A Street Car Named Desire by Tennessee Williams

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Blanche is a woman who has a pretty bad life. Her husband committed suicide because of the annoying Blanche who bothered him after she realized that he was a homosexual. She lost her job as a schoolteacher because the principal discovered that she was having an affair with a teenage student. She was drunk most of the times and tried to be with man and show that she still attractive. After she got fired, she went to her sister’s house to stay. Her sister Stella was happy for leaving her previous life and marrying a Polish descent man named Stanley Kowalski. And his hate of Blanche starts instantly after he met her. Blanche tries to get in a relationship with one of Stanley’s friends. At first it goes well but at the end Mitch tells her that he’s not going to marry such a filthy woman. Kowalski’s family was falling apart because of Blanche. At the end Blanche got raped by Stanley and a doctor will arrive soon to take Blanche to an insane asylum, but Blanche believes she is leaving to join her millionaire Shep Huntleigh for help escaping from New Orleans. First she refuses but ,finally,...

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    Blanche’s immoral and illogical decisions all stem from her husband's suicide. When a tragedy happens in someone’s life, it shows the person’s true colors. Blanche’s true self was an alcoholic and sex addict, which is displayed when “She rushes about frantically, hiding the bottle in a closet, crouching at the mirror and dabbing her face with cologne and powder” (Williams 122). Although Blanche is an alcoholic, she tries to hide it from others. She is aware of her true self and tries to hide it within illusions. Blanche pretends to be proper and young with her fancy clothes and makeup but is only masking her true, broken self.

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    Blanche was awfully spoiled as a young girl. She lived in a huge house named Belle Reve, where servants would wait on her every want and need. This led her to never experience any hardships or adversity as a child. She had no previous experience of when she was forced to deal with any difficulties. She just had other people to take care of them for her. This is why, as an adult, Blanche doesn’t know how to overcome adve...

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  • Gender Roles in A Streetcar Named Desire

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    Within Tennessee Williams's story about love and abuse within marriage and challenging familial ties, there lie three very different characters that all see the world in vastly different ways. These members of a family that operate completely outside of our generation’s norms, are constantly unsure of themselves and their station within the binary not only of their familial unit, but within the gender binary that is established for them to follow. Throughout the story of the strange family, each character goes through a different arch that changes them irrevocably whether it is able to be perceived or not by those around them. The only male, Stanley is initially the macho force in the home who controls everything without question. He has no consequences for his actions against his wife and is never held accountable for treating the people around him poorly; this lasts until Blanche arrives. Blanche is an outwardly demure, but spirited young woman who after experiencing untold misfortune breaks mentally and decides to no longer care what others may think of her. She lives her life lavishly and foolishly by having dalliances with younger or richer men who shower her with gifts and attention to get sex from her all too willing form. Her effect on Stanley is one of temptation and challenge; she continually tries to convince her sister that she is too good for the man and in turn fosters a resentment for her in him. Stella acts as the antithesis of Stanley and Blanche’s extreme personalities. She is innocence and purity where they are the darkness that threatens to overtake her life. Throughout, Stella is a pawn that they both try to use against the other to no real avail as she is determined to make the best choice for herself. In th...

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    Blanche, in particular, is much more of an anachronism than Stella, who has, for the most part, adapted to the environment of Stanley Kowalski. Finally, both Stella and Blanche are or have been married. It is in their respective marriages that we can begin to trace the profound differences between these two sisters. Where Blanche's marriage, to a man whom she dearly loved (Miller 43), proved catastrophic to her, Stella's marriage seems to be fulfilling her as a woman. Blanche's marriage to a young homosexual, and the subsequent tragedy that resulted from her discovery of her husband's degeneracy and her inability to help him, has been responsible for much of the perversity in her life.

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    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...

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    She struggles with Stanley’s ideals and shields her past. The essential conflict of the story is between Blanche, and her brother-in-law Stanley. Stanley investigates Blanche’s life to find the truth of her promiscuity, ruining her relationships with Stella, and her possible future husband Mitch, which successfully obtain his goal of getting Blanche out of his house. Blanche attempts to convince Stella that she should leave Stanley because she witnessed a fight between the two. Despite these instances, there is an essence of sexual tension between the two, leading to a suspected rape scene in which one of their arguments ends with Stanley leading Blanche to the bed.

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  • A Streetcar Named Desire: Sympathy for Blanche

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    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...

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    Blanche represents a deep-seated attachment to the past.5  Her life is a lesson how tragic events events in the past can ruin a person's future. Her husband's death affects her the most.

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  • Conflict Between Blanche And Stanley In A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams

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    Blanche who had been caring for a generation of dying relatives at Belle Reve has been forced to sell the family plantation. Blanche is a great deal less realistic than Stanley and lives in illusions which bring upon her downfall.

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  • A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams

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    In Tennessee Williams’ 1947 play, “A Streetcar Named Desire,” Stella and Stanley Kowalski live in the heart of poor, urban New Orleans in a one-story flat very different from the prestigious home Stella came from. This prestige is alive and well inside Stella’s lady-like sister, Blanche Du Bois. Over the course of Blanche’s life, she has experienced many tragedies that deeply affected her, such as the death of her gay husband, the downward spiral in her mental health that followed, and most recently the loss of her wealth and therefore social status. She constructs a proverbial lampshade to mask her pain and to control the last part of her world that she is able to, the image she projects into the world for herself and others to see. The brooding prince of William Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” chooses a very similar way of coping with the hand life has dealt him. When his mother remarries his uncle only a month after his father’s passing, the ghost of Hamlet’s father visits the young prince demanding avengement. These events cause Hamlet to try to replace the old lampshade that helped him cope with reality by changing his own image and fooling himself and others into thinking he’s crazy. An examination of both plays reveals that the importance of subjective truths and the way in which Blanche and Hamlet use them to cope transcends the context of both plays.

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  • Blanche is Responsible for her own Fate in a Street Car Named Desire

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    In conclusion Blanche is to a degree responsible for her own downfall and mental collapse. She opts to turn to promiscuity and inebriety even going as far as to admitting to flirting with Stanley, and by the end disclosing all her tricks and deceits to him and Mitch. However, she cannot be held as responsible for the acts of her husband, Stanley and even Stella and the social circumstances involving the destruction of her old America by new America, which have caused her already deteriorating mental state to detract beyond possible repair by the end of the play.

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  • Fantasy and Illusion in A Streetcar Named Desire

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    ...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.

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  • The Desires in A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams

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    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.

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