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A Streetcar Named Desire Literary Analysis Essay

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Hannah Syed March 8, 2017 Gemini English 101 Literary Analysis Essay Fading Beauty A Streetcar Named Desire written by Tennessee Williams, is a complex apologue of conflicted characters and themes. It is set during the 1940s in New Orleans, Louisiana. The characters including Stella, Stanley and Blanche struggle to cooperate and act as symbols of opposing class and power. Each individual character expresses their personality from a different approach. Blanche, however is the most complex character in Streetcar. Throughout the majority of the play, the content was focused around Blanche and her background. The audience learns that she is emotionally traumatized and sensitive. Blanche struggles …show more content…

This is an attempt at “washing away” and forgetting her corrupt past. After the death of her husband, Blanche tries to avoid the guilt by having “intimacies with strangers”(Williams 55). She involved herself with numerous sexual partners because she does not want “realism, only magic”(Williams 116). As Blanche grows older, she has come to realize that her bad reputation is expanding, which may hinder the beauty of her ability to become sexually involved with one stable partner. After being introduced to Stanley and his buddies, Blanche found interest in a man named Mitch. He can be described as innocent and soft-hearted, due to the high concerns he has for his sick mother. Mitch is different though. He behaves and reacts adversely from Stanley and the other men during game nights of poker. It seems as if Mitch shows minor affection for Blanche when they are together. In the beginning of the play, Mitch was awkward and shy, but develops a special bond with the audience. Soon, the audience creates sympathy for Mitch after the tragic events that occurred in his past. Throughout the scenes of Streetcar, he serves as a gentleman towards Blanche. Both Mitch and Blanche can be described as being in a codependent relationship that is founded on desperation and loneliness from the emotional damage in which they have suffered. However, the romance slowly vanishes when Stanley advises Mitch about Blanche’s past in Laurel in addition to witnessing Blanche kiss a young man, whose job is to collect money for their local

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Tennessee Williams is one of the most recognized playwrights that lived during the mid-twentieth-century (“Tennessee Williams”). After finishing college, Williams decides to move to New Orleans, where he writes A Streetcar Named Desire. His career starts to take off as he begins to write more plays (“Tennessee Williams”). A Streetcar Named Desire talks about the life of a woman, Blanche DuBois, who is very secretive about her past and does not expose her true intentions of coming to live with her younger sister Stella. As the play goes on Stanley, Stella’s husband, starts to dig into the dark past that terrorizes Blanche when they begin to have a conflict with each other.

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In the play A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams, the main characters, Blanche Dubois and Stanley Kowalski, share a great dislike and distrust towards one another, ultimately becoming the basis for the story’s conflict. Their common contemption stems from their contrasting personalities and backgrounds, their incompatibility of being able to function under the same environment, and inability to adapt to the situations they find themselves in. Although Blanche detests Stanley and the manner in which he behaves in, she realises that he is a necessary part for Stella’s life in New Orleans, an environment that greatly differs from the southern aristocracy that Stella and Blanche once lived in. Blanche expresses this idea by stating, “Oh,

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In Scene 10, she deviously claims that she has just received a telegram from the millionaire, Steph Huntleigh, to explain why she is dressed up. At first, Stanley plays along, but once Blanche musters up the audacity to say that Mitch returned to their apartment seeking repentance, Stanley draws the line. He calls her out for her fictitious tales of her past, and states, “We’ve had this date from the start,” just before he maliciously rapes Blanche. Their natures root in primal, animalistic instincts, Stanley like a dirty hog, open and free concerning his sexuality, Blanche like a fox, sly and deceitful. Despite her incessant attempts to destroy her past, Blanche is unable to stop their sexual connection as she has had so many other men.

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