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Representation of women in Shakespeare
Gender and roles of women in literature
Gender and roles of women in literature
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Without character, there can be no drama
These strong drama and dramedy plots are structured around two strong dramatic women who emphasise the importance of character to act as a vessel through which a drama can be represented in a variety of settings. In both, 1940s New Orleans set A Streetcar Named Desire and the Illyria-based Twelfth Night, the plot is centred around a woman hiding her identity, in A Streetcar Named Desire Blanche is the catalyst for the plot as is Viola for Twelfth Night, though women in very different times, they are similar in their affect on the audience but differ in how they deal with loss.
Blanche and Viola contribute to the development of the theme of hidden identity, although their methods of disguise differ. Viola’s disguise is more obvious to the audience at the start. Viola’s focus is on disguising her physical identity; it is necessary for Viola to hide her identity so she can start to re-build her life. However, the same could be said for the intentions of Blanche’s disguise. Blanche’s disguise covers her past actions and her present emotions. Both women cling to their disguises through the plot but they have very different relationships with their disguises. Viola’s hidden identity is born out of the need to survive and she views her disguise as a “wickedness” (II,ii, 24). Blanche, on the other hand “[doesn’t] want realism” and uses her disguise to shield others and herself from the reality of who she really is (Williams 86).
As complex, troubled characters Blanche and Viola established a relationship with the audience, which leaves the audience feeling sympathetic toward them both. The nature of the sympathy felt by the audience varies between characters. Viola loses her brother, and is wash...
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... very real responses to loss but evoke different qualities and actions.
Two characters that express themselves differently but, through their use of disguise and similar affect on the audience, manage to successfully portray the depth of a drama by connecting with the audience and acting as a channel for the cathartic moment, which marks a drama. These two women represent the same character but portray her in different ways. Viola’s portrayal is directed toward the fantastical, comedic setting of Twelfth Night, whereas Blanche is a much harsher, real, relatable character where the true fight with these emotion can be felt in an authentic way.
Work Cited
Shakespeare, William. Twelfth Night. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2012. Print.
Williams, Tennessee, and Elliott Martin. Browne. A Streetcar Named Desire. London: Penguin, 2009. Print. Modern Classics.
In Tennessee Williams' play, A Streetcar Named Desire, Williams uses the suicide of Blanche's husband to illuminate Blanche's insecurities and immoral behavior. When something terrible happens to someone, it often reveals who he or she truly is. Blanche falls victim to this behavior, and she fails to face her demons. This displays how the play links a character’s illogical choices and their inner struggles.
During the time period Tennessee Williams, author of the play A Streetcar Named Desire, lived in, men were typically portrayed as leaders of the household. Through Williams' usage of dialogue, specific descriptions of each characters, as well as sound, he illustrates to readers of today's society how differently a man and woman coexisted in the mid-1900s, compared to today. Through the eyes of a topical/historical theorist, who stresses the relationships between the story and the time period it takes place, the distinction between today's society and that of five decades past, can be observed with depth and precision.
McGlinn addresses the third dialectic taking hold of Blanche: illusion versus reality. McGlinn points out that, like all the women in Williams’s plays between 1940 and 1950, Blanche “refuses to accept the reality of her life and attempts to live under illusion.” [Tharpe, 513]. Although McGlinn is accurate in noting Blanche’s conflict between gentility and promiscuity, the result of which is “self-defeat instead of survival” [Tharpe, 513], she fails to see that Blanche lives in both illusion and reality simultaneously, and it is this dialectic that is the slow poison which destroys her. This death-instinct gives us the fourth and last dialectic in Blanche: her struggle between death and desire.”
Due to a combination of her being an airhead, and her want to start over and dismember her past from herself, Blanche begins self-delusion. She creates a fantasy life, in which she is still a young, beautiful, innocent woman who has ju...
In this paper it will be shown that the functionalists are correct. Functionalists argue that Blanche's self-concept, which she believes is a traditional upper class woman, eventually leads to her mental and emotional breakdown. Feminists argue Blanche is sent off to a mental hospital to hush up Stanley's crime of rape, not because of any illness. Although there is some value to the feminist interpretation, it contains several weaknesses. The following review of some aspects of the plot will reveal some of those weaknesses.
Hirsch, Foster. A Portrait of the Artist-The Plays of Tennessee Williams. London: Kennikat Press, 1979.
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.
Williams, Tennessee. “A Streetcar Named Desire.” The Norton Introduction to Literature. Ed. Kelly J. Mays. 11th ed. New York: Norton, 2013.1815-1881. Print.
As the play proceeds, we increasingly gain knowledge of Blanche and the real person she is juxtaposed to the actual being that she would like everyone to think she is. Tennessee Williams did an amazing job incorporating motifs such as lighting and flirtation in the play and without them we would be puzzled and left confused because their would be no inside view of Blanche and her mind. Using the fore mentioned motifs, we can contemplate that Blanche is deceptive, narcissistic and seductive and the use of motifs helped develop Blanche into the character she is.
Blanche could be seen as the central character for “being torn away from (her) chosen image”, as the image she projects to the world gets cruelly ripped away from her through a series of events that lead to her demise. Blanche is described as being “moth like”, meaning that she has to hide herself in the dark for fear of going into the light, and in turn revealing the ‘real’ Blanche; she would become the moth, and metaphorically “die” in the light that she divulges.
Written in 1947, A Streetcar Named Desire has always been considered one of Tennessee William’s most successful plays. One way for this can be found is the way Williams makes major use of symbols and colours as a dramatic technique.
Women's struggle for identity is a common issue explored in both A Streetcar Named Desire and Top Girls alike. Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire has been interpreted as both a psychological drama and as social drama, and focuses on the character of Blanche Dubois and her personal journey in finding her identity. This leads to her eventual destruction by Stanley Kowalski, who can be interpreted as a figure of 'hegemonic masculinity'. Churchill's Top Girls is a non-didactic social drama from the 1980s, a significant
Owing to its high intensity emotional plot and subtle yet powerful acting by its lead cast ensured that the movie became a blockbuster. Tennessee weaves a plot set in New Orleans around three characters: Blanche, her brother-in-law Stanley and her sister Stella. The following essay‘s objective is to compare both, Williams’s play with a motion picture based on it, highlighting similarities and differences between the two. Similarities After watching the movie and going through the drama text, one can only agree with the fact that Elia Kazan retains the core plot and the originality of the play written by Williams, perfectly. Williams was responsible for working on the screen play of the movie, and this fact reflects clearly on the onscreen version of the play as his thought and personality are clearly reflected in the movie.
William Shakespeare's, Twelfth Night has many themes, but appearance vs. reality is the theme that illustrates a different picture from two perspectives, there are many characters behind their masks and disguises. Some are hiding love behind these disguises and some are trying to show their love through a different disguise. They both still being servants are using disguise differently. Malvolio, servant of Olivia, falls in love with the trap (the letter) thinking his lady likes him, and to show his love he uses a different appearance to express it. Viola, servant of Orsino, falls in love with him, but secretly, not wanting to express her love for him, because of her disguise as her barrier for that case. Viola/Ceasario is wearing a disguise and secretly loves Orsino. Malvolio, on the other hand, is also a servant but still changes his appearance to express love for the great lady Olivia. This essay will prove that disguises and appearances are symbolic of the characters named Viola and Malvolio and are differently used for both.
Throughout Twelfth Night, disguise and mistaken identity works as a catalyst for confusion and disorder which consistently contributes towards the dramatic comic genre of the play. Many characters in Twelfth Night assume disguises, beginning with Viola, who disguises herself as a man in order to serve Orsino, the Duke. By dressing his protagonist in male garments, Shakespeare creates ongoing sexual confusion with characters, which include Olivia, Viola and Orsino, who create a ‘love triangle’ between them. Implicitly, there is homoerotic subtext here: Olivia is in love with a woman, despite believing her to be a man, and Orsino often comments on Cesario’s beauty, which implies that he is attracted to Viola even before her male disguise is removed. However, even subsequent to the revealing of Viola’s true identity, Orsino’s declares his love to Viola implying that he enjoys lengthening the pretence of Vio...