Comparing A Streetcar Named Desire and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
In the game of life man is given the options to bluff, raise, or fold. He is dealt a hand created by the consequences of his choices or by outside forces beyond his control. It is a never ending cycle: choices made create more choices. Using diverse, complex characters simmering with passion and often a contradiction within themselves, Tennessee Williams examines the link of past and present created by man's choices in "A Streetcar Named Desire" and "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof."
Delicate Blanche, virile Stanley. Dynamic Maggie, impotent Brick. Williams' protagonists are distinctly different in temperament. In "A Streetcar Named Desire" Blanche exemplifies the stereotypical old south: educated, genteel, obsolete. Stanley is the new south: primitive, crude, ambitious. 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. He wants her to be truthful and "lay her cards on the table" but simultaneously would "get ideas" about Blanche if she wasn't Stella's sister (Williams, Street 40-41). Their relationship overflows with sexual tension as they battle for Stella. Stanley, the new south, defeats Blanche, the old south. After destroying her chance for security, his sexual assault erases her last traces of sanity.
Similarly opposites attract in "Cat on...
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...ms." Tennessee Williams: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1977. 45-60.
Fauk, Signi Lenea. Tennessee Williams. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1978. 1-167.
Heilman, Robert. "Tennessee Williams' Approach to Tragedy." Tennessee Williams: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1977. 17-35.
Stanton, Stephen. "Introduction." Tennessee Williams: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey : Prentice-Hall, 1977. 1-16.
Weales, Gerald. "Tennessee Williams' Achievement in the Sixties." Tennessee Williams: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc, 1977. 61-70.
Williams, Tennessee. Cat On a Hot Tin Roof. New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1958. 3-85.
---. A Streetcar Named Desire. New York: Penguin Books, 1974. 12-142.
Riddel, Joseph N. “A Streetcar Named Desire—Nietzsche Descending.” Tennessee Williams. Bloom’s Modern Critical Views. Ed. Harold Bloom. Philadelphia: Chelsea, 1987. 13-22. Print.
The Soviet Union and the United States were very distant during three decades of a nuclear arms race. Even though the two nations never directly had a battle, the Cuban Missile Crisis, amongst other things, was a result of the tension. The missile crisis began in October of 1962, when an American spy plane secretly photographed nuclear missile sites being built by the Soviet Union in Cuba. JFK did not want the Soviet Union and Cuba to know that he had discovered the missiles, so he made his decisions very secretly. Eventually, Kennedy decided to place a ring of ships around Cuba and place missiles in Turkey. Eventually, both leaders superpowers realized the possibility of a nuclear war and agreed to a deal in which the Soviets would remove the missiles from Cuba if the US didn't invade Cuba. Even though the Soviets removed took their missiles out of Cuba and the US eventually taking their missiles out of Turkey, they (the Soviets) continued to build a more advanced military; the missile crisis was over, but the arms race was not.
Williams, Tennessee. Anthology of American Literature: From Realism to the Present. Ed. McMichael, George et al. New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 2000.
Williams, Dakin and Shephard Mead. Tennessee Williams: An Intimate Biography. New York: Arbor House, 1998.
Jackson, Esther Merle. The Broken World of Tennessee Williams. Madison: & of Wisconsin P, 1965.
Abate, Tom. “Which bird is the better indicator species for old-growth forest?” Bioscience Jan. 1992: 8-9.
After obtaining Fidel Castro's approval, the Soviet Union worked quickly and secretly to build missile installations in Cuba. On October 16, President John Kennedy was shown reconnaissance photographs of Soviet missile installations under construction in Cuba. After seven days of guarded and intense debate in the United States administration, during which Soviet diplomats denied that installations for offensive missiles were being built in Cuba, President Kennedy, in a televised address on October 22, announced the discovery of the installations and proclaimed that any nuclear missile attack from Cuba would be regarded as an attack by the Soviet Union and would be responded to accordingly. He also imposed a naval quarantine on Cuba to prevent further Soviet shipments of offensive military weapons from arriving there.
Williams, Tennessee. "Tennessee Williams Interviews Himself." Where I Live: Selected Essays by Tennessee Williams. Ed. Christine Day and Bob Woods. New York: New Directions, 1978. 88-92.
As Edgar Allen Poe wrote more and more stories, some comparisons between all of them started to arose, two stories that share a lot of similarities are “The Raven” and “Tell-Tale Heart.” One similarity is that in both stories the narrators were both scared of something that would not leave them alone, in “The Raven” the terror is the Raven and in “Tell-Tale Heart” it is the old man's eye and eventually his heart beat. Another similarity between the stories is that the narrator is the main character and is telling a story about themselves, one being about a murder they had committed and the other about a Raven knocking at a man’s door. The next correspondence is
Jackson, Esther Merle. The Broken World of Tennessee Williams. Madison: & of Wisconsin P, 1965.
Williams, Tennessee. “The Glass Menagerie.” Literature: an Introductionto Fiction, Poetry, Drams, and writing. Ed. X. J. Kennedy and Dana Gioia. 7th Compact ed. New York: Pearson, 2013. 1174-1220. Print.
Conarroe, Joel. "William Carlos Williams." Six American poets: an anthology. New York: Random House, 1991. . Print.
Climate change can be seen as a change in the pattern of weather over time scales of decades or longer, relating to changes in oceans, land surfaces and ice sheets. Evidence has proven that the Antarctic continent is warming as a whole. Studies conducted by Antarctic researchers have found that a temperature increase of 1.3°C will threaten 40% of the total Emperor penguin population, along with 70% of the world’s total Adélie penguin population, largely as the result of diminishing sea ice. Predictions that have made is that at present rate, global temperatures will exceed 1.3°C of warming before mid-century with penguin scientists also predicting that climate change will push the Emperor population to near extinction within this century as the result of sea-ice
The point was that Williams is trying to imagine an autonomous work of art that has a deep thinking to it, that is in some sense violence or personified, and this sexual desire to make the tragic something living, introduces to the world of the tragic the problem of death. Tennessee William explores a conflict through between desire and death. There ...
The Tell Tale Heart is a story, on the most basic level, of conflict. There is a mental conflict within the narrator himself (assuming the narrator is male). Through obvious clues and statements, Poe alerts the reader to the mental state of the narrator, which is insanity. The insanity is described as an obsession (with the old man's eye), which in turn leads to loss of control and eventually results in violence. Ultimately, the narrator tells his story of killing his housemate. Although the narrator seems to be blatantly insane, and thinks he has freedom from guilt, the feeling of guilt over the murder is too overwhelming to bear. The narrator cannot tolerate it and eventually confesses his supposed 'perfect'; crime. People tend to think that insane persons are beyond the normal realm of reason shared by those who are in their right mind. This is not so; guilt is an emotion shared by all humans. The most demented individuals are not above the feeling of guilt and the havoc it causes to the psyche. Poe's use of setting, character, and language reveal that even an insane person feels guilt. Therein lies the theme to The Tell Tale Heart: The emotion of guilt easily, if not eventually, crashes through the seemingly unbreakable walls of insanity.