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A streetcar named desire themes analysis
Themes from A Streetcar Named Desire
Themes from A Streetcar Named Desire
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Throughout Tennessee Williams’s life, his struggle with gender identity and sexuality altered his perception of others claiming “people are complex.” Williams’s plays reflect his own life by creating characters who are neither good nor bad but have a certain complexity that baffles the audience. These intricate characters, like Williams, struggle with his/her own human nature and are coaxed by the temptations of immoral desires. In Tennessee Williams’s two plays, Streetcar Named Desire and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Williams develops the significance of the two titles by generating themes such as desire, mendacity, and sexuality.
Williams constructs the title Streetcar Named Desire by directly using the themes established through his personal conflict. The metaphor
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Stella is also a character driven by desire. Her inability to leave Stanley, though he is abusive and irrational, is haunting. She exclaims, “He smashed all the lightbulbs with the heel of my slipper.” Blanche questions Stella, “And you let him? Didn’t run, didn’t scream?” Stella replies, “Actually, I was sorta thrilled by it.” Bewildered Blanche, appalled by Stella’s willingness to stay with a brute like Stanley, hypocritically judges Stella. Blanche and Stella both rely on the desire of sex and a relationship to feel wanted and important. In Stella and Stanley’s home in Elysian Fields, Stella is blinded by her sexual appeal and desire of Stanley’s senseless harsh and abusive actions, and continues to live in her artificial utopia. Blanche uses sexual relationships to mend her damaged heart and sanity, along with creating a
Comparing A Streetcar Named Desire and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof In the game of life, a man is given the option 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 between past and present created by man's choices in "A Streetcar Named Desire" and "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. "
Her character represents absolute indifference due to her largely domestic and submissive role. Stella is almost a prisoner in her own home; she is continuously indoors from the outset of the play. Her character is subjugated by the language in the play. She is rarely called by her name, and is continuously referred to as "honey", "baby", or "sweetie" instead. This is one of the characteristics of the feminine struggle for equality within contemporary society; her name is not used to confirm her identity - instead she is branded by condescending labels which overwhelm her individuality. Stella is often belittled physically through the violence her husband subjects her too; for example, Stanley 's response to her request for help to clearing the table:
As Stanley continues torturing Blanche and draws Stella and Mitch away from her, Blanche’s sanity slowly dwindles. Even though she lied throughout the play, her dishonesty becomes more noticeable and irrational due to Stanley's torment about her horrible past. After dealing with the deaths of her whole family, she loses Belle Reve, the estate on which her and her sister grew up. This is too much for Blanche to handle causing her moral vision to be blurred by “her desperate need to be with someone, with ancestors for models who indulged in “epic fornications” with impunity, [Blanche] moves through the world filling the void in her life with lust” (Kataria 2). She also loses a young husband who killed himself after she found out he was gay when she caught him with another man. After that traumatic experience she needed “a cosy nook to squirm herself into because ...
Stanley oftenly abuses Stella whenever he is drunk. One night, Stanley brings his friends over for a poker night. Mitch leaves the table in order to talk to Blanche. Stanley begins to get furious since Mitch is no longer playing. As more and more interruptions keep occurring, Stanley is furious and breaks the radio Blanche and Mitch were using. Stella then calls Stanley an animal. “He advances and disappears. There is a sound of a blow. Stella cries out.”(57) Stanley is usually abusive when he's either drunk or frustrated. After Stanley strikes her, Stella leaves the house and goes to her neighbors house. Blanche follows her sister upstairs to support Stella so she does not feel alone. Stanley then calms down and calls for Stella to come back. She returns and falls into Stanley's arms. Stella is very loyal to Stanley, she stays with him because he is her husband and does not want to change that. This is why she ignores her sister's pleas. Stanleys actions prove to the reader that he is an abusive husband to Stella and that Stella tolerates
In Williams’ Streetcar Named Desire the characters represent two opposing themes. These themes are of illusion and reality. The two characters that demonstrate these themes are Blanche, and Stanley. Blanche represents the theme of Illusion, with her lies, and excuses. Stanley demonstrates the theme of reality with his straightforward vulgar ness. Tennessee Williams uses these characters effectively to demonstrate these themes, while also using music and background characters to reinforce one another.
Blanche’s developmental history or character development points to her diagnosis. Blanche comes to New Orleans to stay with her sister Stella after being fired from her job as a schoolteacher due to having an inappropriate affair with a teenage student. When she arrives to see her sister, she is consumed with insecurities regarding her appearance and is condescending to her sister’s humble lifestyle. Stella’s husband Stanley immediately has distrust and dislike for Blanche and treats her
Character Conflict in Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire. 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.
Stanley’s treatment of Blanche leaves her alone once again, with what little dreams of returning to her previous status destroyed like the paper lampshade that once gave her the shield from the real her she desperately craved. Stella, the one person Blanche believed she could rely on, sides against her husband after Blanche’s ordeal, leading Blanche to be taken away, relying on the “kindness of strangers”. This final image that Williams leaves us with fully demonstrates that Blanche has been cruelly and finally forced away from her “chosen image of what and who” she is, leaving an empty woman, once full of hope for her future.
Stella Kowalski’s character, parallels to Stanley’s and represents the ego in the play. herself from her hometown and start a life in this vigorous world made by Stanley. she stands for the ego who wants to create a balance between desires and ideas, between body and soul, heart and mind to have a normal life. Blanche is the only one who wants to warn her of what she does. Loving Blanche, she also dislikes her and at the same time fears her. She hopes Blanche marry Mitch for her sister’s sake and for herself too. Actually she wants to get rid of
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”.
Stella represents an important part in this drama by providing a contrast to how life can change people when they go down different paths. In Contrast to her sister, Stella is bound to love. Although she fell in love with a primitive, common man, she most definitely loves him. Stella desires only to make Stanley happy and live a beautiful life together. She wants to find peace between her sister and her husband yet instead she finds conflict afflicting her on both sides. Blanche uses her dilutions and tries to sway Stella away from Stanley yet Stella takes all these slanders and belittles them. Stella does this because she loves Stanley and since she is pregnant with his baby.
After two world wars, the balance of power between the genders in America had completely shifted. Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire is a harsh, yet powerful play that exposes the reality of the gender struggle. Williams illustrates society’s changing attitudes towards masculinity and femininity through his eloquent use of dramatic devices such as characterization, dialogue, setting, symbolism, and foreshadowing.
This gradual fall and loss of her sense of reality is truly tragic. Blanche is a person largely driven by the part of her that wants to be liked and be accepted. She cares greatly about how she is viewed and how she looks which is seen throughout the play. Even at the end when she’s living almost completely in the imaginations of her mind she asks Stella and Eunice how she looks before being taken away to an insane asylum. Tennessee Williams, the author of the play, uses all the conflict between Blanche and others, specifically Stanley, to show that fantasy is unable to overcome reality. Stanley and Blanche are both the epitomes of fantasy and reality. Stanley is a man focused on sexual drive, work, and fighting. He is exhibited as animalistic and strongly driven by his desires which is shown when he says, “Be comfortable. That's my motto up where I come from.” Stanley loves and searches after reality which is why he is so set on breaking down the facade he sees in Blanche. Blanche on the other hand is running from her reality and her past. Her fantasy of being high class and chaste is the exact opposite of her reality which is why she wants a life like that so badly. She wants marriage and stability, two things she was jealous of Stella having after arriving in New Orleans. Her fantasy she was building in her new life is shattered when Stanley is able to learn of her past and bring reality crashing down on her. Williams
As a playwright write William’s was not afraid to depict his own life through his literary works. William’s has been a very significant author in literature, as described by the New York Times (1983) as “the most important American playwright after Eugene O 'Neill”. Tennessee William’s was also recognized because of the way he wrote, and his impact on society, and his personal experiences, inserted into the plays. ‘He had a profound effect on the American theater and on American playwrights and actors. He wrote with deep sympathy and expansive humor about outcasts in our society. Though his images were often violent, he was a poet of the human heart’ (M. Gussow, 1983). Three of his most famous works, out of all that he had were The Glass Menagerie, A street Car Named Desire, and lastly Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. In all three of these plays they depicted/ reflected a point in time where William’s went through a negative experience, which influenced him to insert these experiences into the plays. Also in all his plays, they were about a family and their struggles to see the reality of their world and trying not to go along with the norms of society. A similarity in all the plays was that William’s made the women in all these plays as himself. In other words the women represented his life. "It 's true my heroines often speak for me. That doesn 't make them transvestites. Playwrights
Stanley (Stella's husband) represents a theme of realism in the play; he is shown as a primitive, masculine character that is irresistible to Stella and on some levels even to his "opponent" Stella's sister Blanche.