In the play A Streetcar Named Desire, Williams shows that when one chooses to blind themselves in order to obtain desire, one sets up ruin. He emphasizes his meaning with symbols. Williams focuses on symbols that suggest enlightenment or ignorance in order to make his audience aware of the main characters chosen blind spots; as well as, their desires and the impacts that their blind spots and desires have. Williams’ uses symbols associated with light in order to expose Stella’s blindness. Williams’ meaning first appears when Stanley hits Stella. For a short moment after he strikes her, Williams allows Stella to see Stanley clearly. This enables her to ascend the stairs into enlightenment. Williams makes Stella’s short transformation obvious …show more content…
When Stella goes back to Stanley, Blanche becomes concerned about her. Blanche's love for Stella blinds her to the truth about Stella’s relationship with Stanley. This is shown when Blanche talks about how she is going to rescue both of them from Stanley, even when Stella says, “... I am not in anything that I have a desire to get out of” (65). Stella tries to explain, that “things that happen between a man and a woman in the dark - that sort of make everything else seem - unimportant” (70). This statement, however, only supports Blanche’s belief that Stella chose to blind herself for “brutal desire” (70), and that this choice will only lead Stella down a disastrous path. Blanche compares this brutal desire to the streetcar, Desire, that both of them rode to this run down part of New Orleans. In this one line Williams is able reveal the transgression each of the characters with chosen blindnesses will go through. Blanche does not fully realize how Stella feels until they step outside into the better lit living space, where she can see Stella hug …show more content…
She works so hard to hide at this, that she begins to believe in some of the lies that she tells to other people. Her charade drives her to madness. Williams emphasizes Blanche’s attempts to hide her true nature by showing her trying to change her surroundings, when she is lying or omitting the truth. This can be seen in the paper lantern that she uses to cover up the lamp, which prevents others from seeing her properly. Williams also uses Blanche’s perfume to indicate to his audience when Blanche tries to hide her past. Williams demonstrates this when Stanley threatens to expose Blanche. When Stanley mentions the flamingo, a darker part of Blanche’s past, she begins to spray herself with perfume. She even mentions that it cost “Twenty-five dollars an ounce...” and that she is “...nearly out” (77). This quote shows that Blanche has covered up her past often. Blanche’s constant concern about her past drives her to madness, which Williams represents with the Varsouviana music that Blanche associates with her dead husband. This Polka music, that runs through Blanche's head, prevents her from hearing correctly. In addition, the music is accompanied by human like shapes that cannot be seen properly, which shows another form of both Blanche’s blindness, as well as her
Tennessee Williams was one of the most important playwrights in the American literature. He is famous for works such as “The Glass Menagerie” (1944), “A Streetcar Named Desire” (1947) or “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955)”. As John S. Bak claims: “Streetcar remains the most intriguing and the most frequently analyzed of Williams’ plays.” In the lines that follow I am going to analyze how the identity of Blanche DuBois, the female character of his play, “A Streetcar Named Desire”, is shaped.
Tennessee Williams A Streetcar Named Desire is a overly dramatic play that concludes in a remarkable manner. The play takes off by introducing Stanley and Stella, a married couple whom live in New Orleans. They have a two-sided relationship, very loving but abusive. Then suddenly Blanche shows up, Stella’s sister, and informs Stella that their home in Belle Reve was lost. A few days later, Blanche meets and becomes attracted to Mitch, a friend of Stanley. Blanche sees Stanley as an abusive husband and contrasts him to Mitch. Blanche immediately begins to develop deep emotions for Mitch because he is very romantic and a gentleman. Blanche begins to talk to Stella because she does not want her sister to be abused.
Stella and Blanche are two important female characters in Tennessee Williams' "poetic tragedy," A Streetcar Named Desire. Although they are sisters, their blood relationship suggests other similarities between the two women. They are both part of the final generation of a once aristocratic but now moribund family. Both exhibit a great deal of culture and sensitivity, and as a result, both seem out of place in Elysian Fields. As Miller (45) notes, "Beauty is shipwrecked on the rock of the world's vulgarity."
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.
Tennessee Williams gives insight into three ordinary lives in his play, “A Streetcar Named Desire” which is set in the mid-1930’s in New Orleans. The main characters in the play are Blanche, Stanley, and Stella. All three of these characters suffer from personalities that differentiate each of them to great extremes. Because of these dramatic contrarieties in attitudes, there are mounting conflicts between the characters throughout the play. The principal conflict lies between Blanche and Stanley, due to their conflicting ideals of happiness and the way things “ought to be”.
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.
The arts stir emotion in audiences. Whether it is hate or humor, compassion or confusion, passion or pity, an artist's goal is to construct a particular feeling in an individual. Tennessee Williams is no different. In A Streetcar Named Desire, the audience is confronted with a blend of many unique emotions, perhaps the strongest being sympathy. Blanch Dubois is presented as the sympathetic character in Tennessee William's A Streetcar Named Desire as she battles mental anguish, depression, failure and disaster.
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
I believe that Williams passes on a strong message through the play, “Desire deteriorates our lives while our greatest fears stare us in the eye, the only reward we find is in knowing why we regret.” In the end, Blanche Dubois of A Streetcar Named Desire is a tragic figure. All she ever desired was a good, clean life. What she acquired was pain and illusion. One can only be relieved that Blanche finally emptied her secrets and came clean. Whether she ever actually got what she wanted or not, at least her torture even ours conclusively came to an end.
As one can see, Tennessee Williams used colours in several ways. The significance of colours reveals the real appearance of Blanche throughout the play. The colours have their own meanings. The significance of colours is a central theme in Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire; the author uses colours to reflect states of mind, make further commentary on particular characters, and what sorts of things specific colours represent.
“Illusions commend themselves to us because they save us pain and allow us to enjoy pleasure instead. We must therefore accept it without complaint when they sometimes collide with a bit of reality against which they are dashed to pieces” (Sigmund Freud). Illusion can be a part of our lives; however, if taken to the extreme, it can lead one to forget reality. Every individual has problems in life that must be faced with reality and not with illusion, even though it might throw one into flames of fires. Tennessee Williams' play of a family reveals the strength of resistance between reality and desire, judgment and imagination, and between male and female. The idea of reality versus illusion is demonstrated throughout the play. Blanche's world of delusion and fantastical philosophy is categorized by her playful relationships, attempts to revive her youth, and her unawareness in the direction of reality of life. In Tennessee William’s play, A Streetcar Named Desire, through the study of character and tropology, fantasy and illusion allow one to make life appear as it should be rather than as it is.
Blanche uses her dilutions and tries to sway Stella away from Stanley, yet Stella takes all these slanders and belittles them. Stella does this because she loves Stanley and since she is pregnant with his baby.
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.
Tennessee Williams in A Streetcar Named Desire creates one of the most profound accounts of desire versus death; in doing so he designs Blanche Dubois whose only wish is to be desired. Unfortunately in this tragedy death prevails over desire. The two elements of death and desire as binaries are not able to to exist without each other, and this idea is manifested throughout the main character, Blanche Dubois.
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