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Blanche portrays many emotions on page 12 that reflects onto the audience. As an audience we feel empathy for Blanche because she is portrayed as a ‘fallen woman’ who is very isolated from the world. We can also see that she has a very delicate emotional state and a need for flattery through her dramatic actions. When we become aware of Blanche’s promiscuous past the audiences feelings may go two ways. We may feel sympathy for her because she feels the need to sexually satisfy herself to feel loved, or, we may have little sympathy for her because she is her own worst enemy in the play. For example, Blanche kisses a subscriptions boy before meeting with Mitch whom she wants to settle down with. This behaviour doesn’t show that she is dedicated
Blanche could not accept her past and overcome it. She was passionately in love with Alan; but after discovering that he was gay, she could not stomach the news. When she revealed how disgusted she was, it prompted Alan to commit suicide. She could never quite overcome the guilt and put it behind her. Blanche often encountered flashbacks about him. She could hear the gun shot and polka music in her head. After Alan’s death, she was plagued by the deaths of her relatives. Stella moved away and did not have to deal with the agony Blanche faced each day. Blanche was the one who stuck it out with her family at Belle Reve where she had to watch as each of her remaining family members passed away. “I took the blows in my face and my body! All of those deaths! The long parade to the graveyard! Father, Mother! Margaret, that dreadful way! You just came home in time for the funerals, Stella. And funerals are pretty compared to deaths. Funerals are quiet, but deaths—not always” (Scene 1, page 1546). Blanche lost Belle Reve because of all the funeral expenses. Belle Reve had been in her family for generations, and it slipped through her fingers while she watched helplessly. Blanche’s anguish caused her loneliness. The loneliness fueled her abundance of sexual encounters. Her rendezvous just added to her problems and dirtied her rep...
Blanche had a desire for sex in general to cope with her divorce and the loss of her family; she just needed to feel loved. Stanley expressed his hidden desire for Blanche by being cruel to her through the whole story, and then having sex with her. Mitch showed his desire for Blanche by asking her to marry him. Stella had a desire for Stanley’s love and for Blanche’s well-being. The play is a display of the drama involved in families, and it shows that sometimes people have to make decisions and choose one relationship over another.
During scene one, the audience is introduced to Blanche as Stella's sister, who is going to stay with her for a while. Blanch tries her best to act normal and hide her emotion from her sister, but breaks down at the end of scene one explaining to Stella how their old home, the Belle Reve, was "lost." It is inferred that the home had to be sold to cover the massive funeral expenses due to the many deaths of members of the Dubois family. As Blanche whines to her sister, "All of those deaths! The parade to the graveyard! Father, mother! Margaret, that dreadful way!" (21). The audience sees this poor aging woman, who has lost so many close to her, and now her home where she grew up. How could anyone look at her, and not feel the pain and suffering that she has to deal with by herself? Williams wants the audience to see what this woman has been through and why she is acting the way she is. Blanche's first love was also taken from her. It seems that everyone she loves is dead except for her sister. Death plays a crucial role in Blanche's depression and other mental irregularities. While these circumstances are probably enough for the audience to feel sympathy for Blanche, Williams takes it a step further when we see Blanche's...
who went through a lot early on in his life. He made an effort to get his life on the right path by studying to be a religious man. He was uprooted from the home he knew and the people he loved. Elie had to grow up quickly and deal with things that were beyond his capacity. He had to work hard labor and sleep amongst people in deplorable conditions. Elie kept his faith but there were times in his young life that he had to question why this is happening to him and his family. When Hamlet lost his father he had to deal with situations that were beyond his control. His mother married his uncle, who in the end was responsible for his father’s murder. Thoughts of revenge emerged in his mind. He wanted others to suffer the same way he was
In Tennessee Williams play "A Streetcar Named Desire" two of the main characters Stanley and Blanche persistently oppose each other, their differences eventually spiral into Stanley's rape of Stella.
Blanche also becomes disconnected from reality because of her delusions of music and gunshots from her husband’s death. She seeks relationships with strangers in the hopes of recreating the love she had for her husband. When the relationship fails to satisfy her craving for love, she sinks further into her fantasy. When Mitch rejects her, saying “I don 't think I want to marry you anymore.” (Williams 131) she once again finds comfort in her fantasy. She has sunk so far into her fantasy that she has a response to all of Stanley’s questions. She is no longer up holding the illusion for others. She truly believes her delusions enough to maintain the façade while she is
She looks for empathy in all the wrong places. She looks for it when with strangers, with Stanley, Mitch, and Stella. The tragedy of Alan’s death is a leading cause for Blanche’s desire for attention and empathy. After his death he becomes involved with the hotel “flamingo”. It is here where she mistakenly thinks that sex, is a form of empathy. This empathy causes her character to have a blackened image of how to gain empathy from others. Once she gets run out of the flamingo she attempts to gain attention from Stanley. “It 's mine, too. It 's hard to stay looking fresh. I haven 't washed or even powdered my face and here you are!” Blanche understands that Stanley is a man who can at least support his wife. She flirts with Stanley, in a desperate need to feel, safe and cared for. Stanley understands that Blanche is manipulative, and he does not give empathy towards her. The tragic Irony with Blanche is that she does not recognize true empathy when it is given to her, Mitch has a deep care for Blanche, to the extent that he is willing to marry her. “You need somebody. And I need somebody, too. Could it be—you and me, Blanche?” Mitch shows a great amount of compassion towards Blanche, but blanche cannot recognize this empathy and sees it more as an opportunity to manipulate him, which doesn’t turn out well in the end. Stella is the
In Tennessee Williams’ play A Streetcar Named Desire, main character Blanche Dubois to begin with seems to be a nearly perfect model of a classy woman whose social interaction, life and behavior are based upon her sophistication. The play revolves around her, therefore the main theme of drama concerns her directly. In Blanche is seen the misfortune of a person caught between two worlds-the world of the past and the world of the present-unwilling to let go of the past and unable, because of her character, to come to any sort of terms with the present.
As Stanley continues torturing Blanche and draws Stella and Mitch away from her, Blanche’s sanity slowly dwindles. Even though she lied throughout the play, her dishonesty becomes more noticeable and irrational due to Stanley's torment about her horrible past. After dealing with the deaths of her whole family, she loses Belle Reve, the estate on which her and her sister grew up. This is too much for Blanche to handle causing her moral vision to be blurred by “her desperate need to be with someone, with ancestors for models who indulged in “epic fornications” with impunity, [Blanche] moves through the world filling the void in her life with lust” (Kataria 2). She also loses a young husband who killed himself after she found out he was gay when she caught him with another man. After that traumatic experience she needed “a cosy nook to squirm herself into because ...
was lobotomised in his absence and later institutionalised leading. many critics to believe that the character of Blanche may have arisen. from events in his own life. Blanche's tragic past involving both the death of her "young" husband and her consequent promiscuity with. The "young men" created an overwhelming amount of emotion for Blanche.
...es and thinks that her hopes will not be destroyed. Thirdly, Blanche thinks that strangers are the ones who will rescue her; instead they want her for sex. Fourthly, Blanche believes that the ones who love her are trying to imprison her and make her work like a maid imprisoned by them. Fifthly, Blanche’s superiority in social status was an obscure in her way of having a good social life. Last but not least, Blanche symbolizes the road she chose in life- desire and fantasy- which led her to her final downfall.
Obsession is longing for something a person desires for and is unable to let go. Therefore, people go to certain lengths to protect those they love in order to feel satisfied in their life. Blanche and Stanley in A Streetcar Named Desire look for love to satisfy the love they lost. Their obsession is a result of fighting for Stella’s attention when Blanche interferes with Stella and Stanley’s relationship, which causes tension between one another. Thus, Stanley disrupts Blanche’s arrival to illustrate the changes he faces because he goes through sudden interruptions in his love life. Blanche and Stanley seek out each other’s weakness to show their power against one another and achieve their bond. As a result, Blanche and Stanley play a game in their relationships that create more tension to hurt each other. In order to fulfill their obsession with love, Stanley and Blanche interfere with each other’s lives to search for the love they lost.
One cant imagine how it must feel to lose the ones they love and hold dear, but to stay afterwards and mourn the loss of the many is unbearable. Blanche has had a streak of horrible luck. Her husband killing himself after she exposed her knowledge about his homosexuality, her advances on young men that led to her exile and finally her alcoholism that drew her life to pieces contemplated this sorrow that we could not help but feel for Blanche throughout the drama. Blanche’s desire to escape from this situation is fulfilled when she is taken away to the insane asylum. There she will have peace when in the real world she only faces pain.
Blanche is driven by her sexual desire but also wishes for stability and a fresh start instead. Blanche states “It was the other little familiarity that I felt obliged to discourage, I didn’t resent it!.. I was somewhat flattered that you desired me” (Williams 87). For the first time she doesn’t succumb to her body’s physical needs for her wish to be able to settle down with Mitch. If Blanche answered her body’s need for sex she would have killed her act of being a Southern belle looking for a suitor. This again brings out the close line between death and
A Streetcar Named Desire is a play of multifaceted themes and diverse characters with the main antagonists of the play, Blanche and Stanley infused by their polarized attitudes towards reality and society ‘structured on the basis of the oppositions past/present and paradise lost/present chaos’(*1). The effect of these conflicting views is the mental deterioration of Blanche’s cerebral health that, it has been said; Stanley an insensitive brute destroyed Blanche with cruel relish and is the architect of her tragic end. However, due to various events in the play this statement is open to question, for instance, the word ‘insensitive’ is debatable, ‘insensitive’ can be defined as not thinking of other people’s feelings but Stanley is aware of what he’s doing understanding the mental impairment he causes Blanche.