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How Does Tennessee Williams Present Blanche

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In the play ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’ Tennessee Williams Blanche DuBois’character captivates the audience with her complex persona. The moment where Blanche reveals her past to Mitch is a turning point in the play, where Williams is able to skillfully bring out Blanche's complex character through the use of language and dialouge, music and character development. Through these techniques, Williams is able to create a character with a complex mix of fragility and strength. Williams uses the element of language to further enhance Blanche's character. Blanche's dialogue is poetic and lyrical, especially her French. “Voutez-vous coucher avec moi ce soir?” which translates to will you sleep with me tonight highlights her romanticised view of the world, especially since she was speaking French, the language of romance. Her use of such posh language reflects her attempts to create an alternate reality that shields her from the harshness of her actual circumstances. By creating an alternate reality of romance and glamour Blanche blurs the line between illusion and the truth. This convey …show more content…

Through the use of the polka music, a recurring musical motif, the audience gains an insight into Blanche's traumatic experiences with love. “A few moments later - a shot! [The polka stops abruptly. Blanche rises stiffly. Then the polka resumes in major key]”. The recurring polka music serves as a haunting reminder of her troubled past and her inability to escape the memories that haunt her, namely her husband’s suicide.The Varsouviana polka, was playing when Blanche's husband shot himself. Thus, the music becomes a haunting reminder of her past actions and the immense guilt she carries. Through these deep moments, Williams is able to convey the depth and complexity of Blanche’s character as we are able to see that she is a strong woman and not as shallow as portrayed in the previous

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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.

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“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.

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She is, by far, in opposition with the theme of purity, the author reveals that Blanche is a liar. Indeed she is saying that she has been hiring from her job, which is not the truth. Blanche is one the most interesting character in the story because she does not fit to some gender stereotypes, this difference makes her attractive and

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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.

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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.

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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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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

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