A streetcar named desire was written by Tennessee Williams in 1947, in purpose to show the “declining of the upper class and the domination of the bourgeois middle class in the U.S.A. where the south agriculture class could not compete with the industrialization.” Blanche Dubois the protagonist of our story, a southern beauty that is trapped by the restrictive laws of her society. But she broke them, and eventually put herself in a state, where she had no job and no house. So she had to go to her sister, Stella and live with her and her sister’s husband, Stanley. While staying there, she created a façade for her to hide her flaws and kept acting as a lady, where she is anything but that. To hide her true self, Blanche restored to duplicity, coupled with her voracious desire and ubiquitous deception caused her a breakdown. In the following paragraphs, there will be more events that led Blanche to such end. One of the things that led Blanche to her downfall is the past. The past, where she was the reason why she lost her husband, Alan, he …show more content…
For example, she kept telling her sister to move on with the world and to not stay with her husband. In fact, it is the other way round, she is the one who must move on and find something to do with her life, instead of drinking away her problems. Her attitude toward having sex with Mitch is contradictory too, she wants to show her as pure and reserved person, but she isn’t a bit of that, if she didn’t lie about that, she could have connected with him on the physical level too and she would move on a little bit, because she has someone with her and will stay with her. And who knows, maybe it would have been easy for her to confess to him what she did in Laurel because they would be closer towards each
Blanche attempts to take control over her present life and make her fantasy become a reality. As she struggles to get past her husband's suicide, she comes across a phase in which she wishes to please other men in order to feel complete with herself. Her husband's sudden suicide was traumatizing and this main factor pushed her to find comfort in men. As Blanche explains, “coming suddenly into a room which I thought was empty- which wasn’t empty but had two people in it… the boy I had married and an older man who had been his friend for years” (114). Through this event, we can tell how Blanche has guilt because she made her husband feel horrible for being with another man which led him to shoot himself.
There are many things to be said about Ms. Blanche DuBois in the literary work “A Streetcar Named Desire”. Blanche Dubois has many personality flaws and traits have come from her many troubled experiences. One of her personality traits is that she is in a way insecure mainly due to the fact that she once had wealth and estate but lost it all. Those insecure faults arose from when she once felt the security of a marriage but lost that also when she discovered that he liked man in which led to him committing suicide. One of the best textual evidence to point to the fact is when she was looking for a compliment from Stanley.
A Streetcar Named Desire was published just after World War II. When the play came out, the country had just emerged from the war after struggling through the Great Depression of 1930 's, and suddenly the national spotlight concentrated on the lower and middle classes as the true supporters of the heroic American spirit. The title of the play shows that desire is the force which will lead the actions of the play. The title comes from an actual vehicle or a streetcar named “Desire” that Blanche takes to transport her to her sister’s house, then she turns to one called Cemeteries and get off at Elysian Fields. So it is obvious that desire is what Blanche has followed from the beginning
Character Analysis of Blanche DuBois One of the main characters in a play by Tennessee Williams A Streetcar Named Desire is Blanche DuBois. Blanche is a victim of her upbringing and the changing times she lives in. She was born to aristocratic family and raised to be taken care of. This romantic, art, music and poetry loving soul is unprepared for the world she lives in
She was upset over his life choices. He committed suicide by shooting himself in the street. This left Blanche feeling guilty and alone. She begins to have insecurities as to why she could not please her husband. Blanche also held the responsibility of taking care of all her sick family until they died.
The 1951 film version of A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams, gives a visualization of the working-class Americans in the 1940’s. The film gave a better understanding of the characters, and their perspective as their lifestyle was brought to life. The household of the average working-class is depicted in the opening scene when Blanche comes to visit Stella and sees her apartment. The apartment is broken down and located on a small street in New Orleans. It is small, with ‘two’ rooms separated by a curtain.
Williams uses the expressionist technique “The ‘Varsouviana’ is filtered into weird distortion, accompanied by the cries and noises of the jungle” to parallel Blanche’s inner mind and depicts Blanche’s deranged mental state after Stella’s betrayal. The imagery ‘Lurid reflections appear on the walls in odd, sinuous shapes’ highlights her mental turbulence and the stage directions ‘mysterious voices behind walls, as if reverberated through a canyon of rock…the echo sounds in threatening whispers’ heightens tension, positioning the audience to witness the overwhelming fear and exaggeration of her senses, further emphasising the detrimental impact Stella’s decision made. The Streetcar Named Desire also examines the influence that a person’s social standing can have. Stanley’s statement in scene 2 ‘The Kowalskis and Dubois have different notions’ indicates their social upbringing has influenced the way they think, hence disrupting their connection and loyalty towards one another. The use of their family name is metonymic for their ancestry and social standing, addressing the barriers derived from a social hierarchy which have affected their relationship.
In A Streetcar Named Desire, written by Tennessee Williams in 1947, Stella Kowalski has to make a critical decision. During the entire show Blanche DuBois is staying with her sister, Stella. While she is there Blanche becomes more and more deranged, and as the show continues Blanche lies about her life and how she came to stay with her sister. Due to Blanche Dubois’ daft mannerisms, her sister made the suitable decision to send her to a mental institution. Stella Kowalski has a child on the way, and if Blanche has a mental disorder it will be extremely hard to care for a child and a sister.
Tennessee Williams wrote “A Streetcar Named Desire” (Williams, 1947) It is based in New Orleans a new cosmopolitan city which is poor but has raffish charm. The past is representing old south in America 1900’s and present is representing new America post world war 2 in 1940’s. Past and present are intertwined throughout the play in the characters Stanley, Blanche, Stella and mitch. Gender roles show that males are the dominant and rule the house which Stanley is prime example as he brings home food and we learn of one time when he got cross and he smashed the light bulbs.
In A Streetcar Named Desire, the author Tennessee Williams exaggerates and dramatizes fantasy’s incapability to overcome reality through an observation of the boundary between Blanches exterior and interior conveying the theme that illusion and fantasy are often better than reality. Blanche, who hides her version of the past, alters her present and her relationship with her suitor Mitch and her sister, Stella. Blanche was surrounded by death in her past, her relatives and husband have passed away, leaving her with no legacy left to continue. The money has exhausted; the values are falling apart and she is alienated and unable to survive in the harsh reality of modern society. Throughout the novel Williams juxtaposed Blanche’s delusions with
Another very common theme represented throughout both texts, is the constant allusion to light. Within “A Streetcar Named Desire”, the use of light reveals Blanche’s role and appearance as a character. One of Blanche’s biggest flaws is that she prefers to be only seen in the dark. She does not like to reveal herself in the light as she is afraid of people seeing that she is in fact aging.
The Fight for Dominance In today’s society, gender norms convince men that unless they are able to control women, they are weak. Considered the inferior gender, women must find new ways to prove their own strength, whether it be through manipulation or their sexuality. The battle between the two continues as men strive to remain dominant, often by immoral means, and women attempt to gain the upper hand. In the screenplay, “A Streetcar Named Desire” by Tennessee Williams, the sexual tension and struggle for dominion between Blanche and Stanley is evident, and as the play continues, Blanche's promiscuity and Stanley's predatory nature foreshadow an inevitable confrontation.
Blanche flees a failed company and a failed marriage in attempt to find refuge in her sister’s home. Through her whirlwind of emotions, the reader can see Blanche desires youth and beauty above all else, or so the readers think. In reality, she uses darkness to hide the true story of her past. In A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams, Williams uses the motif of light to reveal Blanche’s habit of living in a fantasy world until the light illuminates her reality. Blanche uses darkness to block her past from onlookers as to shape her image.
“A Streetcar Named Desire” is a very elegant film in which the Southern gothic culture is demonstrated profoundly. Tennessee Williams uses the characters in the play to bring about a sense of how corrupt society truly was in the 1940’s in the South. The 1940’s was marked by an immense amount of violence, alcoholism, and poverty. Women at the time were treated as objects rather than people. Throughout the play Tennessee Williams relates the aspects of Southern society to the characters in the play.
Gender differences take a big place in every story and can lead to some conflicts. According to Cliffsnotes,“Gender stereotypes are simplistic generalizations about the gender attributes “(Cliffsnotes 1). In other words, it exists some stereotypes that categorized people. In A streetcar named Desire written by Tennessee Williams, there is some conflictual situations based on gender differences between Mitch, Stanley, Stella and Blanche. Based on this idea, each character represents a specific type of gender stereotypes.