“He’s not the type that goes for jasmine perfume, but maybe he’s what we need to mix with our blood” (Williams 1794). Stanley’s wife’s sister, Blanche, has come to live with him and his wife, Stella. Tennessee Williams depicts a man who is a true blue-collared man infatuated with the female gender. In, A Streetcar Named Desire, Stanley exhibits his sexuality and his dominance to assert that he is in control of the house. Williams makes Stanley’s dominance evident when he first introduces Blanche to Stanley. During this first encounter, Stanley doesn’t mind at all to make sure that Blanche knows that it is his house that she has come to stay at. As Stanley does take the time to simply ask her, “Do you mind if I make myself comfortable?” He then proceeds to remove his shirt (1787). With this question it has certain to make Blanche a little uncomfortable to meet someone new, her brother-in-law, and then he loses an article of clothing. Stanley does this act by just making himself known to be dominant and in control. Through this male attribute Stanley displays, he is able to do what he wishes in his own house. Through the narrative, Stanley is expressed through roaring noises. He is continuously trying to get his point across to Blanche, whom has a delicate personality, that he is superior to her. When speaking to Blanche, even through the stage directions Williams makes it evident that he is powerful. His voice is described as “booming” and “bellowing” when speaking to Blanche or Stella (1778, 1792). Williams defines this man as not a mellow person to have a conversation with. Through the stage direction, it is evident that Stanley means everything to make himself clear. Stanley is most certainly the alpha male throughout the stor... ... middle of paper ... ... of this reading, Stanley violates all rights of Blanche. As Blanche becomes delusional and slips into a psychiatric personality, she is okay hoping that Stanley will comfort and rescue her. Instead, “She moans. The bottle-top falls. She sinks to her knees: He picks up her inert figure and carries her to the bed. The hot trumpet and drums from the Four Deuces sound loudly” (1837). Stanley has tampered with Blanche’s wishes and rapes her. Through this statement it seems like Blanche has lost all faith in which she was and has let Stanley conquer her with his aggressive dominance. In conclusion, Stanley is a manipulative man who loves to uphold his domination towards others. He uses his verbal, emotional, and physical aggressive behavior to take control of others and depict himself as the “king.” Through the struggles other face before him, Stanley has total control.
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
...ices, such an attempt to elicit sympathy for this monster falls short” (Bell 2). Stanley is looked at as the monster of the play which is how he should be viewed. Luck was not on Blanches side through her life which made her make the mistakes she made. Even though her past was not clean, Stanley did not purge her of this. He tried to show her the reality of the world, but through his brutal treatment, only made her sensibility worse. Stanley is a primitive ape-like man, driven only by instinct, who views women as objects and has no respect for others. He is a wife batter and a rapist who is responsible for the crumbling sanity of Blanche who is “the last victim of the Old South, one who inherits the trappings of that grand society but pays the final price for the inability to adapt to a modern world that seeks to wipe grace and gentility out of existence” (Bell 2).
Stanley is described as a a crude man in a modern world. Blanche often denies her
Later on in the scene Stanley goes through Blanche’s belongings in a very careless manner as seen when he “pulls open the wardrobe trunk” and “jerks out an armful of dresses.” He becomes increasingly violent with his actions as he “hurls” and “kicks” Blanche’s
Stanley’s lack of respect for Blanche’s mental fragility mixed with his verbal abuse and cruelty pushes her to the brink of insanity. Stanley does not only verbally abuse Blanche, but he also physically abuses her. The height of this physical abuse comes at the end of scene ten. Stella is in the hospital expected to deliver in the next 24-hours and Stanley comes home form the hospital to a distraught Blanche. Stanley is amicable and overjoyed with the fact that he will soon be having a son, while Blanche on the other hand has no hope in finding love or happiness having lost her opportunity with Mitch due to Stanley telling him about Blanche’s past. Blanche refers to Stanley as “swine” This upsets Stanley and he begins to taunt Blanche, even though he knows of her insecurities about her appearance. “Take a look at yourself in that worn-out Mardi Gras outfit, rented for fifty cents from some rag-picker! And with the crazy crown on! What queen do you think you are?” (10.107). Blanche’s reaction to his comments makes it evident that her remaining spirits are being broken. Stanley immediately looks to completely break her with physical abuse. He approaches her despite her requests for him to stay away. She smashes a bottle on the table and faces him, clutching the broken top (10.140). Stanley states Oh! So you want some roughhouse! All right, lets have some roughhouse!” (10.145) This marks the final step of Stanley’s breaking of Blanche’s mental state. ‘Tiger…! Drop the bottle-top! Drop it! We’ve had this date with each other from the beginning!” She moans. The bottle-top falls. She sinks to her knees. He picks up her inert figure and carries her to bed
Stanley is, at first sought to be a dominant, rough individual but William’s use of stage direction implies an opposing thought. For example, Williams describes Blanche’s bed near the bedroom of Stella and Stanley’s, but what is so vital about the position of the bed readers may question. Conclusively, Stanley’s...
Stanley does not take notice of his wife’s concern, but instead continues on his original course, asserting his own destiny, without any thought to the effect it may have on those around him. This taking blood at any cost to those around him is foreshadowed in scene one, with the packet of met which he forces upon his wife. It is through actions such as these that Stanley asserts power, symbolic of the male dominance throughout patriarchal society. He also gains a s...
Although Stella believes Stanley is ‘as good as a lamb’, his true identity is revealed through both his brutality and dominance he exerts on women, and the references to his animal-like nature used to accentuate this. Williams uses animalistic imagery to display Stanley’s primitive characteristics and this is evident at the start of the play when Stanley is seen throwing a package of ‘meat’ to his wife. This immediate symbol suggests both his role as a provider, as if he is a primitive hunter-gatherer, and has sexual connotations because of the phallic suggestiveness. His association with cavemen is emphasised by Blanche, who mocks him as ‘an ape’, ‘bearing the raw meat home’ and who understatedly complains that he is ‘a little bit on the primitive side’. This ‘little bit’ is an example of an understatement that is used to suggest the opposite, that she finds him remarkably brutish. From Blanche’s criticism that ‘[Stanley] acts like an animal, has animal habits!’, Blanche believes Stanley is putting on a performance, suggested by the word ‘acts’, and from the exclamation we can imply that Blanche has strong feelings of disgust and aversion towards him. This is furthered by her emphasis on his brutality through the repetition of ‘eats like one, moves like one, talks like one’ and the use of a tricolon places attention and emphasis on his actions which embody an animal. Williams therefore uses Blanche’s refusal to accept and normalise brutal behaviour to create conflict and this causes juxtaposition between their contrasting personalities to accentuate
Conflicts first arise when Blanche reached at Stanley’s house and right away Stanley’s empowerment is challenged who always had control over his house, and more importantly on Stella, his wife. Stanley’s complicating nature was first hinted when he beats his wife, which is not alarming and is evident that he molested his sister-in-law. Blanche offended Stanley right away as he was called a ‘polack’ by him. Blanche also opposes Stanley as she described him ‘animal thing’. A visible section of conflict between Blanche and Stanley occurred over ‘Belle Reve’ and Stanley’s ‘Napoleonic code’ argument. Blanche repeatedly told Stanley that she lost everything in ‘Belle Reve’ but she didn't have any validation to go with her fiction. Another precise conflict is when Stanley ‘investigated’ Blanche past in which he found out that Blanche is a prostitute as she doesn't want ‘light’ to shine on her ‘realism’ and how Blanche was always dependent on the ‘kindness’ of ‘strangers’ because no one empathized with her. Blanche’s presence was so unacceptable for Stanley that he even had to buy her a ‘bus ticket’ so she could leave, this indicates that Stanley neither had empathy left for Blanche nor was resilient to what happened at the start. In the end their personalities did not go hand in hand, neither of them views their life the same way. There were too many differences among them to allow them to get along. They were directly created to foil each
From the moment Stanley and Blanche met the contrast between the two characters was apparent, Stanley even points out ‘The Kowalskis and the DuBois have different notions’ (S2:pg.135*). Williams uses the dramatic device of colors to symbolize a distinction between Stanley and Blanche; Stanley wears vivid colors ‘roughly dressed in blue denim’(S1:pg.116*) representing his masculinity and authority he possesses in the Kowalski household, before Blanche arrived, in contrast to Blanche who ‘is daintily dressed in a white suit’ (S1:pg.117*) representing purity and femininity. Blanche wears white at the beginning of the play thinking she will be able to hide her impure behaviour but Stanley saw right her act and knew she would be a threat to his marriage with Stella. The reason being is that Blanche constantly criticizes Stanley making derogatory comments about him calling him a ‘common’ and ‘bestial’(S4:pg.163*) along with conde...
The use of this dramatic irony is made to give a hint of suspense to the reader because they are aware that Stanley is around meanwhile Stella and Blanche do not. Blanche continues to speak her mind about Stanley saying that he appears to be “sub-human” and have animal like qualities. Stella lets Blanche have her time to rant about Stanley even though she does not have a problem with him. When Stanley finally enters the room, he grins through the curtains at Blanche and stares at her. Blanche now realized that he was listening to her whole conversation meanwhile the audience had known the whole time.
Blanche is heard singing ‘It’s a Barnum and Bailey world, Just a phony as it can be—’. ‘Barnum’, is an exophoric reference to the Barnum effect, from entertainer P. T. Barnum—a notorious hoaxer, that meant to accept vague information. In addition, by using the word ‘phony’ the concept of half-truth, hoaxes and deceit, foreshadowing to her fate to people’s belief in half-truths, is further emphasised by Williams. Therefore, Blanche’s jovial singing is dramatic irony and temporal prolepsis to her fate as it reflects Stanley’s actions and the events in scene IX with Mitch. William’s conveys that this is the most likely cause of misunderstanding through Stanley’s use of colloquial lexis like the monosyllabic ‘Boy, oh, boy’ and by purposely misspelling practically when he says confidently that ‘Yep it was practickly a town ordinance’ and uses a declarative statement to convey his certainty on something that in truth is far from certain. By doing this, Williams emphasises the uneducated nature of Stanley to the audience, and implies that his claim may not actually be that true. The plosive repetition of, ‘Boy’, in, ‘Boy, oh, Boy!’, is used to emphasise his enthusiasm for the downfall of Blanche and conveys the immaturity of Stanley to the audience. Furthermore, Stanley’s malice towards Blanche is highlighted by his use of the semantic field of fishing when he exclaims that he’d ‘like to have seen her trying to squirm out of that one! But they had her on the hook good’ with the zoomorphic use of ‘squirm’ to characterise Blanche as the
The audience can sense that Williams has intended Stanley to question Blanche and for her to simply return his remarks with what seem like legitimate reasons "Why, those were a tribute from an admirer of mine." The conflict can only be increased because Stanley has not yet been able to dismantle Blanche and find the truth.
In scene three Stanley is having his poker party (pg. 57). At this point he is very drunk. Blanche distracting Stanley by listening to the radio instigates him to grab it off the table and toss it out the window. Stella in a state of panic tells everyone to go home which angers Stanley so he chases after her and hits her. This type of behavior is not normal of any human being involved in any relationship. Stanley repeatedly gets what he wants by use of any means possible. In addition the person whoever threatens the existence of his poker game receives a beating, in this case his wife. This scene demonstrates Stanley’s viscous animal like traits with such violence. If what happened here was repeated in today’s society he would find himself in a jail cell with a pending divorce.
Also, the repetitive comparison of him to an animal or ape is the perfect image not the id as it is the instinctive part of your psyche. The way this passage leaves the reader is very powerful saying that “maybe he’ll strike you” is a good example of Stanley’s aggressive nature, and when Blanche says “or maybe grunt and kiss you” is a very good example of his sexual nature.