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Streetcar Named Desire Light Analysis

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Lighting is an important aspect of plays. It helps set the tone, the mood, and enriches the setting. Lighting seems to be an even more significant component in Tennessee Williams’ work, Streetcar Named Desire. In the play, protagonist Blanche DuBois, a disgraced southern belle living with her sister and brother-in-law, maintains a unique relationship with lighting. DuBois never allows herself to stay in anything that could be considered adequate lighting. She instead insists on remaining in partially light areas, even arranging her schedule in a way in which she can avoid all sunlight. DuBois’ complete refusal of being fully illuminated is a metaphor for the way the character hides her true personality and it showcases the unease …show more content…

The DuBois’ were a family of great wealth and success. They dwelled in a grand manner, the Belle Reve, and held reverence amongst the locals. However, Blanche is clearly not what is expected in a DuBois. Not only has she lost her job for incriminating reasons, but she is also suffering from debilitating anxiety and remains unmarried, a true tragedy of the era. She succumbs to desire, something a true lady could never fathom. While in the darkness, Blanche feels that she can conceal her shortcomings and keep up the illusion of being a classic, refined DuBois. The truth is easily discovered through the use of light, and as Blanche exclaims, “daylight never exposed so total a ruin” (Williams, 1120). The night also aides in Blanche forgetting her current station in life. Under a comforting cloak of darkness, she can imagine that she is not living in a two-room apartment with her little sister Stella, but in the ornate estate that she has lost forever. Therefore, Blanche’s preference of darkness is used to create this other persona in ways that are both based on appearance and on an extremely human need to feel

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Briefly characterize Blanche Dubois. What evidence is there in the text that supports your characterization? Blanche Dubois seem like a rich person due to what she’s wearing, ”white suit,bodice necklace, earrings of pearl, white glove…”. She was also described as a moth due to the white and her beauty that will cause attention to her. 3) How does Blanche react to Stella’s apartment?

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In literature, the presence the outsider can be traced from ancient Greek dramas to modern literature, from Medea to the Underground Man. Most of the literary works pertaining to the outsider focus on the conflict between the outsider and the insider, conflicts that arise from the Otherness of the outsider. For example, in Jane Eyre, the Otherness of the titular protagonist—her fiery spirit and her subverting idea of equality based on individual merits rather than social status—leads to her alienation and conflicts with the insider wherever she goes. However, Tennessee Williams, in A Streetcar Named Desire, explored a different dynamic—namely the conflict between two outsiders, Stanley Kowalski and Blanche DuBois. In the domestic sphere

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It is what is haunting Blanche’s life, it is what has made her mentally unstable. Throughout the play, she has been hiding her past from people so she looks like

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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.

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(Williams 144). Motif Throughout the play, Blanche avoids light; she prefers to close the curtains and dim the lights. However, in scene nine, when Mitch finally learns of Blanche’s true life, he tears off the lamp shade cover, putting Blanche under full light. The idea of reality versus illusion is prevalent here because, before, the darkness allowed Blanche to be deceitful and create this illusion that she was young, innocent, and

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This is where Blanche becomes obsessed with avoiding any type of light, whether it be in a loving relationship or an overhead lightbulb. Her reaction can be seen as an attempt hide the fact her youth is fading as well as her true nature. While staying with her sister Blanche makes several strides to stay in the dark. One of the first in a series of events she has Stanley’s friend Mitch cover a naked bulb in her room with a Chinese paper lantern stating “I can’t stand a naked light bulb, any more than I can a rude remark or a vulgar action” (114; sec. 3) shows that she would rather hide behind fancy shades than face

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This shows how someone can think they are doing a good job how hiding their true self, but actually, everyone can see through their persona. Blanche tries her best to make sure her appearances are well kept; she is completely oblivious to the fact that she has severe mental and emotional problems, due to the fact that her husband took his own life.

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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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She was married to a rich man and had the life she ever wanted. However, Blanche slowly started losing everything she ever owned, her life was falling apart. The symbol of light has a great impact in this character’s behaviour. Blanche avoids all direct, bright light, especially in front of men. Mitch, one of her potential suitors, proves this statement when he points out to Blanche: “I don’t think I ever seen you in the light.

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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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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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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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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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Although the protagonists of “Fahrenheit 451” and “A Streetcar Named Desire” live in two drastically different societies, both are not satisfied with their current way of living and desire a change and improvement in their life. In “A Streetcar Named Desire”, the title of the play itself signifies Blanche’s desire to escape from the reality of her life, as she is haunted by her past and is currently living a life of insecurity, due to the loss of Belle Reve. Ironically, the streetcar named Desire did not bring her to what she truly wanted, an end of all her problems, and she in fact lost her sanity. The reason for Blanche’s tragic ending is due to the avoidance of her problems, shown metaphorically in the form of a flimsy paper lantern on top of a lamp.

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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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