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Character portrayal in the streetcar named desire
Character portrayal in the streetcar named desire
A streetcar named desire blanche character analysis
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Blanche suffers from a mental illness and as well as having a loss grip on reality near the end of the play as she struggles to believes a wealthy man wants to take her away. Blanche lies repetitively throughout the play and successfully ruses Stella and Mitch into viewing her as a prim and proper lady. She even attempts her desire to deceive Mitch, so he would marry her, which almost works. Blanche has a habit of flirting indiscreetly, especially with younger men and even reveals to Stella that she flirted with Stanley. Blanche endlessly feels the need to bath, possibly because she feels dirty and ashamed of the past and wishes to wash it away. Blanche has a drinking problem as she cannot stay away from alcohol. She despises standing in the
Blanche’s immoral and illogical decisions all stem from her husband's suicide. When a tragedy happens in someone’s life, it shows the person’s true colors. Blanche’s true self was an alcoholic and sex addict, which is displayed when “She rushes about frantically, hiding the bottle in a closet, crouching at the mirror and dabbing her face with cologne and powder” (Williams 122). Although Blanche is an alcoholic, she tries to hide it from others. She is aware of her true self and tries to hide it within illusions. Blanche pretends to be proper and young with her fancy clothes and makeup but is only masking her true, broken self.
The loss of her beloved husband kept Blanche’s mental state in the past, back when she was 16, when she only cared about her appearance. That is why at the age of 30 she avoids bright lights that reveal her wrinkles. Blanche does not want to remember the troubles of her past and therefore she attempts to remain at a time when life was simpler. This is reinforced by the light metaphor which illustrates how her life has darkened since Allan’s suicide and how the light of love will never shine as brightly for Blanche ever again. Although, throughout the play Blanche sparks an interest in Mitch, a friend of Stanley’s, who reveals in Scene three that he also lost a lover once, although his lover was taken by an illness, not suicide, and therefore he still searches for the possibility of love, when Blanche aims to find stability and security.
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...
This gradual fall and loss of her sense of reality is truly tragic. Blanche is a person largely driven by the part of her that wants to be liked and be accepted. She cares greatly about how she is viewed and how she looks which is seen throughout the play. Even at the end when she’s living almost completely in the imaginations of her mind she asks Stella and Eunice how she looks before being taken away to an insane asylum. Tennessee Williams, the author of the play, uses all the conflict between Blanche and others, specifically Stanley, to show that fantasy is unable to overcome reality. Stanley and Blanche are both the epitomes of fantasy and reality. Stanley is a man focused on sexual drive, work, and fighting. He is exhibited as animalistic and strongly driven by his desires which is shown when he says, “Be comfortable. That's my motto up where I come from.” Stanley loves and searches after reality which is why he is so set on breaking down the facade he sees in Blanche. Blanche on the other hand is running from her reality and her past. Her fantasy of being high class and chaste is the exact opposite of her reality which is why she wants a life like that so badly. She wants marriage and stability, two things she was jealous of Stella having after arriving in New Orleans. Her fantasy she was building in her new life is shattered when Stanley is able to learn of her past and bring reality crashing down on her. Williams
Superficial is the first impression that Blanche gives when she enters the play. Consumed by appearance and face value, she is unable to see that Stella’s new lifestyle is not as horrid as she imagines. In comparison to Belle Reve, it is true that these New Orleans slums may not meet Dubois standards, but Blanche is unable to see beyond the way things appear in order to realize that Stella’s world does not revolve around material items. This flaw is intertwined with her vanity and her need keep up appearances. On the surface, Blanche appears to be snobbish and conceited.
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.
Given Blanche’s hysterical behavior, and due to her history of lying and deceit, Blanche is difficult to believe. Not to mention, the other people around Blanche becoming convinced of Blanche’s mental instability does not help Blanche’s case. Stanley refers to Blanche as “downright loco - nuts,” (Williams 121). Mitch, then, asks Blanche is she is “boxed out of your mind?” (Williams 141). Later, the audience discovers that Blanche also suffers from hallucinations. She sees “lucid reflections appear on the walls: that are in “odd, sinuous shapes,” (Williams
In this play, Blanche is the older sister of Stella and she comes to Elysian Fields to live with her sister because she has nowhere else to live because she was asked to leave the last town that she was living in because of the life that she was choosing to live there. Blanche also lost her family’s estate, Belle Reve. Therefore, she had to go to the last place that she could think of and that was the house of her sister, Stella. From the start of the play, it is imminent that Blanche is the victim of her own life, and not a victor. She first lost her husband when she was a very young girl because of the fact that she found out that he was gay. She was in love with this man and when she found out, she was just heartbroken. However, she didn’t want to tell him that she knew about his secret so she kept it a secret for a while. But then, one night while they were dancing, she all of sudden just came out and told him what she knew. He was so embarrassed by this that he ran out of the room and shot and killed himself. That is one of the battles that she was the victim of. Then when she loses Belle Reve and is forced to live in a town called Laurel, she chooses to live a life that she doesn’t want to. She forces herself into prostitution because she has no other way of making money to help support herself. During this time, she is living in a hotel called the Flamingo and many men are coming up to her room every night. This disturbs the peace within the hotel and when the hotel and the town of Laurel figure out what she is doing in the hotel, they tell her to leave the hotel and also the town because they don’t want anyone like her to be there.
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.
She went on to sleep with other people and that must have not been as fulfilling to her life as she thought she would be. She was fired from her job as a teacher which could have made her feel hopeless and miserable, not having any income to survive, as in her case, buying a lot of expensive things. When moving to her sister’s place, she wanted to act as if she was more superior to her sister’s husband, Stanley Kowalski, as they were constantly disagreeing with each other. But she would sometimes tease him, or they would sometimes be an underlying flirtation between them. They might have found each other somewhat attractive, but also found each other irritating. Blanche’s constant bathing seems like she is cleansing herself from the past, wanting to be forget and be free from it and start a new life. She wants to have a husband who can take care of her. She wants security and love. She thinks that Mitch could be a good choice. They seem to like each other upon first
She damaged her relationships with the people who were the most important to her and hurt herself as well. By feeding and nourishing her misfortunes with suffering Blanche was never truly freed from her pain, it continued to haunt her and follow her until she lost her mind. She was never truly able to achieve enlightenment due to the fact she lost her sane mind; furthermore, she lost her sane mind because she suppressed her emotions and was in denial over her situation. It can also be noted that Blanche inadvertently cried for help from the people around her that she trusted including her sister, Mitch, and even Eunice, only to have all of them disregard her and leave her. The disloyalty shown by those around Blanche resulted from her presumed insanity, which as mentioned before was caused by her misguided coping reaction to her pain. Instead of Blanche learning and building herself from the unfortunate nature of her past she chose to perpetuate her suffering; consequently, this lead to her losing her mind and psychologically drowning to death in her own
Firstly, the reader may initially feel Blanche is completely responsible or at least somewhat to blame, for what becomes of her. She is very deceitful and behaves in this way throughout the play, particularly to Mitch, saying, ‘Stella is my precious little sister’ and continuously attempting to deceive Stanley, saying she ‘received a telegram from an old admirer of mine’. These are just two examples of Blanches’ trickery and lying ways. In some ways though, the reader will sense that Blanche rather than knowingly being deceitful, actually begins to believe what she says is true, and that she lives in her own dream reality, telling people ‘what ought to be the truth’ probably due to the unforgiving nature of her true life. This will make the reader begin to pity Blanche and consider whether these lies and deceits are just what she uses to comfort and protect herself. Blanche has many romantic delusions which have been plaguing her mind since the death of her husband. Though his death was not entirely her fault, her flirtatious manner is a major contributor to her downfall. She came to New Orleans as she was fired from...
which, as Williams suggests, "was too great for her to contain". As to whether her escape was "madness" can be debatable - although Blanche is clearly unstable at many points, some believe that Blanche is not. actually insane, suggested by Stella's comment in Scene 11 - "I. couldn't believe her story and go on living with Stanley. " From her first appearance on stage, Blanche is presented as being.
...es and thinks that her hopes will not be destroyed. Thirdly, Blanche thinks that strangers are the ones who will rescue her; instead they want her for sex. Fourthly, Blanche believes that the ones who love her are trying to imprison her and make her work like a maid imprisoned by them. Fifthly, Blanche’s superiority in social status was an obscure in her way of having a good social life. Last but not least, Blanche symbolizes the road she chose in life- desire and fantasy- which led her to her final downfall.
Blanche is driven by her sexual desire but also wishes for stability and a fresh start instead. Blanche states “It was the other little familiarity that I felt obliged to discourage, I didn’t resent it!.. I was somewhat flattered that you desired me” (Williams 87). For the first time she doesn’t succumb to her body’s physical needs for her wish to be able to settle down with Mitch. If Blanche answered her body’s need for sex she would have killed her act of being a Southern belle looking for a suitor. This again brings out the close line between death and