Blanche Dubois Character Analysis Essay

Darkness can be a comfortable place for anyone. Without having to look at yourself or have people see you, one may not feel as judged or insecure. Light is revealing. In a bright room, you can’t hide tears, blemishes, or emotions. Blanche, from A Streetcar Named Desire, knows the pain of light all to well. 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.

Tennessee William’s 1947 play A Streetcar Named Desire takes place in Elysian Fields, New Orleans, and portrays the marital situation of this time. This play illustrates conflict over the marriage of Stella and Stanley. This marriage can be seen as strict, and controlling but also full of lust. Stella’s sister, Blanche, sees through the illusion and can see how toxic the marriage really is. Stanley and Blanche come from distinctly different backgrounds, Stanley is from the working class while Blanche comes from wealth. Williams uses these two contrasting points of views on marriage, to show the issues of possessiveness, class, and sexism.

“The Great Gatsby” and “A Streetcar Named Desire” both focus on the common theme of pursuing goals and living the American Dream. As well as leaving behind the past and “turn a new leaf”.

The play “A Streetcar Named Desire” is about an emotionally unstable lady named Blanche. She moves in with her youngest sister and her husband because the landlord took the land away from Blanche because they could not pay for it anymore. After being their for a while Blanche starts remembering her horrible past which is something she was trying to do in the first place. The husband of Stella, Stanley Kowalski was also someone that made Blanche’s life miserable for complicating everything and harassing her in every possible way.

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

Desire can be defined as a strong feeling of wanting or wishing for something. The something could be an object, idea, or an event. In A Streetcar Named Desire, Blanche Dubois believes that the opposite of death is desire. Logically speaking, the real opposite of death is life; so why does Blanche believe that it’s desire? Possibly because she relates desire to life it’s self. The lives of the main character revolve around desire. Throughout the play, the theme of death is the opposite of desire is developed through the main character’s need to be desired or desirable.

Stereotypical gender roles have existed as long as human culture has, becoming a natural part of all of our lives. Within each gender lies a variety of stereotypes and expectations. Most notably for men they are often depicted as tough and the family provider. Whereas women are often shown to be soft and vulnerable. Throughout the play A Streetcar Named Desire the author; Tennessee Williams illustrates the main characters, Stanley, Stella, Mitch and Blanche with these stereotypes. The play takes place in the 1950s in New Orleans containing a diverse population. However, is race discriminated against, those who go against classifed gender roles are often discriminated and have trouble finding their way in society. Although gender equality has

“A Streetcar Named Desire” contains a strong lighting motif that repeats throughout the play. This usually involves Blanche, a character who shies away from any light that is drawn upon her, and is especially sensitive to light when her suitor Mitch is around. To Blanche, she is still young and beautiful in her mind, but when light shines on her she becomes afraid that Mitch will notice her aging skin, her beauty falling. This motif heavily implies how Blanche sees herself and the significance to her sexual innocence.

Tennessee Williams is one of the most recognized playwrights that lived during the mid-twentieth-century (“Tennessee Williams”). After finishing college, Williams decides to move to New Orleans, where he writes A Streetcar Named Desire. His career starts to take off as he begins to write more plays (“Tennessee Williams”). A Streetcar Named Desire talks about the life of a woman, Blanche DuBois, who is very secretive about her past and does not expose her true intentions of coming to live with her younger sister Stella. As the play goes on Stanley, Stella’s husband, starts to dig into the dark past that terrorizes Blanche when they begin to have a conflict with each other. In Tennessee Williams’ play, A Streetcar Named Desire Blanche Dubois

Tennessee William’s A Streetcar Named Desire is a wonderfully tragic story of the delusional Blanche DuBois, whose lies are unfolded and destroyed by the misogynist Stanley Kowalski. Throughout the play, Blanche frequently lies about her past, who she is, and what she’s done. Each lie she tells slowly unravels the next until she is caught, drowning in her own pathetic lies, forced to surrender to the malicious consequences dealt by Stanley. Similar to James Gatz, Blanche is obsessed with covering up her past actions, and creating a thin cloak of lies; however, James’ past is merely one of social degradation, Blanche carries the weight of her own horrible decisions. Blanche’s past and her attempts to mask it,

In the play A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams, the main characters, Blanche Dubois and Stanley Kowalski, share a great dislike and distrust towards one another, ultimately becoming the basis for the story’s conflict. Their common contemption stems from their contrasting personalities and backgrounds, their incompatibility of being able to function under the same environment, and inability to adapt to the situations they find themselves in. Although Blanche detests Stanley and the manner in which he behaves in, she realises that he is a necessary part for Stella’s life in New Orleans, an environment that greatly differs from the southern aristocracy that Stella and Blanche once lived in. Blanche expresses this idea by stating, “Oh,

In the avid pursuit of happiness, an individual can feel compelled to fabricate the truth about themselves in order to achieve the joy that they believe they deserve. The harsh truth of reality can force us to turn to the warmth of a fantasy to ease us in our search of contentment. Such is the case in Tennessee William’s play “A Streetcar Named Desire”, where sisters, Blanche and Stella both lie to themselves and others in order to become satisfied with their lives. Through the eyes of the beholder, happiness is measured differently; to Blanche, happiness is measured in wealth, particularly a wealthy man, whereas to Stella, happiness is in the comfort of a husband whom she refuses to call abusive.

Society of Tennessee Williams’ time saw sexuality as a part of ourselves that should be suppressed because of it’s destructive nature. Throughout A Streetcar Named Desire Williams showcases his characters in this anti-sex society. He shows them in this society, not to praise it, but instead to highlight the negative effects of existing in such a world. Through the actions and consequences his characters face in conforming to societies’ standards Williams manages to communicate a story that condemns society for keeping people from expressing their sexuality and from being stable, whole and sexual human beings. Expressing sexuality or sexual desires leads the play 's characters to death or to ruin, the suppression of desire is destructive and

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.

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.