The first part of this scene introduces us symbolically to the essential characteristics of Stanley Kowalski. He enters in a loud-colored bowling jacket and work clothes and is carrying "a red-stained package." He bellows to Stella and throws her the raw meat which she catches as she laughs breathlessly. The neighbors laugh over the package of bloody meat — an obvious sexual symbol which depicts Stanley in the same way as Blanche later describes him to Stella: He is a "survivor of the stone age! Bearing the raw meat home from the kill in the jungle; and you — you here — waiting for him." This scene, therefore, shows Stanley as the crude and uncouth man. The scene also sets a tone of commonplace brutality and reality into which the delicate and sensitive Blanche is about to appear.
Williams is overly fond of using Freudian sexual symbols. Readers should be aware of these and choose their own responses. Aside from the use of the raw meat, he uses the bowling balls and pins, and the columns of the Belle Reve plantation home as obvious, overt phallic and sexual symbols. The fact that Stanley bowls suggests symbolically his characteristic of summing everything up in terms of sexuality.
When Blanche says that she took a "streetcar named Desire, and then . . . one called Cemeteries," Williams seems to be implying that desire leads to death which is then an escape to the Elysian Fields. But ironically, in terms of the play, the streetcar leads her to the French Quarter which is certainly no Elysian Fields.
