A Winless Battle

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A Winless Battle Sometimes in life, there are times when you are faced with a struggle and often times, no matter how hard you try to get yourself out of this struggle, you just can’t and you end up feeling as though you have lost the battle. In “A Streetcar Named Desire,” by Tennessee Williams, there are four characters that really display this situation. Blanche, Stanley, Stella, and Mitch are the four characters that display this situation. In Tennessee Williams play, “A Streetcar Named Desire,” there are no victors, only victims. In this play, Blanche is the older sister of Stella and she comes to Elysian Fields to live with her sister because she has nowhere else to live because she was asked to leave the last town that she was living in because of the life that she was choosing to live there. Blanche also lost her family’s estate, Belle Reve. Therefore, she had to go to the last place that she could think of and that was the house of her sister, Stella. From the start of the play, it is imminent that Blanche is the victim of her own life, and not a victor. She first lost her husband when she was a very young girl because of the fact that she found out that he was gay. She was in love with this man and when she found out, she was just heartbroken. However, she didn’t want to tell him that she knew about his secret so she kept it a secret for a while. But then, one night while they were dancing, she all of sudden just came out and told him what she knew. He was so embarrassed by this that he ran out of the room and shot and killed himself. That is one of the battles that she was the victim of. Then when she loses Belle Reve and is forced to live in a town called Laurel, she chooses to live a life that she doesn’t want to. She forces herself into prostitution because she has no other way of making money to help support herself. During this time, she is living in a hotel called the Flamingo and many men are coming up to her room every night. This disturbs the peace within the hotel and when the hotel and the town of Laurel figure out what she is doing in the hotel, they tell her to leave the hotel and also the town because they don’t want anyone like her to be there.

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