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Social realism in a streetcar named desire
Blanche dubois character analysis
Social realism in a streetcar named desire
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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.
Blanche could not accept her past and overcome it. She was passionately in love with Alan; but after discovering that he was gay, she could not stomach the news. When she revealed how disgusted she was, it prompted Alan to commit suicide. She could never quite overcome the guilt and put it behind her. Blanche often encountered flashbacks about him. She could hear the gun shot and polka music in her head. After Alan’s death, she was plagued by the deaths of her relatives. Stella moved away and did not have to deal with the agony Blanche faced each day. Blanche was the one who stuck it out with her family at Belle Reve where she had to watch as each of her remaining family members passed away. “I took the blows in my face and my body! All of those deaths! The long parade to the graveyard! Father, Mother! Margaret, that dreadful way! You just came home in time for the funerals, Stella. And funerals are pretty compared to deaths. Funerals are quiet, but deaths—not always” (Scene 1, page 1546). Blanche lost Belle Reve because of all the funeral expenses. Belle Reve had been in her family for generations, and it slipped through her fingers while she watched helplessly. Blanche’s anguish caused her loneliness. The loneliness fueled her abundance of sexual encounters. Her rendezvous just added to her problems and dirtied her rep...
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... ignorance; and this was the undeniable tragedy that caused her downfall in the end. Stanley was angry when Blanche told Stella that she did not like him, but he never gave her a chance. Stanley despised her from the beginning. Neither Stanley nor Mitch was intelligent enough to comprehend that not everything is black and white. They perceived her as a deceitful whore. Stella chose her violent husband over her sister. Also, Mitch could not overlook her mistakes. Mitch focused on her flaws which blinded him from seeing the beauty and love Blanche had to offer. Blanche wanted their love, but each of their individual flaws sunk her deeper into a hole. The people around Blanche were unwilling to change and develop an open-minded way of dealing with her situation. Blanche needed kindness and affection, but nobody was able to give it to her when she needed it the most.
This can be symbolized by light. Blanche hates to be seen by Mitch, her significant other, in the light because it exposes her true identity. Instead, she only plans to meet him at night or in dark places. Also, she covers the lone light in Stella and Stanley’s apartment with a Chinese paper lantern. After Blanche and Mitch get into a fight, Mitch rips off the lantern to see what Blanche really looks like. Blanche angrily replies that she’s sorry for wanting magic. In the play, Blanche states “I don’t want realism, I want magic! [..] Yes, yes, magic! I try to give that to people. I misrepresent things to them. I don’t tell the truth, I tell what ought to be truth. And if that is sinful, then let me be damned for it!”(Williams 117). Blanche wants to escape reality, but this only leads to her self-destruction. It is the men in her life and past experiences that is the main cause of her self - destruction. One of these being the death of her young love, Allen Grey. During their marriage, Blanche, attached to the hip to this man, walked in on him with another man. She then brought the incident up at a bad time; soon after, Allen took his own life, which I believe was the first step to this so called “self-destruction. Blanche could never forgive herself of this. This is the truth of her past, therefore,
Blanche was awfully spoiled as a young girl. She lived in a huge house named Belle Reve, where servants would wait on her every want and need. This led her to never experience any hardships or adversity as a child. She had no previous experience of when she was forced to deal with any difficulties. She just had other people to take care of them for her. This is why, as an adult, Blanche doesn’t know how to overcome adve...
Stanley oftenly abuses Stella whenever he is drunk. One night, Stanley brings his friends over for a poker night. Mitch leaves the table in order to talk to Blanche. Stanley begins to get furious since Mitch is no longer playing. As more and more interruptions keep occurring, Stanley is furious and breaks the radio Blanche and Mitch were using. Stella then calls Stanley an animal. “He advances and disappears. There is a sound of a blow. Stella cries out.”(57) Stanley is usually abusive when he's either drunk or frustrated. After Stanley strikes her, Stella leaves the house and goes to her neighbors house. Blanche follows her sister upstairs to support Stella so she does not feel alone. Stanley then calms down and calls for Stella to come back. She returns and falls into Stanley's arms. Stella is very loyal to Stanley, she stays with him because he is her husband and does not want to change that. This is why she ignores her sister's pleas. Stanleys actions prove to the reader that he is an abusive husband to Stella and that Stella tolerates
Blanche has a devastating and scarring past in which her tragic flaw originates from. The elements of love, sex, and death haunt her until she is unable to handle it any longer and loses what is left of her sanity and sparks her unstable mind. To expatiate, Blanche was once married to the love of her life, Allen Grey, until she found him in bed with another man. Her husband shoots himself after Blanche says she is disgusted by him. This horrific event has an enormous impact on Blanche’s life and is key to her later behavior. To prove this, throughout the novel the narrator keeps referring to the Varsouviana, the song that was playing on the night of her husband’s death, playing through Blanche’s head every time she starts to panic. Blanche also feels a burning sense of guilt due to the fact that she feels his death was all her doing. “Blanche: Poems a dead boy wrote. I hurt him the way that you would like to hurt me, but you can’t!” (34) Stella and Blanche’s family owned a large estate called Belle Reve. After Stella left Belle Reve, Blanche was unable to financially support neither the estate nor the family she had living there with just an English teacher’s salary. One by one until the last, her family dies leaving Blanche alone and to pay for their funeral costs. Eventually, Belle Reve is taken from her. Soon after, Blanche...
Blanche, in particular, 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. Where Blanche's marriage, to a man whom she dearly loved (Miller 43), proved catastrophic to her, Stella's marriage seems to be fulfilling her as a woman. Blanche's marriage to a young homosexual, and the subsequent tragedy that resulted from her discovery of her husband's degeneracy and her inability to help him, has been responsible for much of the perversity in her life.
Soon after Blanche arrives to live with her sister in New Orleans, she comes up with the plan for her pregnant sister, Stella, and herself to
In contrast, Stella is overly mild-tempered and always striving to please. Generally, she is able to adapt to all situations. This ability to adapt proves to be useful, as both her husband and her sister, Blanche, have such strong personalities. From the beginning, it is apparent that Stella often plays the peacemaker. She was able to foresee that Stanley and her visiting sister would clash. In hopes of avoiding any confrontation, she warned them both to be on their best behaviour. Stella is soft-spoken, speaking only when it is needed, and expressing her grief only when it overwhelms her, whereas Blanche is the opposite: an outspoken woman, with many opinions.
She struggles with Stanley’s ideals and shields her past. 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.
During scene one, the audience is introduced to Blanche as Stella's sister, who is going to stay with her for a while. Blanch tries her best to act normal and hide her emotion from her sister, but breaks down at the end of scene one explaining to Stella how their old home, the Belle Reve, was "lost." It is inferred that the home had to be sold to cover the massive funeral expenses due to the many deaths of members of the Dubois family. As Blanche whines to her sister, "All of those deaths! The parade to the graveyard! Father, mother! Margaret, that dreadful way!" (21). The audience sees this poor aging woman, who has lost so many close to her, and now her home where she grew up. How could anyone look at her, and not feel the pain and suffering that she has to deal with by herself? Williams wants the audience to see what this woman has been through and why she is acting the way she is. Blanche's first love was also taken from her. It seems that everyone she loves is dead except for her sister. Death plays a crucial role in Blanche's depression and other mental irregularities. While these circumstances are probably enough for the audience to feel sympathy for Blanche, Williams takes it a step further when we see Blanche's...
Blanche who had been caring for a generation of dying relatives at Belle Reve has been forced to sell the family plantation. Blanche is a great deal less realistic than Stanley and lives in illusions which bring upon her downfall.
Stella states that Blanche’s life has been heavily affected by the death of her husband, Allan. Blanche’s marriage “killed her illusions” which can be interpreted literally. Blanche states that she fell in love “all at once and much, much too completely,” however, her love was unrequited since instead of returning the love Blan... ... middle of paper ... ... o have experienced some sorrow,” which Mitch agrees with, thus revealing that he has been affected by the loss of this girl.
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
To conclude, the author portrays Blanche’s deteriorating mental state throughout the play and by the end it has disappeared, she is in such a mental state that doctors take her away. Even at this stage she is still completely un-aware of her surroundings and the state she is in herself.
In conclusion Blanche is to a degree responsible for her own downfall and mental collapse. She opts to turn to promiscuity and inebriety even going as far as to admitting to flirting with Stanley, and by the end disclosing all her tricks and deceits to him and Mitch. However, she cannot be held as responsible for the acts of her husband, Stanley and even Stella and the social circumstances involving the destruction of her old America by new America, which have caused her already deteriorating mental state to detract beyond possible repair by the end of the play.
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.