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How has Tennessee Williams used characters to explore important themes in the play ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’
Tennessee williams streetcar named desire a modern tragedy
How has Tennessee Williams used characters to explore important themes in the play ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’
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A Streetcar Named Desire, first published in 1947, is considered a landmark play for the 20th century American drama, bringing author Tennessee Williams a Pulitzer Prize. One of its most important themes deals with the contrast between reality and illusion. The aim of this essay is to examine how this contrast is reflected in the way the main character constructs her identity.
As Ruby Cohn calls it in his essay “The Garrulous Grotesque of Tennessee Williams”, A Streetcar Named Desire is “a poignant portrait of a Southern gentlewoman who is extinct in the modern world” (46). The protagonist of the play is Blanche duBois, a fading Southern belle, who comes to New Orleans to live with her sister Stella and her husband Stanley Kowalski. This provides the setting for a clash of two cultures: Blanche on one hand, symbolizing the dying Southern gentility, and Stanley on the other, representing the rising pragmatic middle-class.
Blanche is a character who has been conditioned by the society in which she was brought up, her background influencing her personality. Unhappy with her life, she is unable or unwilling to change it for the better. She prefers to retreat from reality into illusions and fantasies, building multiple façades of her identity, which she presents to the characters she interacts with. She was brought up to imitate the ideal Southern womanhood – the beautiful, sometimes shy, sometimes flirtatious yet always chaste lady. But the harsh reality of the 20th century urban America is in contradiction with this ideal, and Blanche is disillusioned, forced to make her own way in a world which does not understand her and which she does not understand. Her promiscuity and alcoholism are means of escaping these hardships, as she ...
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...he is in fact wearing a mask during the entire play. While trying to hide the lonely, disillusioned and desperate for attention woman she really is, she is slowly but surely heading towards a break-down.
Bibliography
Venezki-Griffin, Alice. Living Theatre. A Study Guide to Great Plays.
Heilman, Robert Bechtold. “Tennessee Williams’ Approach to Tragedy”. Tennessee Williams. A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Stephen S. Stanton. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice – Hall, Inc., 1977. 17-35
Blackwell, Louise. “Tennessee Williams and the Predicament of Women”. Tennessee Williams. A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Stephen S. Stanton. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice – Hall, Inc., 1977. 100-106
Ganz, Arthur. “A Desperate Morality”. Tennessee Williams. A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Stephen S. Stanton. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice – Hall, Inc., 1977. 123-137
Heilman, Robert. "Tennessee Williams' Approach to Tragedy." Tennessee Williams: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1977. 17-35.
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.
Williams, Tennessee. The Glass Menagerie. The Bedford Introduction to Literature: Reading, Writing, Thinking. 5th ed. Ed. Michael Meyer. Boston: Bedford, 1999. 1865-190
The two important female characters in the "poetic tragedy"(Adler 12), A Streetcar Named Desire, are Stella and Blanche. The most obvious comparison between Stella and Blanche is that they are sisters, but this 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 manifest a great deal of culture and sensitivity, and because of this, both seem out of place in Elysian Fields. "Beauty is shipwrecked on the rock of the world's vulgarity" (Miller 45). Blanche, of course, is much more of an anachronism than Stella, who has for the most part adapted to the environment of Stanley Kowalski. Finally, both Stella and Blanche are or have been married. It is in their respective marriages that we can begin to trace the profound differences between these two sisters.
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’ 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.
After two world wars, the balance of power between the genders in America had completely shifted. Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire is a harsh, yet powerful play that exposes the reality of the gender struggle. Williams illustrates society’s changing attitudes towards masculinity and femininity through his eloquent use of dramatic devices such as characterization, dialogue, setting, symbolism, and foreshadowing.
Tennessee Williams was one of the greatest American dramatists of the 20th century. Most of his plays take us to the southern states and show a confused society. In his works he exposes the degeneration of human feelings and relationships. His heroes suffer from broken families and they do not find their place in the society. They tend to be lonely and afraid of much that surrounds them. Among the major themes of his plays are racism, sexism, homophobia and realistic settings filled with loneliness and pain.1 Tennessee Williams characters showed us extremes of human brutality and sexual behavior.2 One of his most popular dramas was written in 1947, and it is called A Streetcar Named Desire.
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.
Williams, Tennessee. “A Streetcar Named Desire.” The Norton Introduction to Literature. Ed. Kelly J. Mays. 11th ed. New York: Norton, 2013.1815-1881. Print.
“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.
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 faces pain.
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.
Griffin, Alice. "Understanding Tennessee Williams". University of South Carolina Press; Reprint edition. February 28, 2011.
Tragicomic Transit Authority.” Tennessee Williams: A Tribute. Ed. Jac Tharpe. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1977. 116-125.