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A Streetcar Named Desire: Play Analysis

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A Streetcar Named Desire is a 1947 play written by Tennessee Williams, an American playwright. The play was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for Drama in the following year. The play premiered on Broadway on December 3, 1947, in the Ethel Barrymore Theatre in New York. The play was originally written in English, and its genre was Southern Gothic. The setting was the French Quarter and the Downtown area of New Orleans. The play later had several adaptations drawn from it with a film, an opera and a ballet production created. The film, however, has some slight modifications made to comply with the restrictions by the Motion Picture Production Code. Many playwrights and other people as one of the greatest of the 20th Century regarding the play (O 'Shea, …show more content…

He tells her that he has also shared the rumors with Mitch and this makes Stella throw a fit since he comes off as cruel. However, this fight is cut off short when she goes into labor and must be hospitalized. Blanche is home alone waiting when Mitch arrives. He confronts her about the information he was told, to which she first attempts to deny but eventually confesses and pleads for forgiveness. Mitch is angry and humiliated and refuses to take a chance to have an honorable relationship with her but instead tries to sexually assault her. Blanche screams “fire” which causes Mitch to run away …show more content…

The characters are all fictional. Blanche DuBois arrives in New Orleans without any money on her to live with her sister and brother in law, the Kowalski’s. She is a former schoolteacher from a wealthy family, but she has been evicted from "Belle Reve," her family home, following the deaths of a few family members and their inheritance was wiped out. Blanche was married to a man named Allan Grey who committed suicide after she caught him and another man having sex. After this, she had a series of affairs to attempt to numb her grief, but this resulted in her being thrown out of her home in Mississippi. This resulted after she slept with a student from the school she was teaching (Román,

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959 Words | 4 Pages

The play A Streetcar Named Desire is one of the most notable plays of the late 1940s to early 1950s and is still prevalent in the theater community today. It originally opened on Broadway in a 1947 at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, today more commonly known as the Barrymore Theatre, preforming for a little over a thousand patrons. The original Stanley was played by Marlon Brando, who would reprise this role in the movie adaptation. At the Barrymore Theatre, the set was quite complex with a full stairway and banister, a pallor with a 4-chair dinning set and all the dressings of a then modern, but lower-class apartment.

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Blanche and Stan exploit Mitch’s biggest flaw of being a pushover. “[Mitch rises as Stanley returns to his seat] Sit down!” (Williams 56) Mitch naively opens up to Blanche which turns out to be a big mistake. She lies to Mitch about her past, and the truth is revealed to Mitch by Stanley. When Blanche needs somebody most, Mitch gives Blanche the cold shoulder.

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He regretted it and was crying for her to go back to him and love him. Also, love in this story is filled with insecurities and secrets. Blanche and Mitch would have been official, but Mitch believed what he was being told about Blanche and did not want her for hearing she was not “pure”. Stanley and Stella are in

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Examining Marriage in Tennessee William’s A Streetcar Named Desire Tennessee William’s 1947 play A Streetcar Named Desire takes place in Elysian Fields, New Orleans, and portrays the marital situation of this time. This play illustrates conflict over the marriage of Stella and Stanley. This marriage can be seen as strict, and controlling but also full of lust.

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A Streetcar Named Desire was produced and directed in 1951 by Elia Kazan. Based on the play written by Tennessee Williams, the film follows Blanche DuBois as she leaves her beloved hometown, Belle Reeve, and moves in with her sister, Stella Kowalski and husband, Stanley. Blanches flirtatious but traumatized personality causes problems for Stella and Stanley whose relationship is based off of sexual desires. Blanche is going through a battle in which she finds herself guilty for her late husbands suicide and this distress eventually leads to a huge conflict in the Kowalski household. Vivien Leigh played the dramatic Blanch DuBois and received an Oscar for the best female in a leading role.

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In 1951, Elia Kazan created a movie version of Tennessee Williams Street Car Named Desire. The play and movie both share the same characters and story. The plot was not changed except for the opening scene and the ending. The movie showed that Blanche took different street cars in the area surrounding where Stanley and Stella lived and the viewer could imagine how difficult it was for Blanche to adjust. There are only a few changes in dialogue for Blanche.

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“Love is something far more than desire for sexual intercourse; it is the principal means of escape from the loneliness which afflicts most men and women throughout the greater part of their lives”(Bertrand Russell). One of the most basic human needs is the need to be loved by someone and to love someone in return. In the play, A Streetcar Named Desire, Tennessee Williams uses a consistent theme of loneliness and peoples desperate need for human companionship in order to be happy as a driving force in the main characters lives. This theme develops gravely throughout the play for each of the main characters. Even though unchecked desire can and does lead to unhappiness, the desire to avoid loneliness drives the main characters into relationships

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Both Blanche's family and Belle Reve represent her dream to indulge in a sophisticated, high class, and luxurious life. When all of Blanche’s family dies and Stella leaves, Blanche loses the first piece of her “beautiful dream.” She no longer has the money to support herself, since her educational career provides insufficient funds. After the tragic loss of her husband, Blanche loses Belle Reve and loses her job, symbolizing that her “beautiful dream” has been fully crushed and the only remnants of her dream are the lies she feeds herself. This fall of social class leads Blanche to carry a tone of classism.

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Blanche tells Mitch the reason that she lies is because she does not want to accept the fate she has been dealt. By her lying to herself and to others, it makes her life seem interesting rather than what it is truly like. The happiest Blanche ever was, was when she was married to her first

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This lie of her beauty was directed at many people, but mostly to Mitch, her love interest. From the beginning of their interactions, Blanche had to Mitch about her age and appearance. She often spoke of being the younger of the two sisters, as well as only ever meeting with him in dim lighting or with heavy makeup applied. After being presented with the many lies of Blanche’s history by Stanley, Mitch lost all faith in her, causing him to enter a more hostile state. In lying to her loved ones and Mitch, Blanche has tarnished her credibility, which affects her further down the

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Blanche is an old southern Belle who expects the man to be a gentleman and in her level of class, scene 10 “A cultivated woman, a woman of intelligence and breeding, can enrich a man’s life” (Williams, 1947) this is how Blanche intertwines the past and present as past women were only there to be seen, look after the house and provide children and present Blanche could be seen to be past her prime. Blanche is representing the past as she is still dress in grand dress white moth Ironically Blanche appears in the first scene dressed in white, “the symbol of

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608 Words | 3 Pages

In A Streetcar Named Desire, the author Tennessee Williams exaggerates and dramatizes fantasy’s incapability to overcome reality through an observation of the boundary between Blanches exterior and interior conveying the theme that illusion and fantasy are often better than reality. Blanche, who hides her version of the past, alters her present and her relationship with her suitor Mitch and her sister, Stella. Blanche was surrounded by death in her past, her relatives and husband have passed away, leaving her with no legacy left to continue. The money has exhausted; the values are falling apart and she is alienated and unable to survive in the harsh reality of modern society. Throughout the novel Williams juxtaposed Blanche’s delusions with

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860 Words | 4 Pages

Blanche, being the way she is, does not get along with Stella’s husband, Stanley. This feud leads to the outcome of disaster and eventually leads to the devastation of the people that they are surrounded by. Throughout life, we are surrounded by diverse personalities. Whether good or bad, we have to face

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1488 Words | 6 Pages

It all started with Blanche Dubois, a fallen and hopeless woman in society’s eyes. Losing her husband to suicide and her families fortune and estate, making her a social outcast due to her imprudent sexual behavior and many other flaws. One of her flaws being that she has a very bad

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765 Words | 4 Pages

To Blanche, Stanley originally comes off as appealing however once he rapes her, he becomes monstrous in her eyes. On the contrary, Blanche is not exactly humane as well. Blanche is the extreme version of how a female was represented in the mid-1900s, but takes crazy too far. As opposed to helping Blanche deal with the world, her fantasizing is more destructive then helpful. Stanley’s violent rape of Blanche is a wake up call from her fantasy life, the final straw in her mental decline, leading to her

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