This study examined the correlation between power relations and politeness strategies in Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire from a pragmatic point of view. It employs a qualitative descriptive methodology utilizing textual and contextual analysis of selected extracts from the play. It examines the characters use of positive politeness, negative politeness, bald-on-record strategies, off-record strategies, and impoliteness to manage social relationships and enact power. It examines the ways communicative behavior in dramatic interaction is molded especially by gender, class, and emotional instability and domestic authority. This analysis shows how the play's linguistic strategies are not just elaborate aesthetic devices, but rather how they perform important pragmatic functions to build conflict, characterization and social stratification. The results show that Stanley uses direct and face-threatening language to assert dominance and maintain territorial, whereas Blanche resorts to indirectness, politeness, emotional appeals and evasive discourse to sustain social identity and face. Stella and Mitch, on the other hand, reveal inconsistent pragmatic tactics based on emotional needs and relational conflict. This study ultimately finds that the politeness strategies employed in A Streetcar Named Desire are closely tied to power dynamics and dramatic conflict.
