Illusion And Reality In A Streetcar Named Desire

The tension between illusion and reality focuses on Blanche’s relationship with other characters and the world around her. Blanche lives in a fantasy world of sentimental illusion because reality would ruin her. Throughout the play, Blanche constantly bathes herself as if she can wash away the dirt of her guilt and she only appears in semi-darkness and shadows, intentionally keeping herself out of the harsh glare of reality. Her sign of purity is an ironic illusion because of her growingly evident promiscuity, but even that is just a part of her act and is not the real Blanche. Blanche exerts efforts to maintain the appearance of being an upper-class young innocent woman, even though she is, by all accounts, a “fallen woman” (Abbotson

Williams’s characters are failed typists, dismissed teachers, unrecognized poets, disqualified doctors, unsuccessful actors; in short, the neurotic, the discarded, the betrayed, the marginalized. They represent a different world which exists on sufferance. His characters play their roles in the desperate hope of finding a sympathetic audience. Williams’s characters stranded between the real and the imagined, the inconsistent present and a lyric nostalgia, the spiritual and the material (Bigsby49). In A Streetcar Named Desire, Williams chooses young characters to explore the energy created cross the gender and class divide for example: Stella is a young woman about twenty-five years old, her husband Stanley and his friend Mitch are about twenty-eight and even Blanche is not an old woman but she is about five years older than Stella (Bigsby53). Many American writers, including Williams, during the 1930 's and 1940 's concentrated on the brave individual stories of the lower and middle classes members, believing that their ambitions and their strong work ethic characterized them as true Americans. Williams focuses on the low-class men, such as: Stanley, Mitch and Steve Hubbell, and presents them as they were hard-working men who were proud of themselves because of the work that they had achieved with their own

Williams’ major female character in A Streetcar Named Desire is Blanche. Blanche is an aging Southern beautiful woman who lives in a state of permanent panic about her fading beauty. Blanche is fatally divided, swinging between the desire to be a young, beautiful lady who concerned with old-fashioned southern ways and a bohemian erring excessive in her appetites. In New Orleans, Blanche hides her real age and vicious past as she tries to attract an appropriate husband to clean up her life (Abbotson50).The loss of security has sent Blanche on a desperate search for protection: “I’ve run for protection Stella, from under one leaky roof to another leaky roof –because it was storm –all storm, and i was caught in the center” (v.114). She believes that marriage is the only way to escape loneliness and the bad reputation that haunts her. She sees Mitch as her only chance for contentment, even though he is far from her ideal. The rape was the only way that Stanley could dominate Blanche and reduces her to his level. In the end, Blanche blindly allows herself to be led away by a kind doctor to a mental asylum. This final scene is the sad culmination of Blanche’s arrogance and total dependence upon men for happiness (Murphy