Comparing A Streetcar Named Desire and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
In the game of life man is given the options to bluff, raise, or fold. He is dealt a hand created by the consequences of his choices or by outside forces beyond his control. It is a never ending cycle: choices made create more choices. Using diverse, complex characters simmering with passion and often a contradiction within themselves, Tennessee Williams examines the link of past and present created by man's choices in "A Streetcar Named Desire" and "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof."
Delicate Blanche, virile Stanley. Dynamic Maggie, impotent Brick. Williams' protagonists are distinctly different in temperament. In "A Streetcar Named Desire" Blanche exemplifies the stereotypical old south: educated, genteel, obsolete. Stanley is the new south: primitive, crude, ambitious. Blanche, a fading beauty, uses her sugary charm and soft southern ways to attract men. In comparison, Stanley "sizes women up at a glance, with sexual classifications" to "determine the way he smiles at them" (Williams, Street 29). Course and deliberately aggressive, he is a "survivor of the stone age" (Williams, Street 72). Despite their differences they both possess a raw sensuality. In their first confrontation, Blanche's thick display of charm angers and attracts Stanley. He wants her to be truthful and "lay her cards on the table" but simultaneously would "get ideas" about Blanche if she wasn't Stella's sister (Williams, Street 40-41). Their relationship overflows with sexual tension as they battle for Stella. Stanley, the new south, defeats Blanche, the old south. After destroying her chance for security, his sexual assault erases her last traces of sanity.
Similarly opposites attract in "Cat on...
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Stanton, Stephen. "Introduction." Tennessee Williams: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey : Prentice-Hall, 1977. 1-16.
Weales, Gerald. "Tennessee Williams' Achievement in the Sixties." Tennessee Williams: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc, 1977. 61-70.
Williams, Tennessee. Cat On a Hot Tin Roof. New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1958. 3-85.
---. A Streetcar Named Desire. New York: Penguin Books, 1974. 12-142.
The Soviet Union and the United States were very distant during three decades of a nuclear arms race. Even though the two nations never directly had a battle, the Cuban Missile Crisis, amongst other things, was a result of the tension. The missile crisis began in October of 1962, when an American spy plane secretly photographed nuclear missile sites being built by the Soviet Union in Cuba. JFK did not want the Soviet Union and Cuba to know that he had discovered the missiles, so he made his decisions very secretly. Eventually, Kennedy decided to place a ring of ships around Cuba and place missiles in Turkey. Eventually, both leaders superpowers realized the possibility of a nuclear war and agreed to a deal in which the Soviets would remove the missiles from Cuba if the US didn't invade Cuba. Even though the Soviets removed took their missiles out of Cuba and the US eventually taking their missiles out of Turkey, they (the Soviets) continued to build a more advanced military; the missile crisis was over, but the arms race was not.
The Cuban Missile Crisis was not only the tensest confrontation between these two nations; it was also the most controversial. There have been many different theories as to why the Soviet Union set up nuclear-armed missiles in Cuba in the first place. One theory suggests that Stalin’s successor, Nikita Khrushchev, placed these weapons in Cuba because he felt endangered by the United States’ nuclear missiles in Turkey, which were a threat to the Soviet Union. Another theory proposes that Castro feared for another US invasion in Cuba, thus enlisting the help of their communist allies. Since the unsuccessful attack at the Bay of Pigs, Castro feared for another invasion, perhaps a more successful one of Cuba. But nonetheless, the Cuban Missile Crisis proves to be successful in which we avoided a nuclear war.
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.
Williams, Tennessee. “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.” Connections: Literature for Composition. Q. Miller and J. Nash. Belmont: Wadsworth, 2008 843-858. Print.
The Cold War is famous not only for its long engagement between the two super powers, the U.S. and the Soviet Union, but also because of the heightened physical tension that nuclear power brought to the global stage. Winning the war at the cost of human annihilation was not abnormal political conversation, and from the 1940s onward, fear of global destruction became a daily concern (Granieri, 2011). The circumstances of the Cold War made it different than previous international conflicts because it was the first conflict that could potentially lead to massive, worldwide destruction. Without the dangers of nuclear power, the Cold War wouldn't have differed much from previous historical conflicts between powerful states.
In A Streetcar Named Desire, Tennessee Williams uses Blanche and Stanley to point out the different features of both periods, old and new. At the end of the play when Stella chooses to be believe Stanley over her sister Blanche. It basically means that New South wins in the end. Blanche who represents the Old South’s rich, beautiful, southern belle is sort of cast out of society. Stella on the other hand was able to adapt to the social evolution of the south and mix with Stanley to create a new life.
Williams, William Carlos. The American Idiom: A Correspondence: William Carlos Williams & Harold Norse 1951-1961. Ed. John J. Wilson. Bright Tyger. San Francisco 1990.
Tennessee Williams gives insight into three ordinary lives in his play, “A Streetcar Named Desire” which is set in the mid-1930’s in New Orleans. The main characters in the play are Blanche, Stanley, and Stella. All three of these characters suffer from personalities that differentiate each of them to great extremes. Because of these dramatic contrarieties in attitudes, there are mounting conflicts between the characters throughout the play. The principal conflict lies between Blanche and Stanley, due to their conflicting ideals of happiness and the way things “ought to be”.
The Cuban Missile Crisis was a major event in U.S History that almost led to nuclear destruction. It was over a period of thirteen days in which diplomats from the U.S and the Soviet Union were trying to reach a peaceful resolution so that they wouldn’t have to engage in physical warfare. The crisis was the hallmark of the Cold War era which lasted from the 1950’s to the late 1980’s. The Cold War was a power struggle between the U.S and Soviet Union in which the two nations had a massive arms race to become the strongest military force. The U.S considered Communism to be an opposing political entity, and therefore branded them as enemies. Khrushchev’s antagonistic view of Americans also played a big role in the conflict. The Cold War tensions, coupled with a political shift in Cuba eventually lead to the military struggle known as the Cuban Missile Crisis. The Cuban Missile Crisis was the point of most tension and near collapse causing the Cold War to almost shift from a passive and underground struggle to a violent and catastrophic one.
As Edgar Allen Poe wrote more and more stories, some comparisons between all of them started to arose, two stories that share a lot of similarities are “The Raven” and “Tell-Tale Heart.” One similarity is that in both stories the narrators were both scared of something that would not leave them alone, in “The Raven” the terror is the Raven and in “Tell-Tale Heart” it is the old man's eye and eventually his heart beat. Another similarity between the stories is that the narrator is the main character and is telling a story about themselves, one being about a murder they had committed and the other about a Raven knocking at a man’s door. The next correspondence is
Conarroe, Joel. "William Carlos Williams." Six American poets: an anthology. New York: Random House, 1991. . Print.
In Tennessee Williams play "A Streetcar Named Desire" two of the main characters Stanley and Blanche persistently oppose each other, their differences eventually spiral into Stanley's rape of Stella.
As the following report demonstrates, some species are adapting to climate changes while many others are not. In some cases, laboratory experiments have lead to the conclusion that certain species can or cannot adapt and evolve. This research is not sufficient to make definitive statements regarding what will happen to species if temperatures and sea levels continue to rise.
The Cuban Missile Crisis, in 1962, was when Soviet Union attempted to place nuclear weapons in Cuba threating the United States to stay out. It was significant because for the 14 days it lasted; it was the closest the Cold War ever came to an actual nuclear conflict. As a result, the American people turned to consumerism and families for reliable comfort against the unreliableness of a nuclear attack.
Climate change can be seen as a change in the pattern of weather over time scales of decades or longer, relating to changes in oceans, land surfaces and ice sheets. Evidence has proven that the Antarctic continent is warming as a whole. Studies conducted by Antarctic researchers have found that a temperature increase of 1.3°C will threaten 40% of the total Emperor penguin population, along with 70% of the world’s total Adélie penguin population, largely as the result of diminishing sea ice. Predictions that have made is that at present rate, global temperatures will exceed 1.3°C of warming before mid-century with penguin scientists also predicting that climate change will push the Emperor population to near extinction within this century as the result of sea-ice