ipl-logo

Blanche Dubois Sexual Desire Analysis

612 Words3 Pages

In Tennessee William’s A Streetcar Named Desire, there are extreme themes of sexual desire and eroticism. This is especially apparent in the characterization of Blanche DuBois, a pretentious upper class southern belle with strong erotic tendencies and an ostentatious personality. Coming from a rich life to having no money and no one to love has caused a complete shift in her personality. In A Streetcar Named Desire, Blanche DuBois’ overt sexual desires, inability to accept reality, and unwillingness to let go of the past leads to her ultimate undoing.
Blanche DuBois first came to New Orleans to stay with her sister Stella Kowalski. She told her sister she was only visiting, but her large suitcase implied otherwise. Her sudden appearance is strange, as she and Stella have had minimal contact with one another since Stella left home. Blanche explained that she has lost the family estate, Belle Reve, due to finances and had been let go of her English teaching position because of her nerves. We later find out that this is not the case. Instead, Belle Reve was lost because of her sexual escapades and alcoholism. Blanche had been lying all along. She had really been fired when the principal gained knowledge of her intimacy with a seventeen-year-old boy. At …show more content…

The death of her relatives causes a downward spiral in Blanche’s financial situation. Her mannerisms show a woman trapped in the lifestyle of fortune, one she refuses to leave behind even after the money has been lost. The loss of Belle Reve is devastating to Blanche and is one reason she spins out of control. As Susan Hawthorne described in her analysis of A Streetcar Named Desire, “She hangs on to what vestiges of gentility she can, but this serves only to alienate rather than to shield her. Tender and delicate, like the moth she resembles, Blanche is unable to survive in the harsh reality of modern society”

Show More
Related

  • Diversity In The 1950's

    600 Words  | 3 Pages

    Blanche's role being a Southern Belle amongst the white elite which dominated the South during the early and mid-1900s displayed the deepness of Southern roots such as wanting to marry a respectable man, and being dedicated to her family and the community. During this time Southern Belles like Blanche “. . . have always depended on the kindness of strangers”, or relied solely on the income of their spouses, in which most obtained through the business of cotton plantations. Her necessity to the kind-heartedness of strangers instead of being self-dependent is the cause as to why she has not been well off in her life. However; due to the abolition of slavery and victory of the confederates the white elite struggled to maintain wealth which forced Southern Belles to seek other means to support their lavish appearance. Blanche who indeed maintained a lifestyle of wealth was forced to sell her cotton plantation after her husband completed suicide.

    Read More

  • Self Preservation In Night By Elie Wiesel

    1480 Words  | 6 Pages

    Blanche is projecting the self-image of a person who believes that they are above others. She acts as though she is of a royal family and demands the respect of everyone around her. She loses her family's home to the government and blames it on her sister who left in order to search for her own lifestyle. From the beginning of her visit, Blanche gets an off feeling about Stanley. When she arrives, he starts to stare at her with a sense of caution then soon begins inspecting the paperwork that she brought with her in order to validate her story.

    Read More

  • A Streetcar Named Desire Conflict Essay

    783 Words  | 4 Pages

    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,

    Read More

  • Blanche Dubois Character Analysis Essay

    1307 Words  | 6 Pages

    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

    Read More

  • Insecurity In A Streetcar Named Desire

    1085 Words  | 5 Pages

    It is what is haunting Blanche’s life, it is what has made her mentally unstable. Throughout the play, she has been hiding her past from people so she looks like

    Read More

  • Compare Fahrenheit 451 And A Streetcar Named Desire

    835 Words  | 4 Pages

    Although the protagonists of “Fahrenheit 451” and “A Streetcar Named Desire” live in two drastically different societies, both are not satisfied with their current way of living and desire a change and improvement in their life. In “A Streetcar Named Desire”, the title of the play itself signifies Blanche’s desire to escape from the reality of her life, as she is haunted by her past and is currently living a life of insecurity, due to the loss of Belle Reve. Ironically, the streetcar named Desire did not bring her to what she truly wanted, an end of all her problems, and she in fact lost her sanity. The reason for Blanche’s tragic ending is due to the avoidance of her problems, shown metaphorically in the form of a flimsy paper lantern on top of a lamp.

    Read More

  • Blanche's Destruction In A Streetcar Named Desire

    778 Words  | 4 Pages

    It is Blanche’s obsessive desire for a clean slate that ultimately drives her streetcar into destruction. With each lie she tells, the last lie becomes a reality to her, and once her delusional reality begins to fade, Blanche recedes into a dark hole where neither she or anyone else could ever truly see herself

    Read More

  • Literary Analysis Of Blanche Dubois

    1166 Words  | 5 Pages

    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.

    Read More

  • How Does Blanche React To Stella's Apartment?

    618 Words  | 3 Pages

    Blanche claim to come to New Orleans because she took a leave from teaching due to her stress. I don’t really believe her because she start to drink quickly and changed topic a little too quickly. 8) What is Belle Reve and what is revealed about it?

    Read More

  • Illusion Vs Reality In A Streetcar Named Desire

    608 Words  | 3 Pages

    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

    Read More

  • Comparing The Great Gatsby And A Streetcar Named Desire

    1312 Words  | 6 Pages

    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.

    Read More

  • Stereotypes In A Streetcar Named Desire

    1245 Words  | 5 Pages

    Not only has Tennesse Williams portrayed Stella and Blanche to be seen as delicate and dependent, our own society has created this image but this not only affects how individuals see themselves but affects relationships immensely. Tennessee Williams reinforces the stereotype in which women are often the victims of unfortunate fate within the usage of the character Blanche. Throughout the whole play, we have witnessed Blanche being on the bitter end of life's miseries as she has encountered the tough loss of Belle Reve, dealing with her ex-husband's suicide and the loss of her relationship with Mitch. Arguably, the expectations and beliefs of women were either to be a housewife or a mother, whereas Blanche shows neither, as a result of automatically feeling out of place possibly leading to her downfall. Blanche was constantly fantasizing about the traditional values of a southern gentlemen, proving her dependence on this sex.

    Read More

  • Theme Of Light In A Streetcar Named Desire

    895 Words  | 4 Pages

    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.

    Read More

  • Examples Of Light And Darkness In Blanche Dubois

    1526 Words  | 7 Pages

    Thesis: Light is symbolic of realism or to put it cruder the ugly reality. Darkness is symbolic of fantasy or the fabrication created by characters. Introduction: Throughout the play and film adaptation of, A Streetcar Named Desire, we view the main characters progression throughout the thought provoking story.

    Read More

  • Who Is Responsible For Blanche's Downfall

    1266 Words  | 6 Pages

    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.

    Read More

More about Blanche Dubois Sexual Desire Analysis

Open Document