Blanche Dubois Character Analysis

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Why Is Blanche Dubois Presented As a Sympathetic Character?
‘A Streetcar Named Desire’ written by Tennessee Williams is set in the French Quarter of Elysian Fields, New Orleans. Blanche Dubois, a Southern Belle on a battle between illusion and reality is the tragic protagonist of Tennessee Williams' play, grew up on a plantation called Belle Reve (a French phrase meaning "beautiful dream"). Throughout her childhood and adolescent years, Blanche grew accustomed to refinement and wealth. As the estate's wealth vanished and her loved ones died off, Blanche held on to fantasies and delusions - two things that are very difficult to cling onto in the two-room apartment of her sister Stella and Stella's domineering husband Stanley Kowalski. Blanche is presented as a sensitive and delicate character that symbolizes purity and innocence. In ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’, Blanche suffers terrible loss, tells compulsive lies, and is driven to insanity.
Loss, death, and misfortune seem to be things that constantly creep up on our delicate Blanche Dubois. In scene six we are introduced to the truth about Blanche’s dead husband. “I loved someone, too, and the person I loved I lost”. Blanche had married and fell in love with a young boy at the age of sixteen whose love had been like a “blinding light”. By unexpectedly entering a room, she found him in a sexual act with an older man. They went that night to a dance where a polka was playing. In the middle of the dance, Blanche told her young husband that he disgusted her. This act of cruelty on Blanche's part caused her young husband to commit suicide. Since that night Blanche has never had any light stronger than a dim candle. Blanche has always thought she failed her young lover when he...

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...life meaning and focus. When she finally retreats into that fantasy she is hauled away as insane but, in truth, she is happier in her insanity than her reality.
Blanche is presented as a sensitive and delicate character that symbolizes purity and innocence. In ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’, Blanche suffers terrible loss, tells compulsive lies, and is driven to insanity. She has reached a place with the nightmares in her mind, but she can’t bear the interruption of ugly reality into her make-believe world. Stanley's disclosures of her past, Mitch's rejection of her as "not clean enough" and his clumsy attempt at raping her, and finally her rape by Stanley on the night when her sister is giving birth to his child - all these destroy our protagonist and her mind gives way. She retreats into her make-believe world, making her committal to an institution inevitable.

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