ipl-logo

Blanche's Death In A Streetcar Named Desire

629 Words3 Pages

3.2.1 Allan’s Death Struggling between the illusion and harsh reality, Blanche’s displacement is a gradual process which includes her husband’s death. When Blanche was young, she loves Allan, a romantic poet, with all her heart. Up till her stay at Stella’s, She still calls Allan a boy. Williams has drawn a brief picture of his death, we can only infer from Blanche’s words that she is inextricably linked to Allan’s suicide. It’s never easy for Blanche to find out that Allan was a homosexual. In America, being a homosexual carries a stigma in those days. And it then drives Allan to suicide. After her husband’s funeral, her mind is incessantly haunted in the aftermath of his death. Her subliminal struggle to find a way out from such guilty nightmares, gradually turns her into physical sickness. …show more content…

Nevertheless, in the viewpoint of feminists, Blanche places her fortune on men and takes it for granted that men can bring her the absolute security. In the milieu of Alan’s death, she can not make herself out of the haze and subsequently is stranded in the Flamingo hotel. Under Williams’ pen, Blanche is in a way portrayed as a damsel in distress that is not merely a synonym for weakness, it works by ripping away the sensible voice from the character in A Streetcar Named Desire. On one hand, this trope is being used in a real world context where backward, sexist attitudes are already rampant. On the other hand, the trope is shown as incapable of escaping the predicament on her own, and then must wait for a savior to come and save her. This brings us to one of the core reasons why the trope is so problematic and pernicious for women’s representation(Zhangwei,2008:23). The best example is Blanche’s

Show More
Related
402 Words | 2 Pages

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.

Read More
276 Words | 2 Pages

How Blanche has been treating relationships in her past affects how she treats the people around her. With how she goes about with their interactions she leads to sabotaging them for herself. Her confrontation with her husband homosexuality and her own words pushing him over the edge causes her to burden herself with the blame, the only release of which is the active search for short term relationships she has with other men. She fills in the void of a close partner with ones that can fit the role but never truly fulfill it. That manipulation of essentially disposable men skews how she sees relationships affecting her interactions with herself with the rest of the cast.

Read More
523 Words | 3 Pages

In Williams’ play The Streetcar Named Desire, the character Blanche have done things and saw things in the past that she is not proud of. These things could not be overlooked no matter where she went her past haunted her. It was like a burden on her shoulders and always holding her back prohibiting her from doing the things she desires. These past actions along with the views made Blanche into the lying lost minded person she was upon the entrance of her sister’s home, and it also influenced the behavior of her surroundings, such as the loss of Bella Reve, the loss of her loved one, and the reason of the loss of her job.

Read More
543 Words | 3 Pages

Frankenstein and Bane are two people whose lifestyles are as common as they get. They both come from loneliness and only desire is to be noticed and loved. The two, seem as monsters on the outside, but in the inside they 're as pure as it gets. Frankenstein was a monster with numerous of emotions. People thought of him just to be a monster, but if you really knew him from the inside you would know it wasn’t true.

Read More
1094 Words | 5 Pages

In Tennessee Williams’s play A Streetcar Named Desire, Blanche Dubois measures her family’s successes and failures against a standard that she believes reflects the social values of the Old South - the pre-war South in which Blanche grew up. She uses her reminiscences and behaviors to construct herself - to other characters and to the audience - as a Southern Belle: a representative of a group of highborn women from the antebellum South. As the play unfolds, however, it becomes clear not only that Blanche cannot live up to the Southern Belles code, but also that her ideas of the Old South are as illusory as the other self-deceptions to which she is subject. Confronted by the harsh reality of post-war America, Blanche finds comfort in escapism,

Read More
778 Words | 4 Pages

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

Read More
1266 Words | 6 Pages

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.

Read More
1245 Words | 5 Pages

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.

Read More
835 Words | 4 Pages

Although the protagonists of “Fahrenheit 451” and “A Streetcar Named Desire” live in two drastically different societies, both are not satisfied with their current way of living and desire a change and improvement in their life. In “A Streetcar Named Desire”, the title of the play itself signifies Blanche’s desire to escape from the reality of her life, as she is haunted by her past and is currently living a life of insecurity, due to the loss of Belle Reve. Ironically, the streetcar named Desire did not bring her to what she truly wanted, an end of all her problems, and she in fact lost her sanity. The reason for Blanche’s tragic ending is due to the avoidance of her problems, shown metaphorically in the form of a flimsy paper lantern on top of a lamp.

Read More
1534 Words | 7 Pages

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

Read More
1307 Words | 6 Pages

She never recovers from the devastating death of her young husband, indirectly caused by the nature of his sexual desire. The death of her relatives are instrumental in reducing her to poverty, as do the desires, the costly “epic fornications” of her forebears. Her own promiscuous sexual desire destroys her reputation and her professional career. (Henthorne ) The death of her relatives leaves deep scars on Blanche’s soul, but even deeper scares are

Read More
668 Words | 3 Pages

In the avid pursuit of happiness, an individual can feel compelled to fabricate the truth about themselves in order to achieve the joy that they believe they deserve. The harsh truth of reality can force us to turn to the warmth of a fantasy to ease us in our search of contentment. Such is the case in Tennessee William’s play “A Streetcar Named Desire”, where sisters, Blanche and Stella both lie to themselves and others in order to become satisfied with their lives. Through the eyes of the beholder, happiness is measured differently; to Blanche, happiness is measured in wealth, particularly a wealthy man, whereas to Stella, happiness is in the comfort of a husband whom she refuses to call abusive. When we are first introduced to Blanche, Williams

Read More
769 Words | 4 Pages

Blanche begin to reach for other things to help her feel the void in her life. She no longer had the life she desired. Blanche begin to look for someone to desire her. She lost

Read More
765 Words | 4 Pages

To Blanche, Stanley originally comes off as appealing however once he rapes her, he becomes monstrous in her eyes. On the contrary, Blanche is not exactly humane as well. Blanche is the extreme version of how a female was represented in the mid-1900s, but takes crazy too far. As opposed to helping Blanche deal with the world, her fantasizing is more destructive then helpful. Stanley’s violent rape of Blanche is a wake up call from her fantasy life, the final straw in her mental decline, leading to her

Read More
1205 Words | 5 Pages

A Character Analysis of Blanche Dubois in the Play “A Streetcar Named Desire” Blanche Dubois is the protagonist of one of Tennessee William’s most famous plays A Streetcar Named Desire. It was first performed on Broadway in 1947. It won a Pulitzer Prize and launched the careers of the playwright, director (Eliza Kazan), and several of the actors (Marlon Brando, Jessica Tandy, Karl Malden, and Kim Hunter). Blanche Dubois is probably one of the dramatic characters who has called the attention of spectators. However, she seems to be inexhaustible in her complexity, for new perspectives can be applied in an analysis of her downfall.

Read More

More about Blanche's Death In A Streetcar Named Desire

Related Topics

Open Document