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A Streetcar Named Desire Essay

1819 Words8 Pages

A Streetcar Named Desire

Althoughit seems like Blanche is the ultimate victim in the play A Street Car
Named Desire, Stella is just as much a victim because she has no mental escape from her abusive marriage. Respect is just as important to women as it is to men because women deserve to be treated like human beings not objects.

The media and the play show women as innocent and vulnerable. Anyone who watches network television can see this portrayal when women are shown as sexual objects. This is reiterated when used through marketing ads, television, film and news media where women are nearly always cast to be sexually attractive. As an example, the media shows an example of women with perfect bodies as young, skinny and showing a lot …show more content…

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By depicting women as objects, servants/sidekicks instead of humans the media creates the problem for the rest of society to also not treat them as humans. This all leads back to the ideas about relationships between men and women in general. Racial stereotypes are the driving force for both male leads’ attitudes in these plays. Stanley is seen as being a “different species” (Williams 18) or a “pollack”
(Williams 81) in A Streetcar Named Desire. Since Americans tend to think racist Polish jokes are funny, they seem to forget that those jokes can be converted into daily simple jokes. Stanley’s need to show people like Blanche that he is not unintelligent. He explains his hostility towards her because he is used to people trying to
“swindled” (Williams 32) him. Stanley’s masculinity is exaggerated and feels that he has to be the dominant habitant in the house. In the play, A
Streetcar Named Desire
Stanley hates the fact that Blanche is a woman who is better than him, more educated and is use to nicer things. In addition, Stanley cannot stand the thought of a woman who is not going to be

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The tone seems to be compassionate in both of the plays. In A Streetcar Named Desire, Stella is constantly feeling sorry for her sister. Blanche is scared to be alone and she voices that in the play. The audience feels for her because she needs to be with someone in order to feel better. Blanche says “I never was hard or self-sufficient enough.

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