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How does tennessee williams life influence a streetcar named desire
Analysis of blanche dubois
Analysis of blanche dubois
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Blanche attempts to take control over her present life and make her fantasy become a reality. As she struggles to get past her husband's suicide, she comes across a phase in which she wishes to please other men in order to feel complete with herself. Her husband's sudden suicide was traumatizing and this main factor pushed her to find comfort in men. As Blanche explains, “coming suddenly into a room which I thought was empty- which wasn’t empty but had two people in it… the boy I had married and an older man who had been his friend for years” (114). Through this event, we can tell how Blanche has guilt because she made her husband feel horrible for being with another man which led him to shoot himself.
It is what is haunting Blanche’s life, it is what has made her mentally unstable. Throughout the play, she has been hiding her past from people so she looks like
Many literary criticisms have been written about Blanche and how she tends to lie about everything in her life. “Blanche disguises her desperation with lies- about drinking, her age, her reasons for coming to New Orleans, her sexual experience.” (Dace n.p.). Dace clearly describes Blanche as a liar and describes the fact how she lied about everything from the smallest thing, like her age to something as big as the reason why she went to New Orleans. “... in spite of the fact she’s somewhat older than I.
Desire can be defined as a strong feeling of wanting or wishing for something. The something could be an object, idea, or an event. In A Streetcar Named Desire, Blanche Dubois believes that the opposite of death is desire. Logically speaking, the real opposite of death is life; so why does Blanche believe that it’s desire? Possibly because she relates desire to life it’s self.
However the main conflict is Blanche’s inability to accept reality or her inability to let go of her past. Blanche sees herself above her sister’s life and carries a sense of entitlement that no longer fits her environment like it did in her past. Underneath, Blanche is a liar and Stanley is not. Stanley and Stella are able to able to admit what they are while Blanche is constantly trying to hide who she is. She is unable to come to her desire and sees herself superior to the people around her.
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.
It is Blanche’s obsessive desire for a clean slate that ultimately drives her streetcar into destruction. With each lie she tells, the last lie becomes a reality to her, and once her delusional reality begins to fade, Blanche recedes into a dark hole where neither she or anyone else could ever truly see herself
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.
Molly Childree Fleischbein EH 102.147 Draft February 5,2018 Our world is full of monsters, some imaginary, but most are legitimate and terrifying. In his text “Monster Culture (Seven Theses)”, Jeffery Jerome Cohen examines the use of monsters in literate and cinema. Cohen makes the claim that the use of monsters, historically and presently, in forms of entertainment symbolizes more than just the fear they instill in audiences. A monster is no longer just a monster.
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.
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.
he plot is framed by Blanche’s arrival in the first scene and her departure in the eleventh scene. The play has only one plot with no sub-plot. A Streetcar Named Desire presents us with two stories: the growing conflict between Stanley and Blanche, and the gradual crumbling of Blanche’s sanity. The play is presented chronologically, from Blanche’s arrival at Elysian Fields in May to her departure for the mental asylum in September. Blanche is the only character who appears in every scene and this enable the audience to witness all her actions and emotions, and become privy to her secrets.
This is presented by Blanches descent into madness due to her inability to act properly on her sexual urges. Lastly, Williams demonstrates how Blanche is not at fault for not knowing how to act on her desires. She was brought up in a world that told her that expressing her sexuality or even having sexual desires was wrong, she never learned how to deal with desire. This is why A Streetcar Named Desire should not be dismissed as a cautionary tale that warns individuals not to embrace desires. On the contrary, this is a story that blames society for not allowing people to openly express their sexuality and act of their most primal of
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, 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
