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How does Tennessee Williams present conflict in A Streetcar Named Desire
How does Tennessee Williams present conflict in A Streetcar Named Desire
How does Tennessee Williams present conflict in A Streetcar Named Desire
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In Tennessee Williams’ 1947 play ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’, Williams highlights the inequality of the patriarchal society through the character of Stanley Kowalski. Through the comparison of Blanche and Stanley respectively representing the ‘old south’ and ‘new south’, Williams draws out Stanley’s character as a Polish immigrant’s son, employed as a factory worker who is unwaveringly contributing to the diminishing of the aristocratic lifestyle which Blanche embodies. Williams presents the brutality of Stanley’s character through unconventional dramatic techniques, specific animalistic language and stage directions. Williams draws attention to Stanley’s beast like nature through the use of unconventional dramatic techniques. In the 1944 …show more content…
Although Stella believes Stanley is ‘as good as a lamb’, his true identity is revealed through both his brutality and dominance he exerts on women, and the references to his animal-like nature used to accentuate this. Williams uses animalistic imagery to display Stanley’s primitive characteristics and this is evident at the start of the play when Stanley is seen throwing a package of ‘meat’ to his wife. This immediate symbol suggests both his role as a provider, as if he is a primitive hunter-gatherer, and has sexual connotations because of the phallic suggestiveness. His association with cavemen is emphasised by Blanche, who mocks him as ‘an ape’, ‘bearing the raw meat home’ and who understatedly complains that he is ‘a little bit on the primitive side’. This ‘little bit’ is an example of an understatement that is used to suggest the opposite, that she finds him remarkably brutish. From Blanche’s criticism that ‘[Stanley] acts like an animal, has animal habits!’, Blanche believes Stanley is putting on a performance, suggested by the word ‘acts’, and from the exclamation we can imply that Blanche has strong feelings of disgust and aversion towards him. This is furthered by her emphasis on his brutality through the repetition of ‘eats like one, moves like one, talks like one’ and the use of a tricolon places attention and emphasis on his actions which embody an animal. Williams therefore uses Blanche’s refusal to accept and normalise brutal behaviour to create conflict and this causes juxtaposition between their contrasting personalities to accentuate
In Tennessee Williams' play, A Streetcar Named Desire, Williams uses the suicide of Blanche's husband to illuminate Blanche's insecurities and immoral behavior. When something terrible happens to someone, it often reveals who he or she truly is. Blanche falls victim to this behavior, and she fails to face her demons. This displays how the play links a character’s illogical choices and their inner struggles.
In this passage, Williams’ emphasises the nature of Blanche’s demise through the contrapuntal mode of the scene juxtaposing Blanche’s bathing with Stanley and Stella’s conversation. Williams wrote in a letter to Elia Kazan, who was to direct the film production of the play, that ‘It is a thing (misunderstanding) not a person (Stanley) that destroys (Blanche) in the ends’. This passage is significant as it shows the extent of Stanley’s misunderstanding of Blanche and his stubbornness to ascertain his condemnations to Stella. Furthermore, the use of colloquial lexis shows the true feebleness of Stanley’s claim because his judicial façade is diminished and shows the dangerous influence of claims as he sways Mitch away from Blanche. Stella’s character
Blanche, a fading beauty, uses her sugary charm and soft southern ways to attract men. In comparison, Stanley "sizes women up at a glance, with sexual classifications" to "determine the way he smiles at them" (Williams, Street 29). Course and deliberately aggressive, he is a "survivor of the stone age" (Williams, Street 72). Despite their differences, they both possess a raw sensuality. In their first confrontation, Blanche's thick display of charm angers and attracts Stanley.
Tennessee Williams was one of the most important playwrights in the American literature. He is famous for works such as “The Glass Menagerie” (1944), “A Streetcar Named Desire” (1947) or “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955)”. As John S. Bak claims: “Streetcar remains the most intriguing and the most frequently analyzed of Williams’ plays.” In the lines that follow I am going to analyze how the identity of Blanche DuBois, the female character of his play, “A Streetcar Named Desire”, is shaped.
When discussing the notion that “Love can often lead to the creation of an ‘Outsider’." there are cases in our literary examples that would agree with the statement, and some that would not. Outsiders in Much Ado About Nothing, Pride and Prejudice and A Streetcar Named Desire are created by both love and other themes, whether it be class, power, disinterest or a scandal.
He embodies the traits found in a world of old fashioned ideals where men were meant to be dominant figures." It was also justified with the scenes that included the interactions between Stanley and the other women in the play. In the first scene Stanley tosses the meat at Stella which displays his barbaric side. This behavior can be compared with the characteristics of a caveman that brings dead meat into the cave after a good
Tennessee Williams gives insight into three ordinary lives in his play, “A Streetcar Named Desire” which is set in the mid-1930’s in New Orleans. The main characters in the play are Blanche, Stanley, and Stella. All three of these characters suffer from personalities that differentiate each of them to great extremes. Because of these dramatic contrarieties in attitudes, there are mounting conflicts between the characters throughout the play. The principal conflict lies between Blanche and Stanley, due to their conflicting ideals of happiness and the way things “ought to be”.
Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire is a play wrought with intertwining conflicts between characters. A drama written in eleven scenes, the play takes place in New Orleans over a nine-month period. The atmosphere is noisy, with pianos playing in the distance from bars in town. It is a crowded area of the city, causing close relations with neighbors, and the whole town knowing your business. Their section of the split house consists of two rooms, a bathroom, and a porch. This small house is not fit for three people. The main characters of the story are Stella and Stanley Kowalski, the home owners, Blanche DuBois, Stella’s sister, Harold Mitchell (Mitch), Stanley’s friend, and Eunice and Steve Hubbell, the couple that lives upstairs. Blanche is the protagonist in the story because all of the conflicts involve her. She struggles with Stanley’s ideals and with shielding her past.
Stanley, the protagonist, is a symbol for society’s view of the stereotypical male. He is muscular, forceful, and dominant. Stanley’s domination becomes so overwhelming that he demands absolute control. This view of the male as a large animal is revealed in the opening of the play where Stanley is described as “bestial.” His power and control throughout the play are foreshadowed in the opening stage directions.
Stanley (Stella's husband) represents a theme of realism in the play; he is shown as a primitive, masculine character that is irresistible to Stella and on some levels even to his "opponent" Stella's sister Blanche.
Also, the repetitive comparison of him to an animal or ape is the perfect image not the id as it is the instinctive part of your psyche. The way this passage leaves the reader is very powerful saying that “maybe he’ll strike you” is a good example of Stanley’s aggressive nature, and when Blanche says “or maybe grunt and kiss you” is a very good example of his sexual nature.
Tennessee William’s A Streetcar Named Desire is one of the most popular plays in American history. The play contains this theme of Old South versus New South where old southern ideals and way of life clashes against newly formed ideals of the late 19th and early 20th century. The distinctions between the Old South’s emphasis on tradition, social class, and segregation versus the New South’s emphasis on hard work can be seen throughout the play. It is manifested in the main characters of the play. Blanche DuBois’s civilized and polished nature makes her a symbol of the Old South while Stanley Kowalski’s brutish, direct, and defying nature represents the New South. Tennessee Williams uses the characters of his play to present a picture of the social, gender role, and behavior distinctions that existed between the Old South versus the New South. Furthermore, the two settings provided in the play, Belle Reve and Elysian Fields can also be seen as different representations of the Old versus the New with the way both places are fundamentally different.
...itome of southern aristocracy, a world dominated by old-fashioned laws and conservative morals, whilst Stanley embodies the fast-moving, vigorous asperity of the modern world and New Orleans. Blanche, quite literally, summarises her attitude to such cultural differences in the line "maybe he's what we need to mix with our blood now that we've lost Belle Reve and have to go on without Belle Reve to protect us." In this sense, she views the male to be a figure of security and protection, perhaps the only worldly perception that she shares with her opposition whose chauvinism exposes a characteristically defined view of the universal man and his role as predator, protector and guardian. Otherwise, their notions are so diverse that their incompatibility drives the plot along and fuels arguments in every scene.
Written in 1947, by playwright Tennessee Williams, the play A Streetcar Named Desire opens in the 1940s in the well-known city of New Orleans. Readers are presented with the young couple Stan and Stella Kowalski who live below another young couple, Eunice and Steve. While Stan and Stella manage to maintain a relationship, it is abusive. Stella reunites with her alcoholic sister Blanche, after learning that the family plantation had been lost due to bankruptcy. Blanche, a widow often finds herself in difficult and unforeseen circumstances. Blanche’s poor choices and vulnerability leads to an affair with Stan’s poker buddy Mitch. Coinciding with his abusive nature, Stanley rapes Blanche. No one believes her until the very end, causing her to get sent away to a mental institution. While the play and film were smashing, each had their similarities overall, in regards to setting, plot, and characters while differences concerned narrative technique.
A Streetcar Named Desire sets the decaying values of the antebellum South against those of the new America. The civil, kindly ways of Blanche’s past are a marked contrast to the rough, dynamic New Orleans inhabited by Stella and Stanley, which leads Tennessee Williams’s “tragedy of incomprehension” (qtd. in Alder, 48). The central protagonist, Blanche, has many flaws; she lies, is vain and deceitful, yet can be witty and sardonic. These multifaceted layers balance what Jessica Tandy, who played Blanche in the first stage production in 1947, “saw as her ‘pathetic elegance’ . . . ‘indomitable spirit and ‘innate tenderness’” (Alder 49). Through a connected sequence of vignettes, our performance presented a deconstruction of Blanche that revealed the lack of comprehension and understanding her different facets and personas created. Initially Blanche is aware of what she is doing and reveals