Deception And Disillusionment In A Streetcar Named Desire

Throughout the classic American play A Streetcar Named Desire, Tennessee Williams utilizes light and dark to underline the role that deception and disillusionment play in Blanche’s interpersonal relationships. Blanche is a woman in her thirties who retreats to her sister Stella’s home after supposedly losing her own home, much to the disliking of Stella’s husband, Stanley. Stanley seeks to expose Blanche for her promiscuous past. After he reveals Blanche’s affairs with a seventeen-year-old student and a multiplicity of strangers, Blanche becomes increasingly alienated from her family and is eventually sent away to a mental institution. Blanche is a vain individual who displays a strong desire to relive her time as a gorgeous and popular young lady. She refuses to be seen in direct light and by potential suitors unless she is sufficiently dressed and accessorized and has powdered her face. In the 1951 film adaptation of A Streetcar Named Desire, directed by Elia Kazan, the use of lighting, shadows, and point-of-view further

highlights Blanche’s desire to relive moments from her youth and her vanity. However, due to censorship restrictions placed upon the film’s producers by conservative powerhouses, the film’s use of lighting, shadows, and point-of-view encourages viewers to see Blanche as a fragile woman who deserves sympathy due to how poorly others have treated her. While the use of light and dark in the dialogue and stage directions in the play assists in portraying Blanche as a cruel, vain woman who is desperate to relive her youthful glory days, the film’s use of lighting, shadows, and point-of-view assists in portraying Blanche as a poor creature who has only been treated unjustly by the world. This essay will focus on how the use of cigarettes reflects both the play’s depiction and the film’s depiction of Blanche.
Throughout both the play and the film, Blanche participates in a popular pastime of the 1940s: smoking cigarettes. Smoking cigarettes provides her with a brief moment of light in which she can reminisce about her past until she is drawn back into the present. There is a hint of irony in regard to how Blanche is obsessed with vanity yet smokes. Although Blanche cares immensely about her physical appearance- she is selective about the dresses that she wears, the make-up she powders her face with, and the perfume she sprays her body with- she displays a lack of care about her physical health. While cigarettes themselves provide a fleeting moment of pleasure, they ultimately cause suffering. By the time that the play was written (1947), it had already been heavily suggested that there was “a correlation between the increased sale of tobacco and the increasing prevalence of lung cancer” (Borio). By the mid-twentieth century, population studies, animal experimentation, cellular pathology, and the recognition of cancer-causing chemicals in cigarette smoke further provided evidence in favor of the notion that cigarette smoking was the leading cause of lung cancer (Proctor). Although cigarette companies continued to deny that smoking cigarettes could lead to detrimental health effects such as lung cancer, certain media outlets, such as Reader’s Digest, and many scientists and researchers published work which suggested that smoking cigarettes could cause deadly diseases (Borio). While it would be incorrect to assume that Tennessee Williams knew or believed in the dangers of smoking cigarettes or that Blanche knew or believed that smoking cigarettes was dangerous, it was widespread, public knowledge at the time of the play’s publication that smoking cigarettes does not come without consequential effects.
One of the most prominent uses of cigarettes in A Streetcar Named Desire occurs during one of the initial exchanges between Blanche and Mitch. Toward the middle of scene three in the play, Blanche has an exchange with Mitch, Stanley’s close friend from work, about Mitch’s beautiful silver cigarette case.

While this interaction between Blanche and Mitch highlights Blanche’s vanity, the inscription on the silver cigarette case gives weight to the profound effect that Blanche’s husband’s death had on her life.

During this interaction, Blanche and Mitch are communicating in a darkly-lit room, which is indicated by how Mitch must strike a match, and thus provide some form of light, in order for Blanche to read the inscription and by how Blanche still has difficulty reading the quotation with this flame right in front of her face. This is later reinforced when Mitch notes “I don’t think I ever seen you [Blanche] in the light” (Williams 143; scene 9). Furthermore, when Blanche enters the home alongside Stella before this interaction with Mitch, she applies powder onto her face to appear fresher for the potential suitors playing poker in the home and to play along with the false notion that she is Stella’s younger sister (Williams 49; scene

3).
Immediately after Blanche reads the inscription, Mitch reveals that there is a love story behind the quotation (Williams 57; scene 3). A former lover of Mitch’s gave him the case before she died. After Mitch divulges this information, Blanche asserts that she believes that “sorrow makes for sincerity” (Williams 58; scene 3). Blanche can relate to Mitch’s pain, as the two of them both had romantic relationships that ended due to the death of their partner. However, while Mitch’s lover was aware that she was dying when she gifted the cigarette case to Mitch, the death of Blanche’s husband Allan was sudden and, in part, due to Blanche’s emotional outburst after finding out that he was having an affair with an older man. In scene six, Blanche reveals, in vivid detail, how the relationship she once shared with her husband unraveled. When Blanche was sixteen years-old, she fell in love with the man who eventually became her husband (Williams 114; scene 6). Blanche exclaims that the love and passion she experienced in her youth with Allan was like turning “a blinding light on something that had always been half in shadow” (Williams 114; scene 6). However, this love transforms into anger and guilt as Blanche discovers that Allan is gay and having an affair with a close male friend (Williams 114; scene 6). Blanche then impulsively expresses her immense disgust toward Allan, leading to his suicide by firearm (Williams 115; scene 6). Allan once served as a ray of guidance and hope for Blanche. However, since his untimely death, the light that Allan once provided has been reduced to a miniscule flame, like that of the match Mitch strikes.