After losing the Civil War, the entire demeanor of the South had changed. The South prior to the Civil War was focused on Southern charm, delicate women, huge plantations and gluttonous wealth. Once the Southerners lost the war, they were forced to face the stark reality of their grotesque system of slavery and the lack of Southern wealth and outward civility. Tennessee Williams illustrates the loss of the Southern culture in many of his works. In his play, A Streetcar Named Desire, Tennessee Williams illustrates through the contrasting settings of Bell Reve and Elysian Fields that it is horrific that one must conform to the new norm of society in order to survive.
Belle Reve, which translates to “a beautiful dream” from French, is a plantation
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She becomes desperate and her purity is now just a façade. She states that, “I had many intimacies with strangers. After the death of Allan – intimacies with strangers was all I seemed able to fill my empty heart with…” (Williams 205). She then must transfer to cemeteries. Cemeteries is symbolic of the death of Blanche’s innocence and purity and because, “The opposite (of death) is desire”(Williams 206). When she finally arrives in Elysian Fields, she is forced to face the stark realities of human brutality and impurity in the form of Stanley …show more content…
She does everything possible to avoid the light and truth of the desire. The paper lantern she put over the lamp symbolizes her aversion to the truth and how she bemoans her innocence. She states that, “I can’t stand a naked light bulb, any more than I can a rude remark or a vulgar action” (Williams 150). Blanche hides behind the façade of innocence and purity to escape truth and reality. Just like the paper lantern, which Mitch easily destroyed, Blanche’s illusions can be easily destroyed. It is determined at the end that Blanche cannot survive in the real world. After she is raped by Stanley, Blanche is focused on her fantasy date Shep Huntleigh, her supposed male suitor. Her fantasy of Shep Huntleigh is the only thing that links her to the old South and her perverse imagination. He is the quintessential southern gentleman who would help her escape reality and life the rest of her life on a warm beach. He is the opposite of her bleak reality with
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 filled the void her husband left by having sex with random, younger men. She was drawn to them because they reminded her of her husband, Allen. Blanche states that “intimacies with strangers was all I seemed to fill my empty heart with” (Williams 128). Even with the countless encounters with strange men, Blanche never found anyone to fill the void. She tried to use the intimacies to distract her from her husband's death. The death of her husband enforced a new level of madness upon Blanche. She became more promiscuous as a result, which further demonstrates why the suicide of her husband was an illuminating moment in the play and how her internal struggle caused by her husband’s death changed her into a sex
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.
The moment their eyes first meet, there seems to be an immediate attraction between Blanche and Mitch, causing them to take a “certain interest” in one another. After their first close encounter while the poker game is taking place, Blanche notices that Mitch is not like Stanley and the others. Telling Stella, “That one seems—superior to the others…I thought he had a sort of sensitive look” (Williams 52), Blanche takes interest in Mitch’s perceived sensitivity, and is immediately attracted
Character Conflict in Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire. 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.
Isn't it true the relationship between Stella and Stanley is praiseworthy, since it combines sexual attraction with compassion for the purpose of procreation? Isn't it true that as opposed to Stanley's normalcy in marriage, Blanche's dalliance in sexual perversion and overt efforts to break up Stanley and Stella's marriage is reprehensible? Isn't it true that Stella's faulty socialization resulting in signs of hysteria throughout the play meant that she probably would have ended her life in a mental hospital no matter whether the rape had occurred or not?
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...
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.
First she is introduced as a symbol of innocence and chastity.4 She is aristocratic and intelligent, and sensitive and fragile at the same time, also beautiful and this delicate beauty has a moth-like appearance. But these positive characteristics are overshadowed by the fact that Blanche arrives to Elysian Fields, which is a poor section of New Orleans, on two streetcars, Desire and Cemeteries. These misterious expressions, which can be considered to be the main symbols of the play, suggest that something is is not clear around Blanhe or that something wrong will happen towards the end. Elysian Fields symbolizes paradise beyond death from ancient lore,3 Desire expresses Blanche's desire to be loved and Cemeteries represents her fear of death.4
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.
she was told "to take a streetcar named Desire, and then to transfer to one
After Mitch forcefully removes the paper lantern from the light bulb, Blanche “utters a frightened gasp” (1.9.14). Within the scene, the paper lantern serves yet another symbolic function. The night when Blanche meets Mitch, she asks him to place the lantern onto the light bulb. Just as the lantern protects Blanche from the light which reveals her age, it creates a façade which conceals her past. With Mitch’s love Blanche believes that the proper persona which she invented for herself could become her identity, thus magic becomes reality. However, as Mitch undresses the light bulb, he exposes Blanche vulnerabilities. Even though Mitch possesses masculinity, he does so to a lesser extent than Stanley. This passage is mildly reminiscent of Stanley and Stella’s wedding night when Stanley smashes the light bulbs in the apartment. Even though Stanley’s actions are more extreme than Mitch’s both carry a sexual connotation and reveal animalistic tendencies. Furthermore, as Mitch stares intently at Blanche in the light, “she cries out and covers her face” (1.9.25). By turning on the light, Mitch for the first time has gotten a good look at Blanche, but to do so he is violating her sense of self-worth. Although Mitch continues to berate Blanche for lying to him, he is still physically attracted to Blanche. Mitch’s cruelty is accepted by Blanche and later in the scene still asks if Mitch
This essay will describe whether or not Blanches’ unfortunate eventual mental collapse was due to her being a victim of the society she went to seek comfort in, or if she was solely or at least partly responsible. The factors and issues that will be discussed include, Blanches’ deceitful behaviour and romantic delusions which may have lead to her eventual downfall, the role Stanley ended up playing with his relentless investigations of her past and the continuous revelations of it, the part society and ‘new America’ played in stifling her desires and throwing her into a world she could not relate to or abide by.
...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.