Tennessee Williams’ psychodrama, A Streetcar Named Desire, explicates the benevolent yet intricate personality of Dubois Dubois, and dives into the uncontrollable tempest that she physically and psychologically battles. Dubois’ intense desire to reinstate a permanent and devoted relationship with someone into her life manipulates her behavior around people. Her psyche - as a result of the sheer nature of this ruling passion - eventually overflows causing repressed emotions, feelings, and impulses to be freely expressed. Throughout the play, Dubois goes on a rampage to find a new mate – she feels that she deserves another life partner, especially after the death of her first and former lover, Allan. She believes to repay herself by starting …show more content…
As she elevates, more and more repressed emotions get stored in the back of her mind. Unfortunately for her though, she rises to an altitude of such high pressure; her mind gets overcrowded with all the suppressed emotions and experiences, and therefore she psychologically ‘pops’, eradicating her own overall objective of living the life she dreams. Similar to how the altitude of the rising balloon represents the level of crowdedness in her mind, the way the rising balloon treats the air depicts how Dubois deals with all the other current factual obstacles of life, such as her poor financial and residential condition, and relationship status; she simply ignores all of these and in a relaxed manner tries to fulfill her quest, without knowing the future consequence of her incongruous actions. As her self-image ascends, she seems to disregard others’ perspectives of her much like a balloon – as it rises, the pressure of the surrounding air decreases, while the helium inside expands until it reaches its point where it deflates into a shattered husk. Fundamentally, all of Dubois’ personal characteristics – from delicacy to imperiousness – and her philosophy on life in general can be figuratively associated with the aspects of a rising
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.
Tennessee Williams was born Thomas Lanier Williams in 1911. As a successful playwright, his career was greatly influenced by events in his life. He was noted for bringing the reader "a slice of his own life and the feel of southern culture", as his primary sources of inspiration were "the writers he grew up with, his family, and the South." The connection between his life and his work can be seen in several of his plays.
Everyone has experienced a situation in life where it's like a rug has been pulled out from under them. Well, T. Williams’ novel A Streetcar Named Desire portrays a similar situation of three unconventional characters whose reality is not the American Dream that they are striving for. Blanche, Stella, and Stanley approach life hoping for different outcomes in their lives. But what is the American Dream they were striving for? Simply put, by looking at the principles of America, the primary dream for everyone is to have a well-lived life. For some people this includes a family, success, happiness, independence, money, and love. If these are T. Williams’ constructs of the American Dream, then Stella and Stanley Kowalski may never find their
Tennessee Williams wrote in a letter that "It ('Streetcar') is a tragedy with the classic aim of producing a catharsis of pity and terror and in order to do that, Blanche must finally have the understanding and compassion of the audience. This without creating a black-dyed villain in Stanley. It is a thing (misunderstanding) not a person (Stanley) that destroys her in the end." In your opinion, to what extent has Williams succeeded in his aims. Although there are many different viewpoints on a conventional tragic heroine, Aristotle made his views clear that a hero must fall from fortune and power, due to a tragic flaw, allowing an audience to feel catharsis at the end of the play. It can be argued that Stanley causes Blanche's downfall, however,
Tennessee William's novel, A Streetcar Named Desire, is the story of the brutish Stanley Kowalski and his meek wife Stella, a New Orleans couple whose lives are turned upside down with the arrival of Stella's neurotic, Southern belle sister Blanche who is immediately drawn into a battle of wills with Stanley. Blanche's childlike helplessness, romantic desires, and pretensions to aristocracy completely collapse when Stanley's ruthless exposure of her past brings about Blanche's final disintegration. When reading the scenes, the symbolism struck me as the most prominent aspect of the novel. Williams uses symbolism throughout the novel to progress the plot of the story, character growth, and foreshadowing of future events in the novel. In this essay, I have chosen a few symbols to discuss how Williams uses them in his novel. In addition, one symbolic event will show evidence of foreshadowing a future event in the novel.
Too often people would rather hide a problem and pretend it does not exist rather than take responsibility and deal with it. In Tennessee Williams’ play A Streetcar Named Desire the Kowalskis see Blanche Dubois as a problem and have her sent to an insane asylum. It is true that Blanche had many issues but the reason behind her incarceration was not to benefit her mental state but to project someone else’s dirty secret. While others may justify the actions of Blanche’s sister and brother-in-law, they are weaker than Blanche for refusing to deal with reality. Take a look into the life of Blanche Dubois and it will be evident that an insane asylum was the wrong place for her. From the loss of her loved ones and childhood home, to her career as a prostitute, and ending with her rape, there is no denying that Blanche Dubois just needed love and support from her family.
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.
The arts stir emotion in audiences. Whether it is hate or humor, compassion or confusion, passion or pity, an artist's goal is to construct a particular feeling in an individual. Tennessee Williams is no different. In A Streetcar Named Desire, the audience is confronted with a blend of many unique emotions, perhaps the strongest being sympathy. Blanch Dubois is presented as the sympathetic character in Tennessee William's A Streetcar Named Desire as she battles mental anguish, depression, failure and disaster.
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.
insight as to what type of sector of New Orleans the play is set in.
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.
Relationships in A Streetcar Named Desire In many modern day relationships between a man and a woman, there is usually a controlling figure that is dominant over the other. It may be women over men, men over women, or in what the true definition of a marriage is an equal partnership. In the play A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams, Stanley is clearly the more dominant figure over Stella.
In the play written by Tennessee Williams, "A Streetcar Named Desire", the use of his remarkable writing tactics and motifs are used to develop the main character Blanche throughout the play. As the play progresses, we gradually gain knowledge pertaining to Blanche and the type of individual she actually is in juxtapose to the facade she puts on. With clever usage of motifs such as lighting and flirtation, we can draw countless conclusions about Blanche throughout the play. Using the fore mentioned motifs we can contemplate that Blanche is developed into a deceiving, narcissistic and seductive being because of the use of motifs Williams amalgamated throughout the play.
The first principle character in this play is Blanche DuBois. She is a neurotic nymphomaniac that is on her way to meet her younger sister Stella in the Elysian Fields. Blanche takes two 2 streetcars, one named Desire, the other Cemeteries to get to her little sisters dwelling. Blanche, Stella and Stanley all desire something in this drama. Blanche desired a world without pain, without suffering, in order to stop the mental distress that she had already obtained. She desires a fairy tale story about a rich man coming and sweeping her off her feet and they ride away on a beautiful oceanic voyage. The most interesting part of Blanche is that through her unstable thinking she has come to believe the things she imagines. Her flashy sense of style and imagination hide the truly tragic story about her past. Blanche lost Belle Reve but, moreover, she lost the ones she loved in the battle. The horror lied not only in the many funerals but also in the silence and the constant mourning after. 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 faced 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.