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Tennessee Williams Research Paper

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Tennessee Williams

Williams’s mother was Edwina Williams and Williams’s father was Cornelius Williams. Williams had a brother named Dakin Williams and had a sister named Rose Williams. Williams was born on March 26, 1911 in Columbus, Mississippi and died on February 25, 1983 in New York City. Williams and his family lived in Mississippi and moved to St. Louis in 1918. Williams was in a romantic relationship with Frank Merlo when they met in 1951. Frank Merlo died in 1961 due to lung cancer. In 1929, Williams enrolled at the University of Missouri. Williams’s father took him out of the university after two year because he failed ROTC. After that he worked at his father’s shoe company. Williams hated the job, but he worked during …show more content…

The names of some of Williams’s plays are A Streetcar Named Desire, Orpheus Descending, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and The Night of the Iguana. Thomas Lanier Williams III used his nickname “Tennessee” as an author. The general overview of the first play is that Tom is a poet works in a shoe warehouse to support his mother, Amanda, and his sister, Laura. Tom and Laura’s father had run away years ago, and except for one postcard, he has not heard from them since. Amanda was originally from a Southern family and is disappointed that Laura, who wears a brace on her leg and is very shy, does not attract boyfriends. She enrolls her in a business college and hopes that she will make her own and her family’s fortune. Laura’s shyness has caused her to secretly drop out of class and spend her days wandering around …show more content…

She is a teacher who teaches English. She is from Laurel, Mississippi and she takes a streetcar named Desire and goes to the New Orleans French Quarter to live with her younger sister, Stella Kowalski and her brother-in-law, Stanley Kowalski. Blanche flirts with Stanley and it cause problems in the Kowalski apartment. One night when Stella is at the hospital waiting to give birth to a son, Stanley comes home and him and Blanche are alone. When Stanley goes to put on his pajamas, Blanche calls the phone to ask for help. Stanley comes out of the bathroom, grinning at her. Blanche tries to get out, but Stanley blocks her way by shutting the door. He comes near her, and she backs away and tells hims to stay back. She breaks a bottle and threatens to twist the broken end in his face. He jumps at her and she tries to fight back, but Stanley has hold of her wrists. She falls to her knees and he carries her to the bed. A Streetcar Named Desire is popular because of its unforgettable characters and its focus on rape. Its opening on Broadway on December 3, 1947 that starred Marlon Brando as Stanley Kowalski and Jessica Tandy as Blanche DuBois is what makes it popular. Williams’s plays bring the characters to life and one can visualize it when it is on television and in one’s mind. The plays are focused on rape, madness, and death. A Streetcar Named Desire was published in 1947. A Streetcar Named Desire is Williams’s most

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His mother Beryl E. Williams was the first black women to graduate from the University of Maine in 1956. His father Roger K. Williams was one of the firsts black to earn Ph.D. in Psychology at Penn State University. Scott father also served in World War ll, where he was raised in Baltimore. His family was academically oriented but also interested in African American

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Stella’s sister, Blanche, sees through the illusion and can see how toxic the marriage really is. Stanley and Blanche come from distinctly different backgrounds, Stanley is from the working class while Blanche comes from wealth. Williams uses these two contrasting points of views on marriage, to show the issues of possessiveness, class, and sexism. When it comes to Stanley’s marriage to Stella, one of the most notable characteristics is how possessive Stanley is. An example of this is when Stanley found out that Blanche and therefore Stella, lost their estate.

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In the film portrayal of the play A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams, the director Elia Kazan brings the play to life. Even though some of the original content in the play needed to be slightly modified due to taboos that existed during the time period that the movie was released, Streetcar is brought to life in this black and white film. Viewers who may have previously read the original play by Tennessee Williams will find the movie not only pleasant to watch but also true to the ideals and characters that Williams wrote about in the original text. In the play, many important themes exist and can easily be identified throughout all 11 scenes of the play.

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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 the play A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams, the main characters, Blanche Dubois and Stanley Kowalski, share a great dislike and distrust towards one another, ultimately becoming the basis for the story’s conflict. Their common contemption stems from their contrasting personalities and backgrounds, their incompatibility of being able to function under the same environment, and inability to adapt to the situations they find themselves in. Although Blanche detests Stanley and the manner in which he behaves in, she realises that he is a necessary part for Stella’s life in New Orleans, an environment that greatly differs from the southern aristocracy that Stella and Blanche once lived in. Blanche expresses this idea by stating, “Oh,

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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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As soon as Blanche steps into the Kowalski household and meets Stanley, it is evident that her appearance is a threat to his superiority. Both characters attempt to establish dominance through their control over Stella, a minor character who exists mainly to deepen the contrast between Blanche and Stanley. In scene four, Blanche advises Stella to leave her abusive husband and attempts to influence her by saying “I have a plan for us both, to get us both—out!” (69).

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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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Tennessee Williams wrote “A Streetcar Named Desire” (Williams, 1947) It is based in New Orleans a new cosmopolitan city which is poor but has raffish charm. The past is representing old south in America 1900’s and present is representing new America post world war 2 in 1940’s. Past and present are intertwined throughout the play in the characters Stanley, Blanche, Stella and mitch. Gender roles show that males are the dominant and rule the house which Stanley is prime example as he brings home food and we learn of one time when he got cross and he smashed the light bulbs.

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Stella lived her life depending on him whereas Blanche was currently on her own after her marriage and had no one to depend on but herself. Unfortunately there was a commotion that occured in scene 4 between Stanley and Stella. Blanche went to check up on Stella and was brutally convincing her to leave Stanley. The way that Stella responded to her made her look naive over the fact that Stanley was the issue. When Blanche and Stella were talking, Stella goes, “Stanley doesn’t give me a regular allowance, he likes to pay bills himself but this morning he gave me ten dollars to smooth things over (Williams, 78).

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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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