The Characters of Blanche and Stanley

In the beginning Tennessee Williams formed Stanley and Blanche from the soil of repression and indulgence; he breathes desire into their nostrils causing them to become living souls. In the mist of the Elysian Fields garden was the tree of knowledge of death and redemption. Stanley the merciless predator of Blanche used the knowledge of the death of Belle Reve to expose Blanche’s nakedness. Blanche covers herself with puritanical fig leaves inadvertently exposing the primitive beast like qualities in Stanley. Tennessee Williams infuses Stanley and Blanche with contradictions of opposing class, differing attitudes about sex and the incongruent perspective on reality. Effortlessly these expressions of desire moves like a pendulum back and forth between Blanche and Stanley, the clock stops, ultimately exposing the neurosis of their souls. The author’s emancipation proclamation reveals how their contradictions became complementaries thus transcending the imagery of death into a pious redemption. Emphatically the author’s soul cries out from the grave, “Out beyond right-doing and wrong-doings there is a field I’ll meet you there,” (Rumi).

Tennessee Williams has poignantly depicted nature doing her bidding for the synchronization of, “unity of mental life,” (Freud, Reich, Lawrence, 499). The author appears to be like a naughty little boy running wild in the theater of universal consciousness. The projection of his inner life through his play A Streetcar Named Desire is his Picasso to the art gallery of replicas. He uses sublimation as an avenue to satisfy basic motives in a manner acceptable to society. In his attempt to escape social purgatory he constructed the characters Stanley and Blanche to give him wings unselfishly and put his ...

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