The Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams is a playwright that uses the setting in order for the sexual, mental, and physical conflict to form. The significance of the conflict develops around this time period and therefore, it is important to acknowledge the oppressiveness of society. The Streetcar Named Desire was taken place in New Orleans in the 1940s. During this time World War II was coming to an end and there was a recurring battle of gender roles. A Streetcar Named Desire is a play based on the never-ending cycle of inequality. The protagonists Stanley and Blanche continue to fight over power. Stanley is the example of superiority and dominance of the household. On the other hand, Blanche is the example of an uncommon woman in society. Blanche is an older woman who is not married and always relied on the “kindness of strangers.” She goes to visit her sister in order to try to find what she is looking for, stability and to satisfy her desire. The conflict of gender roles and patriarchy reject women to be predominant in society and the household. The works chosen focused on the relationship between the protagonists and how their relationships built the external conflict of male dominance. The works compare and contrast the characters in order to relay the underlying message of authority, dominance, and crushing the idea of …show more content…
Blanche is displaced in her normal environment. She was a southern belle who moved to the blue collar side of the south. Blanche tried to cope with the history she left behind and her out of place actions shown in the article, Authorizing History: Victimization in “A Streetcar Named Desire,” Blanche was misplaced and misunderstood. Instead of Stella listening to Blanche, she believes her husband for her unpleasant past and accused rape and agrees to call a doctor to take her
The complex protagonist in A Street Car Named Desire, Blanche Dubois, traveled to New Orleans to stay with her sister, Stella, leaving a litany of tragedy and trouble back home in Mississippi. It is revealed in scene one that Blanche allowed the ancestral estate to foreclose after a series of family deaths and her inability to pay the expenses. She irrationally attacks her sister for leaving the family behind and uses her departure as a way to blame her lost family estate. Another aspect of Blanche’s disparity is the untimely death of her husband, a suicide which she carries blame for. His death created an intimacy void in her life and subsequently leads to her overtly flirtatious and hypersexual behavior. She admits this by saying, “After the death of Allan, intimacies with strangers was all I seemed able to fill my empty heart with” (Streetcar, Williams, p.146). It w...
I think Blanche is relating the streetcar as a symbol for Stanley and both are common and trash. Another meaning is when stella asks Blanche if she has ridden on the streetcar named desire, she is asking her if she has experienced that raw brutal desire like Stella has with Stanley. this scene also has Blanche telling Stella that she has experienced that kind of desire and “It brought me her” (121). She is talking about her marriage to the yound husband that took his own life or about the affair with the seventeen-year-old student because both contributed to forcing her to come there. Both caused her to be broke with no job and no husband.
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.
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...
She presents herself as a very outspoken person, however, we as an audience learn that she is very fragile, this can be seen through her drinking habits and also by the way she vents to Mitch as she unravels her true self. And, so when her lies are detected he is the first to realise that she was battling against her own insecurities and needed someone to comfort as she had putting up a strong front. Furthermore, when Blanche suffered from the loss of Belle Reeve and witnessed the death of her family members and lost her partner she decided to fill the void by working at the hotel as she states that “Intimacies with strangers was all I seemed to able to fill my empty heart with” (scene nine). For the longest time Blanche showed no emotion in relation to grief. Blanche also attempts to save Stella from the marriage which can be seen in the quote “He acts like an animal, has an animal’s habits! Eats like one, moves like one, talks like one!” (Scene four) inferring that she should not compromise Stanley’s bad behaviour. Nonetheless, Blanche’s dark past follows her to New Orleans as Stella finds it hard to believe Blanche after learning about her promiscuous past from her husband. The relationship between Blanche and Stella is broken due to misconceptions and so Blanche remains an outcast to society. Eventhorugh Blanche was grieving and needed some form of comfort as she had been completely isolated
This gradual fall and loss of her sense of reality is truly tragic. Blanche is a person largely driven by the part of her that wants to be liked and be accepted. She cares greatly about how she is viewed and how she looks which is seen throughout the play. Even at the end when she’s living almost completely in the imaginations of her mind she asks Stella and Eunice how she looks before being taken away to an insane asylum. Tennessee Williams, the author of the play, uses all the conflict between Blanche and others, specifically Stanley, to show that fantasy is unable to overcome reality. Stanley and Blanche are both the epitomes of fantasy and reality. Stanley is a man focused on sexual drive, work, and fighting. He is exhibited as animalistic and strongly driven by his desires which is shown when he says, “Be comfortable. That's my motto up where I come from.” Stanley loves and searches after reality which is why he is so set on breaking down the facade he sees in Blanche. Blanche on the other hand is running from her reality and her past. Her fantasy of being high class and chaste is the exact opposite of her reality which is why she wants a life like that so badly. She wants marriage and stability, two things she was jealous of Stella having after arriving in New Orleans. Her fantasy she was building in her new life is shattered when Stanley is able to learn of her past and bring reality crashing down on her. Williams
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”.
Tennessee Williams was a well known Modern English playwright. He was born in Columbus, Mississippi and moved to St. Louis, then to Memphis, and later graduated from the University of Iowa in 1983. Williams began to turn his short stories into plays and later on into films. His wildest audiences were in contemporary dramatic literature. Williams’s plays have been produced in England, France, Hally, Germany, Greece, Austria, Switzerland, Holland, Poland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Belgium, Cuba and Mexico. One of William’s most intriguing plays is Streetcar named Desire. Streetcar was produced around 1947. The “setting of Streetcar” is a combination of raw realism and deliberate fantasy” (Riddel 16). The main character of the play is Ms. Blanche Dubois, a widowed, middle age, “southern bell” hiding from her own reality. Stella, Blanche’s younger sister is married to an animal, Stanley Kowalski. Mitch, Stanley’s friend, is Blanche’s last chance at happiness that she will never reach. According to Joseph Riddel, “Life is a living division of two warring principles, desire and decorum, and she is the victim of civilizations attempt to reconcile the two in a morality” (17). In the play Blanche is stuck between two different worlds; one world in her own mind which is completely her own make believe fairytale of a perfect life she lives, and the real world of harsh reality. “Her indulgent past is a mixture of sin and romance, reality and illusion, the excesses of the self and the restraints of society” (Riddel 17). This world of illusion is her escape from the harsh reality of her real life situation. According to Ruby Cohn, “Blanche Dubois is trapped by the poverty of her imagery which reflects the poverty of her dreams” (82). In a Street...
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.
Tennessee Williams explores in his play” A Streetcar Named Desire”, suggests the main protagonist, Blanche, who has ruins her reputation due to her adversity. She is kick out of Laurel. She have no choice, but to move to her sister’s house. This place can allow her to create a new identity and new life. However when Blanche is revealed , it cause her to choose to live in her own fantasy world , because she cannot face the harsh reality. The Play” A Streetcar Named Desire”, by Tennessee Williams illustrates that sensitive people may succumb to fantasy to survive when they faced adversity, ,which forsake their identity to find an acceptable existence.
In Tennessee Williams’ play A Streetcar Named Desire, main character Blanche Dubois to begin with seems to be a nearly perfect model of a classy woman whose social interaction, life and behavior are based upon her sophistication. The play revolves around her, therefore the main theme of drama concerns her directly. In Blanche is seen the misfortune of a person caught between two worlds-the world of the past and the world of the present-unwilling to let go of the past and unable, because of her character, to come to any sort of terms with the present.
Firstly, the reader may initially feel Blanche is completely responsible or at least somewhat to blame, for what becomes of her. She is very deceitful and behaves in this way throughout the play, particularly to Mitch, saying, ‘Stella is my precious little sister’ and continuously attempting to deceive Stanley, saying she ‘received a telegram from an old admirer of mine’. These are just two examples of Blanches’ trickery and lying ways. In some ways though, the reader will sense that Blanche rather than knowingly being deceitful, actually begins to believe what she says is true, and that she lives in her own dream reality, telling people ‘what ought to be the truth’ probably due to the unforgiving nature of her true life. This will make the reader begin to pity Blanche and consider whether these lies and deceits are just what she uses to comfort and protect herself. Blanche has many romantic delusions which have been plaguing her mind since the death of her husband. Though his death was not entirely her fault, her flirtatious manner is a major contributor to her downfall. She came to New Orleans as she was fired from...
“. . . Women internalize the feminine wound or feminine inferiority so deeply, there's little or no female authority and esteem to fall back on. So they seek it by adopting and pleasing patriarchal standards.” (Sue Monk Kidd, the Dance of the Dissident Daughter)
This play is not for the faint of heart, as it approaches many different themes that are hard to watch. “The play addresses discrimination, classism, sexual assault, domestic violence, addiction, grief, and sexism”, stated Director Nathan Motta.
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.