What Is The Juxtaposition In A Streetcar Named Desire

In Tennessee William’s play, “A Streetcar Named Desire”, he uses two of his main characters to show the juxtaposition of the upper and lower class societies in the late 1940s. Blanche is an upper class woman with an air of sophistication and pretentiousness in everything she does and says. Stanley is a lower class man who is full of crude remarks and vulgar habits. They are, in every sense of the word, opposites. Through his descriptions of the characters, and the obvious power struggle displayed between them, Williams is able to capture the shifting of power in the southern societies in the aftermath of the depression and World War Two.
Blanche and her sister Stella grew up in a seemingly wealthy environment a small town in Mississippi. It

is clear from Blanches actions that while she no longer has the type of money she grew up accustomed to, she still carries the attitude and ideals that a wealthy southern woman of that time might. When she first arrives at Stella’s home in New Orleans, she is horrified at the size of the house and at the poor location. She doesn't even try to mask her disdain at the condition her sister is living in, and one of the first things she says to her is “I thought you would never come back to this horrible place” (Williams 96). It is clear that she disapproves of Stella’s new life, and throughout the play she is constantly trying to change her, unwilling to believe that Stella is completely fine with her new life, and even enjoys it better than her old one.
The way that Williams conveys Stanley and Blanche’s characters is so drastically different, that it is no wonder how much they clash.

The underlying theme of the play is desire, and the way that Stanley and Blanche deal with their desires is one of the biggest differences between them. Stanley embraces all of his desires in a somewhat animalistic way. When he eats, he gets food all over himself. He has many vices, including drinking, smoking, and gambling. He has a very bad temper, and when he wants something he will take it. He is not shy about his sex life, and does not even try and act modest around Blanche or his friends. All of these qualities come together and are best exemplified in scene 3 of the play, when Stanley is with his friends, drinking, smoking, and playing poker. The stage directions say “STANLEY gives a loud whack of his hand on her thigh” (Williams 110). From that, it is clear to see that Stanley believes that he controls Stella and has little regard for her feelings, because after he smacks her, stella says “Thats not fun, Stanley…It makes me so mad when he does that in front of people” (Williams 110). Blanche, on the other hand, tries her very best to mask her desire. She cares a great deal about her outer appearance, and makes sure that she is always presentable. She is constantly lying about how much she drinks, trying to hide the fact that she might have a problem. She often pretends she has no idea where the liquor is hidden, even though the reader (or the audience watching the play) knows that she found it soon after arriving in New

Orleans.
Blanche also tries to mask her sexual nature. She tries her best to remain as pure and innocent as possible, and will not even let Mitch kiss her most of the time. However she flirts with everyone, Stanley included, and in a moment of weakness she made an advance on a boy selling newspapers. Kissing him seems very out of character for her, as she is still trying to hide her desire from those around her and project herself as a innocent and helpless woman. Because Stanley cannot stand Blanche he asks around about her, and finds out that she was known for being very promiscuous back in the small town that she used to live in. Even when confronted about her shady past, Blanche tries to talk her way around it, denying that she was ever in the Flamingo Hotel, and that they must have had her confused with someone else. It is Blanches nature to hide her negative traits that really sets her apart from Stanley. While Stanley is bold and, for the most part, not afraid to say what he is thinking, Blanche covers everything up with excuses and lies, which only ends up hurting her in the ned when Stella chooses to believe Stanley over her.
Stanley and stella are also opposites in their appearance and demeanor. Stanley is the epitome of masculinity, as shown in this quote from when he is first described in the play:
He is of medium height, about five feet eight or nine, and strongly, compactly built. Animal joy in his being is implicit in all his movements and attitudes. Since earliest manhood the center of his life has been pleasure with women, the giving and taking of it, not with weak indulgence, dependently, but with the power and pride of a richly feathered male bird among hens. Branching out from this complete and satisfying center are all the auxiliary channels of his life, such as his heartiness with men, his appreciation of rough humor, his love of good drink and food and games, his car, his radio, everything that is his, that bears his emblem of the gaudy seed-bearer. He seizes up women at a glance, with sexual classifications, crude images flashing into his mind and determining the way he smiles at them. (Williams 101)
Through Williams detailed description, it is clear how essential Stanley’s strength and masculinity is to his character and personality. He is completely defined by his manliness, and will go to great lengths to preserve it. When threatened, his defense is to get hostile and abusive to the women around him. In this play, he serves to act as a stereotype for the blue-collar, lower class immigrant with many vices and little self control. Although he was born in America, both Stella and Blanche seem to view him as foreign, because they were brought up in a society built on tradition and based on the idea that in order to be truly ‘American’ your family must have lived there for generations.
In complete contrast with Stanley, Stella is described as being frail and innocent, the stereotype for an older southern women at the time. She has romantic ideals and behaviors, but has a difficult time being taken seriously because she is living in a modern world. Her character becomes defined through her nervous breakdowns and complete mental deterioration. She lives in a fantasy world, and is completely delusional in thinking that others are living in it with her. She is dependent on her fragility, using it as an excuse for all of her behavior. When she wishes to avoid a subject, she acts very upset and takes a long bath to calm her nerves. Instead of confronting her problems, and dealing with matters head on, she lies to everyone to make herself seem much more regal and ladylike than she actually is. Her delusions of a better life only get worse as the play goes on, and she ends up starting to believe the lies she is telling. You can see how weak she becomes, when at the end she truly believes that Shep Huntleigh has come to get her, even though she was never able to get a hold of him.
The drastic contrast of these two characters sets the stage for the climax of the play when, in a final act of agression, Stanley overpowers Blanche and proves once and for all he is in charge. While the scene would still be dramatic and horrifying without the long buildup of tension and hatred between the two, it would be far less meaningful to the play. The rape serves to solidify the characters defining traits, showing Stanley as an aggressive and remorseless male whose masculinity is so fragile, that he will do anything to prove that can overpower the women at any time. The rape leaves Blanche completely unstable, enhancing her fragility and destroying her already poor mental state.
Williams uses the two to show the dramatic differences between the upper and lower classes and the older and younger societies. While many writers who do this clearly favor one group, Williams chooses to displays the negative characteristics of both aspects of society. The new is dirty and crude, and the old is stuffy and pretentious and neither one is better than the other. Blanche’s crumbling mental state, and Stanley’s overpowering of her serves as a metaphor for the newer, more modern society dominating the old southern romantic one. Without this complete juxtaposition of the two, the action in the play would be minimal, and Williams commentary on the shifting classes of society would be far less obvious to the reader.