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How Does Tennessee Williams Encourage The Audience To Sympathize Blanche

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How does Tennessee Williams encourage the audience to sympathise with Blanche through the use of symbolism?

Symbolism is the manipulation of symbols to imply certain ideas and qualities by providing them with symbolic meanings that are different from their literal sense. Throughout the play, Tennessee Williams makes plentiful use of symbolism to portray the character of Blanche DuBois as it plays a significant role in understanding how her character works. Through the symbols used, the reader is encouraged to sympathise with Blanche as the plot untwines.

Tennessee Williams uses the colour white as a symbol to encourage the audience to sympathise with Blanche. The name Blanche DuBois literally translates to “white woods” ; however, the …show more content…

The lyrics of the song ‘Paper Moon’ actually describe the way love can turn the world into fantasy; if both Mitch and her decided to believe in the illusion. The lyrics reflect Blanche’s perception of life where fantasy is used to mask reality. The “paper” and “cardboard” connote degradability that everything will come to an end, just as Blanche is experiencing. However, Blanche does not want to, she wants to have relationship with Mitch, which is why she creates a Fantasy world; which can be seen implied by the lyrics “make-believe” and “phony” . The “Barnum and Bailey world” is a metaphor. The Barnum and Bailey is a show, an act, a circus, to deceive the eyes of others, which are the same goals as Blanche’s. The effect of a fantasy world and the metaphor of a circus create a particular child-like and innocent tone as Blanche subsequently reflects the mind-set of a child: believing everything one is told and to act with minimum morals – in her case degrading herself, juxtaposing Blanche’s character as she is lost between worlds. This encourages the audience gives her sympathy, indicating to the audience that Blanche is insecure and mislaid, caught up in the world of acting, she can differentiate it to

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Color-blindness, the belief that a person’s race and/or skin tone does not matter. This is a philosophy of ignorance, found in the supposed ‘post-racial’ society of America. Touched upon in her essay, “The Emperor’s New Clothes”, Patricia Williams utilizes personal anecdotes, allusions, the double standard of race, and the personification of social issues to expose society’s attempts to brush racial problems under the proverbial rug. Throughout her social commentary, Williams targets the people who state “‘I don’t think about color, therefore your problems don’t exist’”

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Symbolism is the practice of representing things by symbols, or of investing things with a symbolic meaning or character. In Speak, Laurie Halse Anderson uses literary devices to help the reader better understand Melinda’s personal changes and growth. Trees, lips, and coldness are all symbolically used to represent the changes of Melinda. Throughout the novel, trees play a big part in symbolizing Melinda. Melinda is constantly drawing and relating to trees in the book.

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Named Desire that “I know I fib a good deal. After all, a woman 's charm is fifty percent illusion, but when a thing is important I tell the truth, and this is the truth: I haven 't cheated my sister or you or anyone else as long as I have lived” (41). At times there is the consideration that lying, as well as can be stated for Blanche is, she believes that is the truth, and not a false impression. Blanche gets caught up into lies

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Specifically, we see Blanche Dubois lose touch with reality as she avoids the light and attempts to manipulate the other characters. Blanche is fearful of the light because of her traumatic past that she has faced. Her fear of being revealed in the light shows her true nature, manipulative, delusional and malevolent. Tennessee Williams uses the motif of light and dark to explore and delve into the characters of Blanche Dubois, Stanley Kowalski, and Mitchell. The two opposing forces in a streetcar named desire are Light and Darkness.

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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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Tennessee Williams is acclaimed for his ability to create multi faced characters such as Blanche Dubois in the play, A Streetcar Named Desire. She comes to New Orleans after losing everything including her job, money, and her family’s plantation Belle Reve, to live with her sister Stella. During her time there she causes many conflicts with Stella’s husband Stanley and tries to get involved with the people there, all while judging them for their place in society, although she is imperfect too. Through her, Williams has created a complex character. She is lost, confused, conflicted, lashing out in sexual ways, and living in her own fantasies throughout the entirety of the play.

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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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A streetcar named desire was written by Tennessee Williams in 1947, in purpose to show the “declining of the upper class and the domination of the bourgeois middle class in the U.S.A. where the south agriculture class could not compete with the industrialization.” Blanche Dubois the protagonist of our story, a southern beauty that is trapped by the restrictive laws of her society. But she broke them, and eventually put herself in a state, where she had no job and no house. So she had to go to her sister, Stella and live with her and her sister’s husband, Stanley. While staying there, she created a façade for her to hide her flaws and kept acting as a lady, where she is anything but that.

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Another very common theme represented throughout both texts, is the constant allusion to light. Within “A Streetcar Named Desire”, the use of light reveals Blanche’s role and appearance as a character. One of Blanche’s biggest flaws is that she prefers to be only seen in the dark. She does not like to reveal herself in the light as she is afraid of people seeing that she is in fact aging.

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Not only has Tennesse Williams portrayed Stella and Blanche to be seen as delicate and dependent, our own society has created this image but this not only affects how individuals see themselves but affects relationships immensely. Tennessee Williams reinforces the stereotype in which women are often the victims of unfortunate fate within the usage of the character Blanche. Throughout the whole play, we have witnessed Blanche being on the bitter end of life's miseries as she has encountered the tough loss of Belle Reve, dealing with her ex-husband's suicide and the loss of her relationship with Mitch. Arguably, the expectations and beliefs of women were either to be a housewife or a mother, whereas Blanche shows neither, as a result of automatically feeling out of place possibly leading to her downfall. Blanche was constantly fantasizing about the traditional values of a southern gentlemen, proving her dependence on this sex.

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Blanche flees a failed company and a failed marriage in attempt to find refuge in her sister’s home. Through her whirlwind of emotions, the reader can see Blanche desires youth and beauty above all else, or so the readers think. In reality, she uses darkness to hide the true story of her past. In A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams, Williams uses the motif of light to reveal Blanche’s habit of living in a fantasy world until the light illuminates her reality. Blanche uses darkness to block her past from onlookers as to shape her image.

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Character Analysis of Blanche DuBois One of the main characters in a play by Tennessee Williams A Streetcar Named Desire is Blanche DuBois. Blanche is a victim of her upbringing and the changing times she lives in. She was born to aristocratic family and raised to be taken care of. This romantic, art, music and poetry loving soul is unprepared for the world she lives in

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Symbolism can use an object (like a tree of birds), or art, (like Melinda’s art project or Mr. Freeman's canvas) to represent an abstract idea. Laurie Halse Anderson uses symbolism to hint at a certain mood or emotion, rather than just blatantly saying it. So, the use of symbolism is important because it helps create meaning and emotion in a story. Symbolism makes a book fun to read, the symbolism produces a thought provoking work of art and it, (like in this book), adds meaning to seemingly unrelated objects and elicits emotions in the

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Williams uses the expressionist technique “The ‘Varsouviana’ is filtered into weird distortion, accompanied by the cries and noises of the jungle” to parallel Blanche’s inner mind and depicts Blanche’s deranged mental state after Stella’s betrayal. The imagery ‘Lurid reflections appear on the walls in odd, sinuous shapes’ highlights her mental turbulence and the stage directions ‘mysterious voices behind walls, as if reverberated through a canyon of rock…the echo sounds in threatening whispers’ heightens tension, positioning the audience to witness the overwhelming fear and exaggeration of her senses, further emphasising the detrimental impact Stella’s decision made. The Streetcar Named Desire also examines the influence that a person’s social standing can have. Stanley’s statement in scene 2 ‘The Kowalskis and Dubois have different notions’ indicates their social upbringing has influenced the way they think, hence disrupting their connection and loyalty towards one another. The use of their family name is metonymic for their ancestry and social standing, addressing the barriers derived from a social hierarchy which have affected their relationship.

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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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