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Sound Used In A Streetcar Named Desire

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In a play, sound is used to help illustrate its emotional content as a result of a play being limited in its point of views. Therefore, sound in a Streetcar Named Desire is significant in its dramatic effect in reinforcing the protagonist, Blanche’s, inner conflict to the audience. By garnering this significance of sound, its effect is additionally contributed to the theme of the play due to it highlighting details of the play's scenes for the audience to ultimately recognize specifics that, in succession, applies to the construction of the theme. Therefore, Tennessee Williams emphasizes through the employment of sound, the deterioration of the protagonist, Blanche, through featuring diegetic and non-diegetic sound that illustrate Blanche's …show more content…

The Piano appears the most frequently and drastically in scenes seven and ten due to both scenes featuring climatic points of the play. At the conclusion of scene seven, “the distant piano goes into a hectic breakdown” (128), indicating the sound to be non-diegetic and therefore signifying Blanche’s complete vacancy from reality. However, in scene ten, a transition in sound is palpable due to the sounds that Stanley is characterized with become progressively integrated into the sound of the Blue Piano. The sound of the Blue Piano “…turns into the roar of an approaching locomotive,” (160) referencing to Stanley’s supremacy over the expression of life and what that subsequently means for Blanche and ultimately, humanity. After the transition in sound, “inhuman” (161) sounds are now utilized as a replacement of the Blue Piano due to inhumanity being the conclusive representation of the new World’s expression of life. This notion is further reinforced by the contrast that Blanche provides with the New World through her belief in humanity that conclusively diminishes at the end. In the play, Blanche “need[s] kindness” (69) which is initially presented through the kindness that Mitch exhibits towards her. Mitch being the light in humanity is emphasized when “the polka tune stops” (139), in reference to what the Polka music symbolizes for Blanche’s beliefs. However, when it is revealed that Mitch believes that she is ironically “…not clean enough to bring in the house…” (150), it aids in supplying to the theme of a society’s inhumanity. Therefore, the kindness from strangers is too much for Blanche to hope for and as a result, she succumbs inside herself to escape from the corruption of humanity that the New World

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In contrast, Blanche, besides conducting her conversation subtly and indirectly, also enjoys refinement such as “art, poetry, and music” (83). She shields the lamp with paper lanterns and sprays the house with perfume, both refinements intolerable to Stanley, who tears them down at the last

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The play “A Streetcar Named Desire” is about an emotionally unstable lady named Blanche. She moves in with her youngest sister and her husband because the landlord took the land away from Blanche because they could not pay for it anymore. After being their for a while Blanche starts remembering her horrible past which is something she was trying to do in the first place. The husband of Stella, Stanley Kowalski was also someone that made Blanche’s life miserable for complicating everything and harassing her in every possible way. Death is one of the most symbolic terms in this play.

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When the polka music rises up, Blanche remembers her husband because this music is linked with the death of Allan grey Blanche’s husband, because it was the music they were dancing on ( Tischler 53 ). Moreover, the split of the coke on Blanche’s clothes symbolizes the split of her husband’s blood on her. Blanche’s excessive bathing throughout the play reflects her remorse and her desire to be cleansed from her sin. The most obvious symbol in the play is its title.

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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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In "A Streetcar Named Desire, Tenessee Williams provides the readers with a detailed discription of how he wants to see the play staged by using stage directions . These stage directions help reinforce various themes and helps readers to understand the scenes in greater detail. In the play, "A Streetcar Named Desire", the stage directions are vital in conveying the story to the reader and without the explanations things are said or done the reader would not be able to understand what is happening in the story. The directions affect all aspects of a story. Music is one of the stage direction used and if read carefully, it is clear that Williams uses music to establish the mood of many scenes.

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Music is a universal language among humans in that it is used to communicate or evoke various sentiments. Depending on the context, music creates meaning and provides a more in-depth view of a situation. Nowadays, music is crucial in moviemaking as producers use it as a way to manipulate the viewer’s emotions and add complexity to the settings. Similarly, Tennessee Williams employs different kinds of music- that of the “blue piano”, Varsouviana polka, and “Paper Moon”- in A Streetcar Named Desire to expose the character’s innermost thoughts and emotions and to describe how the deception and decay that pervades through the play affects the characters’ perspectives of the outside world and the actions that they take.

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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

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Playwright Tennessee Williams once said “a symbol in a play has only one legitimate purpose which is to say a thing more directly and simply and beautifully than it could be said in words”. He seems to take his own advice to heart when writing such a thought provoking play as A Streetcar Named Desire. While Williams makes extensive use of symbols in Streetcar, the use of animals and animal-like characteristics as a symbol are constantly used to define Stanley Kowalski’s character and convey his desires as primal and ferine. Stanley has the first line in the play and is immediately characterized by Williams with the use of his stage direction “bellowing” (Williams 244; sc. 1). Like a wild animal, Stanley has a desire for unrefinement and

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In A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams, Blanche, a former socialite and debutante, is ostensibly concerned with manners and civility. Blanche swings from losing people in her life to losing possessions and a strong sense of desire to combat her ineluctable demise. Her sense of desire is inflamed by the death of her former lover, who she describes as her greatest love. Starting in Act One, Williams starts to show the reader Blanches inevitable pattern of life when she is searching for the streetcar and describing the directions given to get to her sister's home. “They told me to take a streetcar named Desire, and then transfer to one called Cemeteries, and ride six blocks and get off at-- Elysian Fields.”

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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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This conveys how Blanche is having a battle with her conscience about the death of her husband and whether she’s at fault. The author similarly presents both types of music to get a mood across which he can’t do directly with the use of sound so William made the music symbolize something and whenever you hear the music in the stage directions you know something is going to happen. Thus, William brilliantly presents the music of “Varsouviana Polka” and “Blue Piano” throughout the text through the use of certain symbolic representations like the “Blue Piano” represents lust and warmth, while the “Varsouviana Polka” guilt and

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The Use of Sounds and Music in Tennessee Williams play A Streetcar Named Desire Tennessee Williams (1911-1983) was born in Mississippi but moved to New Orleans at the age of 28. There he found the inspiration for his play A Streetcar Named Desire. The play is set in New Orleans and incorporates the atmosphere of the setting particularly through music. Williams use of vivid music in this play heightens themes such as madness and social differences. In this essay I am going to verify how Williams uses sounds and music as a tool to develop the plot, more specifically how it shows Blanche’s lost grip of reality.

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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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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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“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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