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Blanche duBois is one of the main characters in Tennessee Williams’ drama “A Streetcar Named Desire” for which he won a Pulitzer Prize in 1955. Blanche is a very complex character in this play because she has many different and opposing personality traits. Blanche has lost everything she has ever known. Her true love, parents and property are all gone. On top of that, and very important to her, her looks are fading. All she has left is her sister. She is best described as snobbish, flirtatious and manipulative. Although these appear to be her primary traits, it becomes obvious as the plot unfolds that these are a cover-up of her true self, a very insecure person. Ultimately, Blanche’s snobbery, sexually promiscuity and manipulative dealings with other characters reveal an ironic cover up due to her overpowering pride and desire to be someone that she is not.
Blanche’s first character trait that stands out is her snobbery. It is first shown at the very beginning of the William’s play. She looks down upon the fact that her sister Stella has a lower standard of living than she ...
Identity in Contemporary American Drama – Between Reality and Illusion 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. Firstly, we learn from an interview he gave, that the character of Blanche has been inspired from a member of his family.
6). Williams’s sister Rose is the real-life parallel of Blanche – Blanche’s illusions about life mirror Rose’s after her forced lobotomy*. However, unlike Rose Blanche is presented as knwing that she is “on the verge of - lunacy” (p.7). Similarly, Williams declared that after the events of ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’, Blanche left the asylum and lived a fulfilling life with a young gentleman – he was perhaps deluding himself, pushing his hopes for Rose onto Blanche, the fictional character believed to have been inspired by his
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.
This statement also emphasises much of Blanche’s own views on sorrow and explains how it has affected her life since she has made the comment from personal experience. To conclude, Tennessee Williams’ dramatic use of death and dying is an overarching theme in ‘A Streetcar Named Desire,’ from which everything about Blanche’s character has formed from. Without the death of Allan, Blanche would not have resorted to prostitution and the brief affairs with strangers, also the deaths of her family have driven Blanche to Stella’s where she is “not wanted” and “ashamed to be”. Therefore these dramatic deaths have lead to the past which comes back to haunt
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.
Blanche, in particular, is much more of an anachronism than Stella, who has, for the most part, adapted to the environment of Stanley Kowalski. Finally, both Stella and Blanche are or have been married. It is in their respective marriages that we can begin to trace the profound differences between these two sisters. Where Blanche's marriage, to a man whom she dearly loved (Miller 43), proved catastrophic to her, Stella's marriage seems to be fulfilling her as a woman. Blanche's marriage to a young homosexual, and the subsequent tragedy that resulted from her discovery of her husband's degeneracy and her inability to help him, has been responsible for much of the perversity in her life.
A Streetcar Named Desire is a play founded on the premise of conflicting cultures. Blanche and Stanley, the main antagonists of the play, have been brought up to harbour and preserve extremely disparate notions, to such an extent that their incompatibility becomes a recurring theme within the story. Indeed, their differing values and principles becomes the ultimate cause of antagonism, as it is their conflicting views that fuels the tension already brewing within the Kowalski household. Blanche, a woman disillusioned with the passing of youth and the dejection that loneliness inflicts upon its unwilling victims, breezes into her sister's modest home with the air and grace of a woman imbued with insecurity and abandonment. Her disapproval, concerning Stella's state of residence, is contrived in the face of a culture that disagrees with the old-fashioned principles of the southern plantations, a place that socialised Blanche to behave with the superior demeanour of a woman brain-washed into right-wing conservatism. Incomparably, she represents the old-world of the south, whilst Stanley is the face of a technology driven, machine fuelled, urbanised new-world that is erected on the foundations of immigration and cultural diversity. New Orleans provides such a setting for the play, emphasising the bygone attitude of Blanche whose refusal to part with the archaic morals of her past simply reiterates her lack of social awareness. In stark contrast Stanley epitomises the urban grit of modern society, revealed by his poker nights, primitive tendencies and resentment towards Blanche. ...
Throughout Tennessee Williams’s play “A Streetcar Named Desire,” Blanche Dubois exemplified several tragic flaws. She suffered from her haunting past; her inability to overcome; her desire to be someone else; and from the cruel, animalistic treatment she received from Stanley. Sadly, her sister Stella also played a role in her downfall. All of these factors ultimately led to Blanche’s tragic breakdown in the end. Blanche could not accept her past and overcome it.
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.
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 sets the decaying values of the antebellum South against those of the new America. The civil, kindly ways of Blanche’s past are a marked contrast to the rough, dynamic New Orleans inhabited by Stella and Stanley, which leads Tennessee Williams’s “tragedy of incomprehension” (qtd. in Alder, 48). The central protagonist, Blanche, has many flaws; she lies, is vain and deceitful, yet can be witty and sardonic. These multifaceted layers balance what Jessica Tandy, who played Blanche in the first stage production in 1947, “saw as her ‘pathetic elegance’ . . . ‘indomitable spirit and ‘innate tenderness’” (Alder 49). Through a connected sequence of vignettes, our performance presented a deconstruction of Blanche that revealed the lack of comprehension and understanding her different facets and personas created. Initially Blanche is aware of what she is doing and reveals
Blanche DuBois, the protagonist of the play, is introduced to the readers in the first scene, where she makes a surprise visit to her sister and her sister’s husband, Stella and Stanley. She is introduced as a fragile woman who the readers begin to feel sympathy for her. She had been asked to leave her job, and she lost the family estate. The readers ...
Tennessee Williams explores in his play” A Streetcar Named Desire”, suggests the main protagonist, Blanche, who has ruins her reputation due to her adversity. She is kick out of Laurel. She have no choice, but to move to her sister’s house. This place can allow her to create a new identity and new life. However when Blanche is revealed , it cause her to choose to live in her own fantasy world , because she cannot face the harsh reality. The Play” A Streetcar Named Desire”, by Tennessee Williams illustrates that sensitive people may succumb to fantasy to survive when they faced adversity, ,which forsake their identity to find an acceptable existence.
In 'A Streetcar Named Desire' we focus on three main characters. One of these characters is a lady called Blanche. As the play progresses, we gradually get to know more about Blanche and the type of person she really is in contrast to the type of person that she would like everybody else to think she is. Using four main mediums, symbolism and imagery, Blanche's action when by herself, Blanche's past and her dialogue with others such as Mitch, Stanley and the paperboy, we can draw a number of conclusions about Blanche until the end of Scene Five. Using the fore mentioned mediums we can deter that Blanche is deceptive, egotistical and seductive.
A Streetcar Named Desire, by Tennessee Williams is superficially simple. This contrasts the complex themes and conflicted characters that unravel throughout the play. Blanche and Stanley are symbols of opposing class’ and differing attitudes regarding life, especially love and sex. As the play progresses the power struggle between Blanche and Stanley ensues and intensifies; however, Williams blurs the lines of good and bad, in that no character is completely good bad. The play has no clear winner, everyone loses something, which gives the audience more to think about.