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Streetcar named desire blanche and stanley
Characterisation in the play A streetcar Named Desire
Themes in a streetcar named desire
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Stella’s sister, Blanche, sees through the illusion and can see how toxic the marriage really is. Stanley and Blanche come from distinctly different backgrounds, Stanley is from the working class while Blanche comes from wealth. Williams uses these two contrasting points of views on marriage, to show the issues of possessiveness, class, and sexism. When it comes to Stanley’s marriage to Stella, one of the most notable characteristics is how possessive Stanley is. An example of this is when Stanley found out that Blanche and therefore Stella, lost their estate.
Summary of the Opening Scene A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams is in New Orleans just after the second world war and focuses on three central characters: Blanche Dubois, her sister Stella & Stanley Kowalski. These three characters are very different. Stella is Blanche’s sister & Stanley’s wife & so she serves to link them. TW creates a very distinctive setting for the play in the opening scene. He is mainly focused in the relationship between Stellas sister, Blanche and the environment of the raffish charm city, New Orleans.
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.
Throughout Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire, Blanche DuBois threatens Stanley Kowalski’s proud Polish-American status. Stanley’s American dream of living in Elysian Fields with his wife, Stella, is threatened by Blanche’s constant criticism about Stanley being a "Polack” (22). Stanley frequently tries to express his dominance over Blanche, culminating in rape. Only wanting to let his brutish desires rule him in peace, like before Blanche’s arrival, Stanley begins to see his Elysium slip away as his wife reverts to the southern elegance she and Blanche were raised in. By the end of Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar
“A Streetcar Named Desire” contains a strong lighting motif that repeats throughout the play. This usually involves Blanche, a character who shies away from any light that is drawn upon her, and is especially sensitive to light when her suitor Mitch is around. To Blanche, she is still young and beautiful in her mind, but when light shines on her she becomes afraid that Mitch will notice her aging skin, her beauty falling. This motif heavily implies how Blanche sees herself and the significance to her sexual innocence. To begin, throughout the play the audience begins to understand how Blanche sees herself.
In the play, A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams, Stanley and Blanche have a fight over who can win the affections of Stella. When Blanche arrives to stay with her sister Stella in New Orleans, she is shocked by her cheap apartment. The sisters come from generational wealth, as they grew up in a mansion that was once a plantation called Belle Reve. Blanche calls Stella’s husband Stanley a “Polack” (17), implying he is a member of the lower class and beneath their social status. She then tells Stella she lost their family estate after all their relatives died, and Stella mourns the loss of her childhood home.
Blanche is emotional, dramatic and strongly feminine. She has very specific ideas about proper behavior and feminine matters, becoming highly critical of her sister’s appearance as soon as she sees her: “You messy child, you, you’ve spilt something on that pretty white lace collar! About your hair—you ought to have it cut in a feather bob with your dainty features.” She places a high value on being upper class and dresses “as if she were arriving at a summer tea or cocktail party in the garden district” and does not hesitate to insult Stanley’s “not so highbrow” social status. Stanley, on the other hand, is blunt, simple and rough-natured, often described as being a true man in behavior.
Overall, her emotions are very delicate and she can only handle so much. Secondly, Stella is also thought of as a delicate person because of her sexuality, a female. During the 1940s and 1950s, women
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.
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.
Blanche DuBois in Tennessee William’s A Streetcar Named Desire appears as a normal woman at the beginning of the play. However, as the play progresses, Blanche becomes what seems to be delusional. She refuses to accept the reality of things instead, choosing to make up a new persona of herself completely hiding her past from her family and even Mitch. Blanche hates the light, takes long baths and even drinks.
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
In A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams, themes of insanity and fanciful realities are shown. Three main characters portray the quality of insanity, but only Blanche is aware of her self-delusion. Stella and Stanley are more out of touch with reality than Blanche because Stella does not realize the extremes of her abusive relationship, she also would rather retreat into a world of fantasy in order to avoid reality, and Stanley is only himself when he is intoxicated. Stella is more mentally unstable than Blanche because she is unable to realize how serious her abusive relationship is. Time and time again, Stanley oversteps his boundaries into abusive territory.
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
In A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), Blanche Debois happenly decides to go visit her sister Stella Kowalski who lives in New Orleans. Blanche was not pleased when she arrived
