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Streetcar named desire stella analysis
Opening of a streetcar named desire analysis
Opening of a streetcar named desire analysis
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The Interrelationship of
Characters and Themes
In Tennessee Williams’
A Streetcar Named Desire
In Williams’ Streetcar Named Desire the characters represent two opposing themes. These themes are of illusion and reality. The two characters that demonstrate these themes are Blanche, and Stanley. Blanche represents the theme of Illusion, with her lies, and excuses. Stanley demonstrates the theme of reality with his straightforward vulgar ness. Tennessee Williams uses these characters effectively to demonstrate these themes, while also using music and background characters to reinforce one another.
In this play the character blanche exhibits the theme of illusion. Blanche came from a rocky past. Her young husband killed himself and left her with a big space in her heart to fill. Blanche tried to fill this space with the comfort of strangers and at one time a young boy. She was forced to leave her hometown. When she arrives in New Orleans, she immediately begins to lie and give false stories. She takes many hot bathes, in an effort to cleanse herself of her past. Blanche tries also to stay out of bright lights. She covers the light bulb (light=reality) in the apartment with a paper lantern. This shows her unwillingness to face reality but instead live in an illusion. She also describes how she tells what should be the truth. This is a sad excuse for covering/lying about the sinful things she has done. Furthermore, throughout the story she repeatedly drinks when she begins to be faced with facts. All these examples, covering light, lying, and alcoholism show how she is not in touch with reality but instead living in a fantasy world of illusion.
The character Stanley represents the theme of reality. Stanley Kowalski is the simple blue-collar husband of Stella. His actions, reactions, and words show reality in its harshest most purist form. His actions are similar to a primitive human. For example he doesn’t close the door when he uses the restroom. This rudeness represents the harsh reality that Blanche refuses to accept. Moreover, when he was drunk he hit Stella. This attack on Blanches sister could be a symbolic “wake up” slap to the face of Blanche.
This can be symbolized by light. Blanche hates to be seen by Mitch, her significant other, in the light because it exposes her true identity. Instead, she only plans to meet him at night or in dark places. Also, she covers the lone light in Stella and Stanley’s apartment with a Chinese paper lantern. After Blanche and Mitch get into a fight, Mitch rips off the lantern to see what Blanche really looks like. Blanche angrily replies that she’s sorry for wanting magic. In the play, Blanche states “I don’t want realism, I want magic! [..] Yes, yes, magic! I try to give that to people. I misrepresent things to them. I don’t tell the truth, I tell what ought to be truth. And if that is sinful, then let me be damned for it!”(Williams 117). Blanche wants to escape reality, but this only leads to her self-destruction. It is the men in her life and past experiences that is the main cause of her self - destruction. One of these being the death of her young love, Allen Grey. During their marriage, Blanche, attached to the hip to this man, walked in on him with another man. She then brought the incident up at a bad time; soon after, Allen took his own life, which I believe was the first step to this so called “self-destruction. Blanche could never forgive herself of this. This is the truth of her past, therefore,
In 'A Streetcar Named Desire' we focus on three main characters. One of these characters is a lady called Blanche. As the play progresses, we gradually get to know more about Blanche and the type of person she really is in contrast to the type of person that she would like everybody else to think she is. Using four main mediums, symbolism and imagery, Blanche's action when by herself, Blanche's past and her dialogue with others such as Mitch, Stanley and the paperboy, we can draw a number of conclusions about Blanche until the end of Scene Five. Using the fore mentioned mediums we can deter that Blanche is deceptive, egotistical and seductive.
Tennessee Williams tells a story of a battle with fantasy and reality through his characters in A Streetcar Named Desire. When the reader is first introduced to the character of Blanche DuBois, she portrays herself as sincere and fragile. Blanche shows up at the house of her sister Stella and her husband Stanley’s home with the intent of staying at their home for a lengthy amount of time. Blanche tells Stella that she has lost Belle Reve, an ancestral home, after the death of many of their relatives and also mentions she has been given a leave of absence from her job as a school teacher because of her bad nerves, “I was so exhausted by all I’d been through my --- nerves broke. I was on the verge of --- lunacy, almost! So Mr. Graves – Mr. Graves
Tennessee Williams was born Thomas Lanier Williams in 1911. As a successful playwright, his career was greatly influenced by events in his life. He was noted for bringing the reader "a slice of his own life and the feel of southern culture", as his primary sources of inspiration were "the writers he grew up with, his family, and the South." The connection between his life and his work can be seen in several of his plays.
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.
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...
Tennessee Williams was one of the greatest American dramatists of the 20th century. Most of his plays take us to the southern states and show a confused society. In his works he exposes the degeneration of human feelings and relationships. His heroes suffer from broken families and they do not find their place in the society. They tend to be lonely and afraid of much that surrounds them. Among the major themes of his plays are racism, sexism, homophobia and realistic settings filled with loneliness and pain.1 Tennessee Williams characters showed us extremes of human brutality and sexual behavior.2 One of his most popular dramas was written in 1947, and it is called A Streetcar Named Desire.
insight as to what type of sector of New Orleans the play is set in.
Through this motif he seems to suggest that in order to cope with trauma, some people feel driven to take certain measures in order to survive in the reality. For an example, on page 36, after Stanley and Stella finish having an discussion about Blanche, the narrator says, “He lights a cigarette.” The author purposely crafts Blanche to be staged in the dark in order to show that she much more desires for others to see the flawless side of her in order to feel ideal from her fantasies. The author uses Blanche to show that people take long showers in order to feel clean, but in reality, traumatized people take long showers in order to cleanse themselves from their terrible past experiences. On page 57, after Mitch arrives, he acted by “He strikes a match and moves closer.” On page 59, when Blanche was describing the origin of her name she said, “It’s a French name. It means woods and Blanche means white, so the two together means whitewoods.” On page 60, Blanche says, “I bought this adorable little colored paper lantern at a Chinese shop on Bourbon. Put it over the light bulb!” The author reveals that Blanche is flirting with Mitch which creates an illusion of fantasy while telling fibs in order to not reveal her flaws and imperfection to him. The author uses Blanche to show that some people who has flaws tends to be self-conscious
There are 3 major themes in the play A Streetcar Named Desire, the first is the constant battle between fantasy and reality, second we have the relationship between sexuality and death, and lastly the dependence of men plays a major role in this book.
By embracing the darkness, she conceals her true age, her true self, and her true intentions, coming across as a completely different individual in order to receive what she wants, love and compassion. Wishing to live in a world of magic where she can be the person she wants to be, Blanche misrepresents herself in the shadows of lies, only telling “what ought to be the truth” (Williams 145). Blanche became accustomed to fearing the light, going so far as to conceal the exposed bulbs in her sister's apartment with paper lanterns to dim the brightness in order to create a new external reality for herself. The author strategically ties this symbol of light into his story, expressing the theme constructively through Blanche constantly suppressing her true self and refusing to come forth into the light and show her true colors. Even the guy she is beginning to fall in love with, Mitch, is lied to and shown the fake Blanche, and he consequently confronts her: “I don’t think I ever [saw] you in the light...I’ve never had a real good look at you” (Williams 143-144). In arguing for a while with her, Mitch ultimately turns the lamp to her, flicking the switch on and getting a feel for the true Blanche. He is instantly filled with disappointment, slapped in the face by the lies Blanche filled his ears with, unable to
The first principle character in this play is Blanche DuBois. She is a neurotic nymphomaniac that is on her way to meet her younger sister Stella in the Elysian Fields. Blanche takes two 2 streetcars, one named Desire, the other Cemeteries to get to her little sisters dwelling. Blanche, Stella and Stanley all desire something in this drama. Blanche desired a world without pain, without suffering, in order to stop the mental distress that she had already obtained. She desires a fairy tale story about a rich man coming and sweeping her off her feet and they ride away on a beautiful oceanic voyage. The most interesting part of Blanche is that through her unstable thinking she has come to believe the things she imagines. Her flashy sense of style and imagination hide the truly tragic story about her past. Blanche lost Belle Reve but, moreover, she lost the ones she loved in the battle. The horror lied not only in the many funerals but also in the silence and the constant mourning after. 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 faced pain.
A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams is a play about a woman named Blanche Dubois who is in misplaced circumstances. Her life is lived through fantasies, the remembrance of her lost husband and the resentment that she feels for her brother-in-law, Stanley Kowalski. Various moral and ethical lessons arise in this play such as: Lying ultimately gets you nowhere, Abuse is never good, Treat people how you want to be treated, Stay true to yourself and Don’t judge a book by its cover.
In A Streetcar Named Desire, written by Tennessee Williams, each character is best represented by how they react with the other people in their home. One of the stronger relationships in the movie adaptation is between Stella and Stanley. They are in love toward the beginning of the movie but the relationship is toxic and it take a third party to point out that Stella is in an abusive relationship. After that there is more fighting and in the end Stella abandons Stanley. Williams characterizes Stella as a
She must live in the world of illusions in order to protect herself against outside threats and against her own fears. Throughout the play, Tennessee Williams contrasted Blanche’s delusions with Stanley’s realism. Unfortunately, by the end, Stanley and his view of the world is victorious. Blanche hopes to salvage her life in such a world of brutality, where the inner anxiety clashes with the outside threats. In order to do this, she uses different coping mechanisms: delusions, alcoholism and illusions.