How Does Blanche Dubois Escape From Reality
Brilliant and creative writers are able to exploit simple ideas or objects to emphasize an important message or characterize a persona in his or her play. In “Streetcar Named Desire,” by Tennessee Williams, Williams utilizes light to help characterize Blanche DuBois. She is presented as an individual who avoids reality, has sexual desires, and displays herself ostentatiously, but she is really an insecure tragic figure; she lies about her age and steers clear of things that will expose the truth. Williams uses light, in his play, as a motif to illustrate that Blanche does not only hide from the light to disguise her age, but by choice (very much) hide her imperfections (flaws) and the truth. There are many interpretations as to what “Blanche”
However, Dubois shoehorns herself into the Kowalski residence and serves no purpose other than to live off her sister under the pretense of temporary support. Her long baths and pretentious display of refined tastes as characterized by her request of “lemon coke with plenty of chipped ice” (Williams 40) and ostentatious clothing are indicative of her attempt at leading a lavish lifestyle as she does so at her own convenience, and with utter disregard for others. It is soon that Blanche realizes that she is no longer considered the “Queen of the Nile” (Williams 127) by Stanley Kowalski as she is confronted with the prospect of abandonment in the face of adversity once again. The juxtaposition of Dubois’ luxurious lifestyle and the Kowalski residence serves to illustrate her anachronistic adherence to the Southern Belle archetype.
Blanche Du Bois’s husband committed suicide after the way his wife, Blanche, treated him for being himself. After her husband committed suicide, she was devastated. She knew that she had been the one that made him take it to that level. Was that really what she was mad about? Or was it more about her not being able to be compassionate for him?
Examining Marriage in Tennessee William’s A Streetcar Named Desire Tennessee William’s 1947 play A Streetcar Named Desire takes place in Elysian Fields, New Orleans, and portrays the marital situation of this time. This play illustrates conflict over the marriage of Stella and Stanley. This marriage can be seen as strict, and controlling but also full of lust.
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.
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,
Throughout Tennessee William’s ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’ and Sylvia Plath’s ‘The Bell Jar’ feminine ideals of appearance are associates with ablutions and bathing. This is due to the view of water having renewing properties, the mental health associations of bathing within both texts, and the patriarchal view of feminine appearances. In William’s and Plath’s literary works, water is depicted as having renewal properties in the central feminine characters of both plots. In the character of Blanche DuBois this is most notable when she exclaims, “Oh, I feel so goof after my long, hot bath, I feel so good and cool and – rested!”. Blanche’s frequent baths, along with the excessive amount of time spent in the bathroom within the play, exemplify her attempts at purifying herself from the events of past and present.
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.
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.
In this story, Tennessee Williams each main character such as, Stanley, Mitch, Blanche and Stella, embodies a specific behavior that does not always fit to the gender stereotypes that they belong to. Indeed, the author categorizes Mitch as the “good guy” who feels some emotions
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.
This is made clear through Stanley’s insecurities about inferiority to women and his prolonged struggle to defeat Blanche. Again, this is evident with Blanche and even Stella. Stella is perceived as a static character with no real individuality, and Blanche, who is seemingly more independent, is characterized mostly by her sexuality. Tennessee Williams demonstrates society’s need for the superiority of men to women through the interactions of Stanley and Blanche in the play, their struggles, and their ultimate
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
“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.
This article is focused on women and their clothing color of choice during the ovulation period within their menstrual cycle. The purpose of the experiment is to find out how females of the human species unconsciously display their fertility levels in an observable manner, if they do at all. It is thought that women in some way indicate that they are fertile, but before this article it was not known how it was expressed. With species outside of the human race, the colors red and pink are commonly used to show a female’s readiness to mate with a male. These colors are stereotypically associated with love, and lust in humans as well.
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