Streetcar Named Desire Perspectives

The play A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams represents through his characters many conflicting perspectives. Discuss this view with reference to the listening component and your prescribed text.

In ‘A Street Car Named Desire’ you see many conflicting perspectives. This is seen through the characters’ personalities and actions as well as their crude and patronising tones. Williams explores the ideas and themes of societal expectations of the past vs present, desire vs death, and illusion vs reality throughout the play and they are reinforced in the listening task.

There is very much a clash between the ‘Old South’ and the ‘New South’, the wealthy were slowly drying out and there was a rising number in the working-class or industrial

Stanley has a condescending view on death. He believes that he can make things happen to keep him alive. It’s obvious that he operates on desire. Williams makes this evident in his description before his first encounter with Blanche, scene 1 pg. 29 [Animal joy in his being is implicit in all his movements and attitude. Since earliest manhood the centre of his life has been pleasure with women, the giving and taking of it, he sizes women up at a glance, with sexual classifications, crude images flashing into his mind and determining the way he smiles at them.] Stanley’s desire is clear when he loses Stella after hitting her. He is left with shouting out his want like a primal animal on his porch.
The final thematic concern is illusion vs. reality. Stanley and eventually Mitch represent the ‘brutal reality’. They like the light and really hate Blanche putting up the paper lanterns. Light=reality and the lanterns block or cloud it. Scene 9 pg.

But Blanche is refusing to accept this. Stanley also get what he wants from sex and sheer force, rather than using words. Blanche on the other hand is all about the illusions. From the moment she is introduced in the play, you see she is illuding people that she is happy and she is just visiting for ‘vacation’ when in reality she has just lost her house and her job, and has nowhere else to go. She put this all on so no one would think less of her but also to illude herself that it wasn’t real. She also puts on the illusion that she is innocent and pure. She is always bathing herself so no-one sees her dirty, and always wears whites and other pale colours. She was said to look like a ‘moth’, pale and delicate, alluring, but moths only come out at night, just like her. She hides in the shadows so she can illude people that she is in fact, younger than she is, but it could also be so people don’t see her true nature. You see this in the listening task, she is constantly moving herself so she is in the shadows, so Mitch doesn’t see her face in full