental health issues were often labeled as “emotional instability” or “hysteria,” while men’s were framed as stress from work or war.

2. Treatment & Institutions

Asylums as default: Those with severe symptoms were often sent to psychiatric hospitals, sometimes for life. Conditions in many institutions were poor—overcrowding, minimal therapy, and harsh control measures were common.

Treatment methods:

Electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) was widely used, often without anesthesia in the early years.

Lobotomies began to be popularized in the late 1940s, touted as a “cure” for severe mental illness but often leaving patients with permanent impairments.

Psychoanalysis existed but was expensive and mostly for the wealthy.

Medication limitations: Modern psychiatric drugs (like antidepressants or antipsychotics) didn’t exist yet, most treatment relied on sedation or physical restraint.

3. War’s Impact on Mental Health

PTSD under another name: Soldiers returned from WWII with what was called “battle fatigue” or “shell shock,” not recognized as PTSD until decades later.

Limited veteran support: VA hospitals provided some care, but stigma and lack of effective treatment left many untreated.

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Eros and Thanatos originates from Freud's essay "Beyond the Pleasure Prinicple" where Eros is the life drive and Thanatos is the life drive.

Eros (the life drive): drive towards survival, love, sexuality, and pleasure.

Thanatos (the death drive): drive towards aggression, destruction, decay, and death. This can be literally self-destruction or symbolically, psychological collapse or loss of vitality.

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A Southern belle is a traditional image of a young woman from the southern United States, especially from the old, wealthy, plantation-owning families before the Civil War.

She is usually described as:

Beautiful and well-dressed

Polite and charming

Skilled in manners, hospitality, and conversation

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Ha Khanh

-Blanche DuBois is the play’s classic “Southern belle”—a refined, elegant woman from the Old South who has lost her wealth and social standing. She comes to New Orleans to stay with her sister Stella, hiding her troubles behind charm, manners, and romantic illusions.

-The “Southern belle” stereotype is about beauty, grace, and proper manners, but Blanche also shows the darker side—loneliness, fear of aging, and difficulty adapting to modern life. She represents the dying Old South, while Stanley Kowalski, her brother-in-law, represents the tough, working-class “New South.”

-Blanche’s downfall shows how fragile the Southern belle ideal really is, and how dreams can’t always survive in a harsh reality.

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Dam

Origin: A subgenre of Gothic fiction that developed in the American South in the 20th century.

Setting: Often set in decaying plantations, small Southern towns, or rural areas.

Themes: Explores racism, poverty, violence, moral decay, and the clash between old Southern traditions and modern change.

Characters: Features flawed, eccentric, or grotesque characters, often marginalized or outcasts.

Notable Authors: William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, Carson McCullers, and Tennessee Williams.

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Dam

Full Name: Born Thomas Lanier Williams III in 1911.

Famous Works: A Streetcar Named Desire, The Glass Menagerie, and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.

Pulitzer Winner: Won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama twice.

Themes: Often explored desire, mental illness, family conflict, and the decay of the American South.

Legacy: Considered one of the greatest American playwrights of the 20th century.

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New Orleans is widely regarded as the birthplace of jazz (late 19th – early 20th century) due to its unique cultural blend:

Diverse cultural influences – African, Caribbean, French, Spanish, and Creole communities coexisted, creating a rich musical environment.

African rhythms + European harmonies – Jazz comes from a blend of African American blues, ragtime, spirituals, and brass band traditions with European classical structures.

Social spaces – Places like Storyville (a red-light district) and Congo Square were gathering points for music, dancing, and improvisation.

Some significant events that shape the music includes:

1890s–1910s: Birth of Jazz in New Orleans

Brass bands and marching music merge with ragtime and blues.

Storyville fosters the spread of the style.

1917: Closure of Storyville – Many musicians move to Chicago, spreading jazz north.

1920s: The Jazz Age & Chicago/New York Expansion

1917: Original Dixieland Jass Band records the first jazz record (Livery Stable Blues).

Great Migration brings African American musicians to Chicago, then to New York.

Harlem Renaissance links jazz to Black cultural pride and artistic innovation.

1930s–1940s: Swing Era & Big Bands

Jazz becomes mainstream entertainment through big bands (Duke Ellington, Count Basie).

1930s: New Orleans musicians like Armstrong become global stars.

1940s–1950s: Bebop & Modern Jazz

Bebop (Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie) shifts jazz from dance music to an art form.

Preservation Hall opens in New Orleans in the 1960s to keep traditional jazz alive.

1960s–Present: Revivals & Global Influence

Traditional jazz revival in New Orleans keeps early styles in the public ear.

Jazz Fest (established 1970) celebrates the city’s musical heritage.

Post-Katrina era sees jazz as a symbol of New Orleans resilience and cultural identity.

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Literature is very much affected by the living conditions in which it was "born and raised" in .

--> It is important to take into notice the context of New Orleans/ southern America to understand the existence of Southern Litterature and its unique attributes.

--> The cultures of several souths are embedded in literatures of slavery, literatures of pastoral, and literatures of resistance.

"A southern slavocracy, sectionalist and ultimately nationalist, is what called into being the first, and in many ways most distinctively southern genres. Slavery and the racial divisions it enforced by law and custom resulted in a multitude of literary forms of response, engagement, and argument: from the plantation novel to the slave narrative; from the slave narratives of the 1830s to the neo-slave narratives of the 1980s and '90s; from the "anti-Tom" novels crafted in response to Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin down to such blockbuster historical epics of the Civil Rights Era as Alex Haley's Roots, E rnest Gaines's The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman and Margaret Walker's Jubilee."

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Music

New Orleans is know as the birthplace of Jazz but in the 1940s the blues became really popular. New

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Immigrations (mainly from Europe or Africa) were fluxing into New Orleans in the 1940s.

Industrialization and the rise of centralized business districts made car network become easier, created more livable/usable land, therefore immigrants, initially resided in undesirable living areas, moved closer to the city in abandoned town homes, forming a cluster of immigrants called "Immigrant Belt".

New Orleans became and remained being one of the most multicultural, diverse places in the US. --> its cultural strengthened the melting pot image of the US.

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The Red Summer

Between 1900 and 1970, about 6,000,000 Black Americans left the region. However, their community-building efforts, initially aimed to mitigate the Jim Crow system of racial discrimination and apartheid, were met with local resistance, eventually exacerbating the existing racial segregation.

Race riot peaked in post-war summer, resulting in the deaths of hundreds of black citizens, most of whose bodies were not carefully reported and thrown away in Mississippi river. Whites attacked blacks' properties, injured, and forced hundreds of them to seek refuge.

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After WW2, the US seemed to be the most unaffected, compared to its enemies.

The US's economy prospered than ever before, than even before the war. Many public policies had been passed to provide financial aid and better living conditions to its citizens.

That said, the economic mobility was not the same for all people. Some flourished more than other. Regardless, it was not only the white Americans that benefited after the phase. Races who had been excluded from the American Dream, before and after the war, such as the African Americans, Hispanic Americans, and American women became more aggressive in trying to win their full freedoms and civil rights as guaranteed by the Declaration of Independence and U.S. Constitution during the postwar era.

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The play was written by Tennessee Williams and completed in 1947

Broadway premiere: December 3, 1947, held in New York City and directed by Elia Kazan

Film adaptation: 1951, also directed by Elia Kazan and produced by Warner Bros

Had several revivals and productions spanning from 1973 - 2014

It was adapted as a TV film in 1995, an opera in 1998, and a Broadway revival in 2023