Escaping Reality In A Streetcar Named Desire

Tennessee Williams and Escaping Reality

Societal expectations can command many aspects of a person’s life. Appearance, possessions, career paths, mood and behavior are all things than can be affected by social pressures. Society can also affect the way people perceive success, and in today’s economic landscape success is mostly measured by accumulated wealth and comfort. Without those things, the weight of society can become heavy and those with economic or social hardship may find solace in disregarding their reality all together. Two of Tennessee Williams’ most highly praised plays, The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire, share a common theme; escaping reality instead of confronting the adversity placed before you. Williams explores this premise through similarities and differences of two characters, Blanche DuBois and Amanda Wingfield.

The complex protagonist in A Street Car Named Desire, Blanche Dubois, traveled to New Orleans to stay with her sister, Stella, leaving a litany of tragedy and trouble back home in Mississippi. It is revealed in scene one that Blanche allowed the ancestral estate to foreclose after a series of family deaths and her inability to pay the expenses. She irrationally attacks her sister for leaving the family behind and uses her departure as a way to blame her lost family estate. Another aspect of Blanche’s disparity is the untimely death of her husband, a suicide which she carries blame for. His death created an intimacy void in her life and subsequently leads to her overtly flirtatious and hypersexual behavior. She admits this by saying, “After the death of Allan, intimacies with strangers was all I seemed able to fill my empty heart with” (Streetcar, Williams, p.146). It w...

... middle of paper ...

... put up a solitary battle all these years. But you’re my right-hand bower! Don’t fall down, don’t fail!" (Menagerie, Williams, p30), Amanda shows how she doesn’t want her children to make the same mistakes she did.

Whether youth, gender roles, wealth or status, both characters are in a struggle with securing what society deems valuable. They are so caught up with their past and repairing or not repeating mistakes that their present lives take a back seat and those around them suffer. The antagonist of stories that describe Blanche and Amanda’s personalities is society. Society places lofty expectations on everyone to be things they cant or don’t want to be and Williams portrays this brilliantly in these two plays. Amanda and Blanche are mired by perpetual escapism because their harsh reality is that they will never fill the voids that society created for them.