A Streetcar Named Desire Rhetorical Analysis

In this passage, Williams’ emphasises the nature of Blanche’s demise through the contrapuntal mode of the scene juxtaposing Blanche’s bathing with Stanley and Stella’s conversation. Williams wrote in a letter to Elia Kazan, who was to direct the film production of the play, that ‘It is a thing (misunderstanding) not a person (Stanley) that destroys (Blanche) in the ends’. This passage is significant as it shows the extent of Stanley’s misunderstanding of Blanche and his stubbornness to ascertain his condemnations to Stella. Furthermore, the use of colloquial lexis shows the true feebleness of Stanley’s claim because his judicial façade is diminished and shows the dangerous influence of claims as he sways Mitch away from Blanche. Stella’s character

Blanche is heard singing ‘It’s a Barnum and Bailey world, Just a phony as it can be—’. ‘Barnum’, is an exophoric reference to the Barnum effect, from entertainer P. T. Barnum—a notorious hoaxer, that meant to accept vague information. In addition, by using the word ‘phony’ the concept of half-truth, hoaxes and deceit, foreshadowing to her fate to people’s belief in half-truths, is further emphasised by Williams. Therefore, Blanche’s jovial singing is dramatic irony and temporal prolepsis to her fate as it reflects Stanley’s actions and the events in scene IX with Mitch. William’s conveys that this is the most likely cause of misunderstanding through Stanley’s use of colloquial lexis like the monosyllabic ‘Boy, oh, boy’ and by purposely misspelling practically when he says confidently that ‘Yep it was practickly a town ordinance’ and uses a declarative statement to convey his certainty on something that in truth is far from certain. By doing this, Williams emphasises the uneducated nature of Stanley to the audience, and implies that his claim may not actually be that true. The plosive repetition of, ‘Boy’, in, ‘Boy, oh, Boy!’, is used to emphasise his enthusiasm for the downfall of Blanche and conveys the immaturity of Stanley to the audience. Furthermore, Stanley’s malice towards Blanche is highlighted by his use of the semantic field of fishing when he exclaims that he’d ‘like to have seen her trying to squirm out of that one! But they had her on the hook good’ with the zoomorphic use of ‘squirm’ to characterise Blanche as the