A Streetcar Named Desire Literary Analysis Essay

In my literary analysis of “A Streetcar Named Desire,” by Tennessee Williams, I narrowed the focus of my essay by finding a theme that is evident throughout the play. In order to do this, I reread the essay and reviewed my annotations. Once I discovered the symbolic theme of light versus dark, I highlighted every line that included it. Finally I looked at all of the quotes to see the bigger picture of how they are related, and wrote a working thesis based on my findings. I found that most of the lines supported the idea that “Blanche longs to share the secrecy of her past with someone, but because she is fearful of being vulnerably truthful, she hides herself in the darkness, symbolic of hiding behind a mask of deceit.” I then used this statement as a focus for the construction of my literary analysis. I broke the thesis into three main statements to support using textual evidence. In order to determine what textual information was promising and supportive for my essay, I reviewed all of the lines mentioning light or darkness, or lines that relate to my thesis. I then simply picked out the ones that created the strongest
I learned by this assignment the importance of planning and the difference that it could make. Again, like I said, preparation for crucial in the development of this essay. I believe that I put more time and effort into the planning stage than the actual writing and editing of the paper. In my opinion, this is because analyzing a work of writing requires much more thought beforehand. I wanted to have a fresh perspective on the play, and didn’t want to simply write an analysis that was commonplace or that someone had already written. Overall, I enjoyed writing this essay and became much more knowledgeable about the process of writing a literary