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Tennessee Williams essay re. "Streetcar
Williams portrayal of society in streetcar named desire
Tennessee williams and his play streetcar named desire
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The white women in Eugene O’Neill’s play All God’s Chillun Got Wings and The older sister in Tennessee Williams’ play A Streetcar Named Desire both struggle mentally with reality and fantasy. Ella Downey, a desperately unstable, racially aware woman, struggles to overcome her insecurities, and is mentally torn between reality and fantasy. Like Ella, Blanche Dubois, a disillusioned woman, finds herself struggling mentally; unable to overcome reality, refuses to accept things are what they are, retreats to the fantasies of her mind. Ella is a desperate woman when she reconnects with an old friend from her childhood, Jim, so many years later; she’s no longer the little girl she once was that he so fondly remembers. Ella is a desperate woman when she reconnects with Jim because she is all alone, she has no family; she’s been abandoned by her lover and dealing with the death of her illegitimate only child thus, deeming her an unstable women because she’s had a child out of wed lock. She has no other suitor’s insight when she proclaims her love for Jim. Ella is racially aware woman wi...
The woman in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple and the woman in Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire both struggle with discrimination. Celie, a passive young woman, finds herself in mistreatment and isolation, leading to emotional numbness, in addition to a society in which females are deemed second-rate furthermore subservient to the males surrounding them. Like Celie, Blanche DuBois, a desperate woman, who finds herself dependent on men, is also caught in a battle between survival and sexism during the transformation from the old to the new coming South.
The text from A Streetcar Named Desire and The Glass Menagerie, both written by the renowned author Tennessee Williams, deal with the topics of life's pressures, and the desire to succeed in everything we do. Oftentimes, people place unrealistic expectations upon us and set the bar higher than we can achieve, or even want to reach. People end up developing mechanisms to deal with these stressors and tensions that have been created. We find other unhealthy habits and vices to supplant the reality we are trying to escape, that hopefully will take away this pain and suffering we are experiencing. In both of these plays, the characters are not able to live in their present realities. Two of the main characters are closely linked in their characterizations
Jim’s feeling of loneliness has a big impact on his view of Alena. If Jim met another girl that day on the beach, and who was not as attractive he would have acted very different. Jim was very vulnerable at that moment and needed som...
The use of alcohol has many different physical properties. In the novel The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, and the play A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams, alcohol plays a rather compelling and symbolic role. For instance alcohol occurs in both texts in the form of social meanings of having a good time and can also lead to violence. Therefore, the authors are trying to get across that alcohol is used, in different ways, to convey the moral degradations of society.
Tennessee Williams was born Thomas Lanier Williams in 1911. As a successful playwright, his career was greatly influenced by events in his life. He was noted for bringing the reader "a slice of his own life and the feel of southern culture", as his primary sources of inspiration were "the writers he grew up with, his family, and the South." The connection between his life and his work can be seen in several of his plays.
“A Street Car Named Desire” is a critically acclaimed play by Tennessee Williams, which emphasizes the sexual desire and tension between characters Blanche Dubois, Stanley Kowalski, Stella Kowalski and Harold Mitchell. Throughout the play, Blanche is so nervous and on edge that a slight disturbance could shatter her sanity. However, Blanches ambition for love and “magic” is what truly affects the other characters in the play and cements the idea that Blanche is a proper lunatic. A street car named desire not only focuses on tense family relationships present in the play but as well as the affects of insanity caused by an individual ambition, which in this case is the desire for love through the protagonist Blanche Dubois. In the play “ A street car named desire” by Tennessee Williams, Williams creates the idea that Blanche’s crazed ambition for “magic” and love is impossible because of her destitute and unforgettable past and her ambition for love leads to her own collapse and downfall.
In Tennessee Williams’ “A Streetcar Named Desire,” paper lanterns, kitchen candles, and multicolored strobes reveal the various shades of reality surrounding Blanch DuBois. When Blanche visits her sister, Stella, and Stanley Kowalski’s modest apartment in New Orleans, tension regarding her mental stability immediately emerges. Blanche cloaks the apartment’s harsh light with a paper lantern, which initially suggests the fervency of her insecurity regarding physical beauty; however, this dim light eventually evolves to expose her unwillingness to embrace reality, one of Blanche’s principal character flaws that stems from the devastating suicide of her former husband. While recounting her husband’s tragedy, Blanche heavily relies on light imagery to accentuate the suicide’s influence on her existence. Towards the play’s conclusion, Mitch destroys the paper lantern and forces Blanche to candidly expose her deteriorated mentality, thus commencing Blanche’s downfall into hysteria. Blanche DuBois’ aversion to light, an element which epitomizes the concept of transparent reality, reveals her superficiality and exposes her capricious mentality, ultimately perpetuating the theme that willful deception leads to unstable reality.
Throughout Tennessee Williams’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. Blanche could not accept her past and overcome it.
In the play A Streetcar Named Desire author Tennessee Williams writes about Blanche DuBois, a woman who is seeking help from her older sister Stella Kowalski. Blanche comes to stay with Stella and her husband Stanley after finding out that Blanche and Stella’s childhood home had been taken from under them. The play goes on to show the dramatic downfall of what is Blanche DuBois. Throughout the play we see her slowly break down till finally she is pushed over the edge. William's uses a great deal of allusion to convey a real meaning to why characters do what they do. It’s not just an example, each allusion has a deeper meaning to the character it’s associated with. Blanche DuBois is the character used associated with allusion. Williams uses allusion with Blanche to present how she masks her true identity to the real world, saying she’s a pure southern belle when really she is truly a lost lonely soul.
In today's rough and tough world, there seems to be no room for failure. The pressure to succeed in life sometimes seems unreasonable. Others often set expectations for people too high. This forces that person to develop ways to take the stress and tension out of their lives in their own individual ways. In the plays "The Glass Menagerie" and " A Streetcar Named Desire" written by Tennessee Williams, none of the characters are capable of living in the present and facing reality. Two of the characters are Amanda Wingfield and Blache Dubios. In order for these characters to deal with the problems and hardships in their lives they retreat into their own separate worlds of illusion and lies.
Many different depictions of gender roles exist in all times throughout the history of American culture and society. Some are well received and some are not. When pitted against each other for all intents and purposes of opposition, the portrayal of the aspects and common traits of masculinity and femininity are separated in a normal manner. However, when one gender expects the other to do its part and they are not satisfied with the results and demand more, things can shift from normal to extreme fairly quickly. This demand is more commonly attributed by the men within literary works. Examples of this can be seen in Tennessee Williams' “A Streetcar Named Desire”, where Stella is constantly being pushed around and being abused by her drunken husband Stanley, and also in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's “The Yellow Wallpaper”, where the female narrator is claimed unfit by her husband as she suffers from a sort of depression, and is generally looked down on for other reasons.
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.
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...
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.