The following task will answer the Prescribe Question “How and why is a social group represented in a particular way?” by analyzing the presentation of the decaying Southern Belle as a social group in Tennessee Williams´s play “A Streetcar Named Desire” to prove how they are depicted as an element of the old world in order to illustrate the need to adapt in a modern society.
A Southern belle (from the French belle, 'beautiful') is an archetype of young, unmarried women of the American South's plantation-owning upper socioeconomic class characterized by hospitality, beauty and a flirtatious yet chaste behaviour. In the play, Southern Belles are represented as part of the decaying Old South through Blanche´s characterization and downfall.
The Southern belle stereotype is based on a fear that women “might escape the rule of the patriarchy, that the oppositions of (...) male/female might collapse into an anarchic conflagration threatening to bring down the symbolic order” (Roberts,
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S. South. She behaves to Stanley as the aristocrat who condescends the plebeian. “He acts like an animal, has an animal’s habits!” (Williams, 1948, Act II) This polarization of between Blanche and Stanley also represents the struggle between different ways of life: Blanche’s traditional, civilized, artistic self and Stanley’s modern, primitive, physical other. The play is set in late 1940's New Orleans, a modern society in the New South where Stanley, a working man with Polish roots, prospers and Blanche, an old fashioned representative of the former elite, loses her mind. Their struggle represents a battle between the dying aristocratic class and the rising industrial working class.
In old English, Stanley means stone. This reinforces Blanche´s idea that he is subhuman but also represents strength and