Sex And Desire In A Streetcar Named Desire

A Street Car Named Desire is a tale of sex and desire. Blanche Dubois, the main character of the play, uses desire as a means of interacting with others. It is how she deals with the stimuli in her external environment. In the play, sex and desire are also destructive forces, becoming the sources of many arguments and tragedies. However, Blanche DuBois imagines herself to be a typical Southern belle and becomes overwhelmed with the openness about sex which has always been a taboo to speak of, despite the fact that she, herself, is sexually active. As such, she becomes overwhelmed with the clashing of different ordeals between the Old Southern era and the emerging modern era.

Blanche is a woman out of a different era – a Southern belle, but she wears a mask over her true self in a time when her sexual prowess would have made her a target of ridicule. She comes from a time when women were supposed to act, talk, and dress a certain way, a time when women who were soft spoken and gentle would be received by gentlemen-like men who treated them as delicate flowers. Because of this notation, Blanche wears a mask of feminine grace a delicacy. Blanches air

There is a tragic irony, in short, in that Mitch’s response to Blanche’s initial tackling of the truth encourages Blanche to make further truthful admissions that will only, in Mitch’s eyes, condemn her. Mitch, after Blanche’s second confession, of course does not embrace her tenderly again; he calls her dirty and demands his sexual due. . . .That is the point of Blanche’s downfall: the finding herself turned by her impulse toward truth in intimacy back into a whore-image from which, through truth. She struggles to escape