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Similarities Between A Streetcar Named Desire And Death Of A Salesman

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The play A Streetcar named desire, is written by Tennessee Williams with the incorporation of Arthur Miller, who wrote the introduction of the play. A few years later, Arthur Miller wrote Death of a Salesman. Both plays have similarities since they were published a few years after World War II. Almost all of the characters from both plays have some type of a connection due to the roles they play. Blanche and Willy have this desperation and need for money, and living the life they dream of. Stella and Linda are both housewives, who don’t contribute to bringing money home. Stanley, Biff, and Happy live under the high expectations of others, feel the pressure to be someone of wealth, someone in life. The economic class status to the main character, Blanche, is extremely important in order to earn respect from others and for …show more content…

The main character in A Streetcar named desire, Blanche, comes from living in a plantation. “A great big place with white columns” says Eunice (9). Plantations were owned by people of money, wealthy family’s. When she arrives to Elysian Fields, she couldn’t think that her sister really lives in an area like that. “The section is poor but, unlike corresponding sections in other American cities, it has a raffish charm” (3). For Blanche going from a plantation to a poor town, was very hard to accept, but it seems that Blanche has lost everything back home. Stella never told Blanche what conditions she lived in, maybe Stella felt embarrassed of where she lives now. What makes Blanches expectations very ironic is that in Greek mythology “Elysian Fields,” which is where her sister lives, means any place or state of perfect happiness; paradise and that of course, was nothing compared to what it appears in the eye of Blanche when she first arrives. Blanche believes that since Stella left Belle Reve to have a better life, then Stella should be living in a place similar or better than

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This passage has been extracted from Act I Scene I of Tennessee Williams’ play, A Streetcar Named Desire. In this extraction, Blanche sees and interacts with her younger sister, Stella, for the first time in many years. Upon this reunification, Blanche is forced to take in the discrepancies between her fantasy expectation of what their reunion will be like and the reality of how her baby sister looks, acts, and lives. As Blanche dwells on how different the Dubois’ plantation Belle Reve is compared to Stella’s current social status and living conditions, Blanche’s unadulterated character is easily scrutinized.

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Her Otherness and incongruity in the lower-middle class New Orleans neighbourhood are apparent from the moment she enters. At the beginning of the play, the inhabitants of Elysian Fields enjoy themselves in some earthly, bawdy activities. Eunice and the coloured woman are chatting “on the steps of the building” (3), making ribald jokes about Stanley’s “package” (4). Mitch and Stanley are going to the bowling club while Stella rushes to join them (4-5). Then Blanche, “daintily dressed in a white suit with a fluffy bodice, …, white gloves and hat” (5), the very image of a Southern gentlewoman, steps into the scene.

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That is why he hates Blanche because she is not the same as the girls he has seen. He sees her as a threat in the sense that she will ruin the marriage between Stella and Stanley. However, he has feelings of self conscious and feels threatened because he feels like she can ruin him. He hates that Stella and Blanche were always wealthy and he feels as if they look down on him for being poor. He does not feeling submissive which is why he reacts harshly most of the time.

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978 Words | 4 Pages

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.

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Tennessee Williams is the author for both “The Glass Menagerie” and “A Streetcar Named Desire” they were both written in the 1940s. In the first nineteen pages of “A Streetcar Named Desire” I analyzed the characters and discovered some similarities. The first similarity within the characters is that both Amanda Wingfield and Blanche Dubios were Southern Belles at some point in their lives. Secondly, they are both very critical towards others, Amanda frequently criticizes her son Tom and Blanche harshly criticizes her sister Stella. These two women are narcissistic because they frequently speak about themselves, for example, when Amanda states that she once had seventeen gentlemen callers and Blanche was showing off her body stating that

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201 Words | 1 Pages

A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams shows the contrasting lifestyle of the southern aristocrats and average working-class American. The major contrasting style is the living conditions each class lived in. For example, when Blanche came looking for her sisters Stella’s apartment, she assumed she was in the wrong place, “her expression is one of shocked disbelief” (page 15). Blanche and Stella both were raised in the south, on a plantation called the Belle Reve, which means beautiful dream. The Belle Reve was described as “a great big place with white columns,” (17), in comparison to the small apartment Stella currently lives in with her husband Stanley.

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778 Words | 4 Pages

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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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.

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1312 Words | 6 Pages

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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806 Words | 4 Pages

Blanche does a great job of voicing her displeasure with the surroundings when describing her sisters living conditions “This--can this be--her home?” (Williams 1118). The story goes on to illustrate how Blanche, raised accustomed to a lifestyle, coped with being transferred to a different social class. Williams does so while rounding out the sub classes in the structure that is

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1371 Words | 6 Pages

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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1547 Words | 7 Pages

Tennessee Williams wrote “A Streetcar Named Desire” (Williams, 1947) It is based in New Orleans a new cosmopolitan city which is poor but has raffish charm. The past is representing old south in America 1900’s and present is representing new America post world war 2 in 1940’s. Past and present are intertwined throughout the play in the characters Stanley, Blanche, Stella and mitch. Gender roles show that males are the dominant and rule the house which Stanley is prime example as he brings home food and we learn of one time when he got cross and he smashed the light bulbs.

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608 Words | 3 Pages

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

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1413 Words | 6 Pages

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

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“A Streetcar Named Desire” is a very elegant film in which the Southern gothic culture is demonstrated profoundly. Tennessee Williams uses the characters in the play to bring about a sense of how corrupt society truly was in the 1940’s in the South. The 1940’s was marked by an immense amount of violence, alcoholism, and poverty. Women at the time were treated as objects rather than people. Throughout the play Tennessee Williams relates the aspects of Southern society to the characters in the play.

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