The seven deadly sins are well established as being detrimental; nevertheless, humanity naturally gravitates towards the inhuman. The life of Blanche DuBois, the protagonist of Tennessee Williams’ play, A Streetcar Named Desire is derailed by lust: the lechery of her ancestors causes the loss of the family home, her husband’s lust leads to suicide, and her own sexuality forces her to leave her occupation and her hometown in disgrace. After taking the streetcars Desire and Cemeteries, Blanche seeks refuge from reality in the home of her sister Stella and her masculine and somewhat barbaric husband Stanley. Despite her attempts to start an unblemished life with a new persona and love interest, Mitch, Blanche’s dark past begins to resurface after …show more content…
Since Blanche’s arrival, Stanley has questioned Blanche’s lifestyle, accused her of theft and engaged in other verbal confrontation. As Mitch’s friend, Stanley deems it necessary to share what he has uncovered about Blanche’s deception and misbehavior with Mitch. After not attending Blanche’s birthday dinner, Mitch visits Blanche late in the evening. In this passage, Mitch reveals to Blanche what he now knows about her and tears off the paper lantern so that he can expose Blanche for who she is. This passage suggests that Mitch embodies the same masculinity already established in Stanley. Utilizing dialogue, characterization, and stage directions, Williams reveals the likeness between the two men. Using dialogue, William’s establishes a power dynamic between Mitch and Blanche driven by Mitch’s dominance. After having discovered the truth behind Blanche’s past, Mitch confronts her about only wanting to meet with him in the …show more content…
After Mitch forcefully removes the paper lantern from the light bulb, Blanche “utters a frightened gasp” (1.9.14). Within the scene, the paper lantern serves yet another symbolic function. The night when Blanche meets Mitch, she asks him to place the lantern onto the light bulb. Just as the lantern protects Blanche from the light which reveals her age, it creates a façade which conceals her past. With Mitch’s love Blanche believes that the proper persona which she invented for herself could become her identity, thus magic becomes reality. However, as Mitch undresses the light bulb, he exposes Blanche vulnerabilities. Even though Mitch possesses masculinity, he does so to a lesser extent than Stanley. This passage is mildly reminiscent of Stanley and Stella’s wedding night when Stanley smashes the light bulbs in the apartment. Even though Stanley’s actions are more extreme than Mitch’s both carry a sexual connotation and reveal animalistic tendencies. Furthermore, as Mitch stares intently at Blanche in the light, “she cries out and covers her face” (1.9.25). By turning on the light, Mitch for the first time has gotten a good look at Blanche, but to do so he is violating her sense of self-worth. Although Mitch continues to berate Blanche for lying to him, he is still physically attracted to Blanche. Mitch’s cruelty is accepted by Blanche and later in the scene still asks if Mitch
The harsh treatment dealt by Mitch to Blanche near the end of the play is
Blanche wanted to start fresh when she went to visit her sister but Stanley would not give up on trying to bring her down. Stanley brings it up to Blanche that he has his suspicions about her when he says, “If I didn't know that you was my wife's sister I'd get ideas about you!”. Stanley investigating into Blanche is out of her control as she can not stop him from doing so. Blanche did things in her past but is trying to change her ways and her past is coming back to haunt her. Without Stanley’s countless efforts to bring down Blanche, she would be in a better situation than she ended up being in. Even the first time Blanche saw Stanley she knew he would try to bring her down. “The first time I laid eyes on Stanley I thought to myself, that man is my executioner! That man will destroy me”. Stanley does end up being her executioner and is the main reason for Blanche's downfall. In the end Blanche is left with nothing as everything she cared about is gone. This is the result of Stanley looking into her life and exposing her past. Stanley and his relentless efforts to bring down Blanche is out of her control and caused Blanche’s final
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
The first time Blanche and Mitch meet Mitch reveals part of his tragic past, ‘the girl is dead now’ through the fact that Mitch still carries the lighter around with him shows how important the ‘girl’ was to him. This helps to create sympathy with the audience. Also from this point onwards we are able to see a tragic similarity between Mitch and Blanche because they have both lost someone they loved- it appears when they were young, you can infer this because both characters use nouns such as ‘boy’ and ‘girl’ which have conations of youth. With Mitch’s past tragedy exposed and Mitch being left vulnerable William’s enables the audience to empathise with him and thus we as an audience feel closer to him and it makes the ending tragic as we can see that he needs Blanche just as much as she needs him. The sympathy the audienc...
The moment their eyes first meet, there seems to be an immediate attraction between Blanche and Mitch, causing them to take a “certain interest” in one another. After their first close encounter while the poker game is taking place, Blanche notices that Mitch is not like Stanley and the others. Telling Stella, “That one seems—superior to the others…I thought he had a sort of sensitive look” (Williams 52), Blanche takes interest in Mitch’s perceived sensitivity, and is immediately attracted
Throughout Tennessee William’s play “A Streetcar Named Desire,” Blanche Dubois exemplified several tragic flaws. She suffered from her haunting past; her inability to overcome; her desire to be someone else; and from the cruel, animalistic treatment she received from Stanley. Sadly, her sister Stella also played a role in her downfall. All of these factors ultimately led to Blanche’s tragic breakdown in the end.
Significant events will have drastically different effects on each of us. When faced with challenges, some individuals are inclined enough to adapt in order to overcome these obstacles, whereas others will find themselves unable to do so, and ultimately stumble along the road leading to their destiny. Tennessee Williams explores a female protagonist’s reaction to the cataclysmic events that befall her throughout the modern drama, A Streetcar Named Desire. Blanche Dubois suffered from a lack of financial security, and a tarnished reputation that continued to befall her. Nonetheless, her resourcefulness never faltered. Blanche’s life is impacted by several significant events which ultimately alters the course of her destiny. Through Blanche, Tennessee Williams develops the idea that we are all faced with challenges that impact our lives, but in the end, it’s how we deal with those circumstances that truly determine our destiny.
The first principle character in this play is Blanche DuBois. She is a neurotic nymphomaniac that is on her way to meet her younger sister Stella in the Elysian Fields. Blanche takes two 2 streetcars, one named Desire, the other Cemeteries to get to her little sisters dwelling. Blanche, Stella and Stanley all desire something in this drama. Blanche desired a world without pain, without suffering, in order to stop the mental distress that she had already obtained. She desires a fairy tale story about a rich man coming and sweeping her off her feet and they ride away on a beautiful oceanic voyage. The most interesting part of Blanche is that through her unstable thinking she has come to believe the things she imagines. Her flashy sense of style and imagination hide the truly tragic story about her past. Blanche lost Belle Reve but, moreover, she lost the ones she loved in the battle. The horror lied not only in the many funerals but also in the silence and the constant mourning after. 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 faced pain.
In this play the character blanche exhibits the theme of illusion. Blanche came from a rocky past. Her young husband killed himself and left her with a big space in her heart to fill. Blanche tried to fill this space with the comfort of strangers and at one time a young boy. She was forced to leave her hometown. When she arrives in New Orleans, she immediately begins to lie and give false stories. She takes many hot bathes, in an effort to cleanse herself of her past. Blanche tries also to stay out of bright lights. She covers the light bulb (light=reality) in the apartment with a paper lantern. This shows her unwillingness to face reality but instead live in an illusion. She also describes how she tells what should be the truth. This is a sad excuse for covering/lying about the sinful things she has done. Furthermore, throughout the story she repeatedly drinks when she begins to be faced with facts. All these examples, covering light, lying, and alcoholism show how she is not in touch with reality but instead living in a fantasy world of illusion.
In this passage, Williams’ emphasises the nature of Blanche’s demise through the contrapuntal mode of the scene juxtaposing Blanche’s bathing with Stanley and Stella’s conversation. Williams wrote in a letter to Elia Kazan, who was to direct the film production of the play, that ‘It is a thing (misunderstanding) not a person (Stanley) that destroys (Blanche) in the ends’. This passage is significant as it shows the extent of Stanley’s misunderstanding of Blanche and his stubbornness to ascertain his condemnations to Stella. Furthermore, the use of colloquial lexis shows the true feebleness of Stanley’s claim because his judicial façade is diminished and shows the dangerous influence of claims as he sways Mitch away from Blanche. Stella’s character
During the course of the play, Blanche smokes cigarettes, the two most prominent instances being with Mitch during one of their first romantic interactions and with the Young Man whom Blanche kisses without his consent. These two instances assist in portraying Blanche as a vain woman who is fixated on reliving her exciting past, in which she was constantly receiving attention from potential admirers and was in love with her husband who later committed suicide due to Blanche’s cruel mistreatment. Although the 1951 film adaptation of A Streetcar Named Desire portrays Blanche as a vain creature in these scenes, the film ultimately showcases her as a helpless, sympathetic woman who is incredibly fragile due to how cruelly the world has treated her. Because of censorship restrictions placed upon the film’s producers, her husband’s homosexuality is not mentioned in the film and her own promiscuous nature is greatly reduced. Moreover, the use of lighting, shadows, and point-of-view further reinforces Blanche’s desire to relive the times where the world was not working against her. While the use of light and dark in the dialogue and stage directions in the play encourages readers to see Blanche as a vain person who is obsessed with receiving the attention she once did when she was young and beautiful, the film’s use of lighting, shadows, and point-of-view encourages viewers to see Blanche as a fragile woman who has only ever been treated in a harsh way by those she cares about and is thus deserving of
One of the first major themes of this book is the constant battle between fantasy and reality. Blanche explains to Mitch that she fibs because she refuses to accept the hand fate has dealt her. Lying to herself and to others allows her to make life appear as it should be rather than as it is. Stanley, a practical man firmly grounded in the physical world, disdains Blanche’s fabrications and does everything he can to unravel them. The relationship between Blanche and Stanley is a struggle between appearances and reality. It propels the play’s plot and creates an overarching tension. Ultimately, Blanche’s attempts to rejuvenate her life and to save Stella from a life with Stanley fail. One of the main ways the author dramatizes fantasy’s inability to overcome reality is through an explorati...
In Tennessee Williams' play, A Streetcar Named Desire, Williams uses the suicide of Blanche's husband to illuminate Blanche's insecurities and immoral behavior. When something terrible happens to someone, it often reveals who he or she truly is. Blanche falls victim to this behavior, and she fails to face her demons. This displays how the play links a character’s illogical choices and their inner struggles.
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. Branching from that, Stella has an inner conflict because she does not know whether to side with her husband or her sister in each situation. Blanche and Mitch ha...
Blanche uses her fantasies as a shield; and her desires as her motivation to survive. Her fading beauty being her only asset and chance of finding stability. Stella’s relationship with Stanley also emphasis the theme Williams created in this book. They’re only bond is physical desire and nothing at all intellectual or deep rooted. Tennessee Williams exemplifies that their relationship which only springs from desire doesn’t make it any weaker. He also creates a social dichotomy of the relationship between death and desire.