Preview

Blanche Dubois Essay

Good Essays
Open Document
Open Document
435 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
Blanche Dubois Essay
Tennessee Williams did a fine job of centering his play bill A Streetcar Named Desire, on the protagonist, Blanche DuBois. With that stated, and to answer the loaded question of who portrayed the most intriguing character from scenes 1-3, most assuredly, Blanche DuBois would have to be the only logical choice. Her introduction to the story sets the persona of her character. Through the vivid details of her wardrobe, in contrast to the setting of the story line and the over-dramatic, self-righteous façade she represents, undoubtedly leaves the audience with a subtle fascination that craves more detail into the depths of her character.
Her appearance is incongruous to this setting. She is daintily dressed in a white
Suit with a fluffy bodice,
…show more content…
Her language is evidentially presented through her background and education. Blanche is a sophisticated, High School English teacher, who takes a certain amount of pride in her extensive vocabulary, all the while using it as a tool to exploit the uneducated souls she encounters. Besides her beauty, she employs a flirty, yet prim and proper charade of a woman who has never known indignity, all with the expectation to obtain admiration, particularly from men, and boost her self-esteem. Her promiscuous nature is distinctly captured in her dialog with Stanley:
Hello, Stanley! Here I am, all freshly bathed and scented, and feeling like a new human being... Excuse me while I slip on my pretty new dress! (Norton, 1790)
In summary, Blanche forecasts a dainty but highbrow disposition throughout the story. She reveals partial truths in regards to the family fortune, her employment status and her love life. These partial truths are exactly what make her character so intriguing, not to mention the closing of scene three’s discussion with Mitch and the discovery that they both have lost a loved one. This is the second time Blanche addresses her widow status, however, at this point, fails to provide the details of this tragedy, leaving the audience with an unresolved yearning to discover what is going on with

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Good Essays

    When Blanche meets Mitch, she realises that her is someone who can give her a sense of belonging and who is also captivated by her “girlish” charms. She deceives him into thinking her, as she would like to be –prim and proper – however, as she later tells Mitch: “Inside, I never lied”. Her essential nature and being have been changed by her promiscuity – She gave her body to any man, but it would appear, that to Mitch, she is ready to give her whole being. Mitch falls in love with Blanches world of illusion – to the point that he suggests marriage.…

    • 752 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    In the commencement of the play, Blanche is quickly described as a damsel in distress. She is portrayed as a wealthy woman “in a white suit with a fluffy bodice, necklace and earing of pearl, white gloves and hat…” (5). She resembles an embellished white moth. The fact that she is forced to live with her younger sister Stella and her domineering husband truly shows that Blanche is in a truly desperate situation. Her overall character is depicted as a traumatized woman that is in complete desolation. Experiences such as witnessing her family on a “...Long parade to the graveyard” (21). Being forced to live with your family until their tragic demise would emotionally and mentally torment anyone. She lives inside of her own world in which she…

    • 190 Words
    • 1 Page
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    The primary noticeable difference between Stanley and Blanche are the worlds that they both come from. Blanche believes in an illusionary world of which the upper and lower class people are separated, education is valued, races are separated and purity is preserved. In contrast, Stanley comes from a patriarchal society, which is morally corrupt, sinful and amoral. In the opening scene, the stage directions “her expression is one of shocked disbelief. Her appearance is incongruous to this setting” conveys her difference in class and how Blanche already does not fit into this new world foreshadowing the end of the play when Blanche is pushed out of the new world. The dialogue “ they mustn’t have- understood- what number I wanted” highlights Blanche’s confusion as she arrives at Elysian Fields, which suggests that Blanche is entering into a world that she does not belong in. The use of the derogatory terms “negro”, “brown” and “one white and one coloured” all suggest that unlike in Blanche’s illusionary world, Stanley’s world, New Orleans does not separate races instead they intermingle. Throughout the play there are many references to animalistic qualities. Blanche is represented, as a “moth” of which is fragile and attracted to light, which leads to danger and death. Stanley is compared to a lion, a predator of power and strong…

    • 847 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    - Behind her veneer of social snobbery and sexual propriety, Blanche is an insecure, dislocated individual. She is an aging Southern belle who lives in a state of perpetual panic about her fading beauty. the Kowalski household, Blanche pretends to be a woman who has never known indignity. Her false propriety is not simply snobbery, however; it constitutes a calculated attempt to make herself appear attractive to new male suitors. Blanche depends on male…

    • 720 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Within this drama Blanche’s life is the very depiction of how one single tragic event can play a major role in one’s future. However, in Blanche’s case, a series of tragic events spark a new lifestyle. Blanche’s sexual needs were never satisfied. She met and fell madly in love at a very young age. At just sixteen years old, she fell in love as well as eloped. After investing time in what she saw as a blissful marriage to her husband, Allan, he admitted to her that he was homosexual. She felt betrayed. She felt used and taken advantage of. Instead of…

    • 1154 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    “Just remember what Huey Long said - that every man’s a king- and I’m the king around here” QUELLE!! With this statement Stanley Kowalski, one of the protagonists in “A Streetcar Named Desire” a play published in 1947 by one of the most famous authors of the South Tennessee Williams, the character captures the critical issue at stake – the underprivileged and repressed role of women in American society at the time right after the Great Depression and World War II. The theme of an older, decadent and back then dying plantation society whose values and virtues were challenged by a new male-dominated and aggressively materialistic society of immigrants gained more and more in importance (Zapf 298).…

    • 861 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    Blanche becomes more and more acquainted with one of Stanley’s friends, Mitch. The first time she meets him, she tells him, “I can’t stand a naked light bulb, any more than I can a rude remark or a vulgar action” (Williams 55). This was her justification for wanting her paper lantern put over the light bulb. The paper lantern assisted in alleviating the unhappy truth about her age, her tensions, and her situation. Smith-Howard and Heintzelman state, “...Blanche has an aversion to being viewed in bright light that will reveal her true age.” Blanche lies to Mitch about her age and prevents herself from being with him throughout the day and rather sees him during the evening or the night (Smith-Howard & Heintzelman). When they meet a second time, Blanche tells Mitch a part of her past. She tells him about a man, Allan Grey, that she used to be married to. She tells Mitch that she discovered love at a young age and at first it was like, “...you suddenly turned a blinding light on something that had always been half in the shadow...then the searchlight which had been turned on the world was turned off again...” (Williams 95). Williams illustrates that Blanche was at one point in her life at ease and unafraid. After discovering that her husband was homosexual and telling him that he disgusted her, Allan committed suicide; as a result…

    • 1129 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    When the play begins, Blanche is already a fallen woman in society’s eyes. Her family fortune and estate are gone, she lost her young husband to suicide years earlier, and she is a social pariah due to her indiscrete sexual behavior. She also has a bad drinking problem, which she covers up poorly. Behind her veneer of social snobbery and sexual propriety, Blanche is an insecure, dislocated individual. She is an aging Southern belle who lives in a state of perpetual panic about her fading beauty. Her manner is dainty and frail, and she sports a wardrobe of showy but cheap evening clothes. Stanley quickly sees through Blanche’s act and seeks out information about her past. The notion of death is apparent through Blanches maiden name, Grey, which suggests bleakness and unhappiness. Indeed we are introduced to the fact that behind…

    • 1679 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    When Blanche starts talking to Stella, she…

    • 583 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Blanche denies her purity. In scene seven, Stanley tells Stella that Blanche had worked at the Hotel Flamingo as a prostitute. We see from this that Blanche denied her past by lying to Mitch, saying that she had never been more than kissed by a man. We see that Blanche was lying when she said that she was taking a leave of absence from her high school career. Blanche actually had relations with a teenage boy. Obviously, Blanche is not pure and innocent. The way Blanche implies that she’s a virgin, talks softly, and wears white, are all ways that Blanche is denying her history as a…

    • 512 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Kowalski's Reality

    • 687 Words
    • 3 Pages

    She has lost her young husband to suicide in earlier years, lost her family fortune and estate, and become a heavy drinker, despite the fact that she attempts to cover that up. It is evident that Blanche is very insecure about her looks, as well as a fragile individual. It is often that Blanche hides herself from an uncovered bulb, in order to hide particular features she is not fond of. Blanche relies on male sexual admiration for a sense of self esteem. When she meets Mitch, Blanche sees an opportunity to escape poverty and her bad reputation. She constructs a new identity for herself, to become more appealing to Mitch. Unfortunately, Mitch is not her prince charming, and Stanley once again, ruins a relationship in Blanches life. He sees through her lies, and makes sure that his mate does not get caught up in them. When Stanley rapes Blanche, she becomes very lost within herself, which the other characters in the play, are unaware…

    • 687 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    She would later get run out of her home in Laurel after she became the disgrace of the town, town slut, and she loses her job after she attempts to have intimate relationships with her students. These two events leave her homeless and without a job, so in order to survive she decides to call on her younger sister, Stella, who is living in New Orleans with a war veteran. She believes that if she was to go and live with Stella, both Stella and Stanley would be happy to provide for her as she lives out the rest of her fantasies and possible finds herself a new man. She succeeds in finding a new man, Mitch, however, he later calls her a dirty slut that is not clean enough to bring into the house with his mother. Basically, Blanche got caught in her web of lies after she began attacking Stanley`s authority and out of spite he tipped of Mitch about Blanche`s true self and the Mitch dumps Blanche. This triggers an emotional breakdown, in which Blanches false hopes begin to come crashing down around her and in the end, Stanley decide to exert his dominance over her, which causes for Blanche to completely fall apart at the seams. Blanche is so emotionally distraught about what had happened to her that she gets sent away to a mental asylum so that she would finally be able to get the help she needed or at least live out her illusions away from everyone…

    • 1372 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    Blanche seems eager to point out Stanley's faults to her sister whenever the opportunity arises. When Stella supposes that perhaps, Stanley is “common”,…

    • 636 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    a gothic short story

    • 1759 Words
    • 8 Pages

    At the beginning of the play, Blanche is already in a nervous breakdown as she was drinking wine that she found in Stella’s house. She was using it to calm her nerves. When Stanley came home from his bowling game, he had a conversation with her. At the end of the scene, he asks her about her husband. She started to break apart as she says “The boy – the boy died; [She sinks back down] I’m afraid I‘m - going to be sick! [Her head falls on her arms],” (p. 31). This represents that her husband’s death has resulted her to go into a depression. She is unstable whenever she is reminded of her husband. She had some memories with her husband that she cannot forget causing her to be really sad. It is later revealed in the play that her husband was with another man. He killed himself due her revulsion towards him. She states “by coming suddenly into a room that I thought was empty – which wasn’t empty, but had two people in it...the boy I had married and an older man who had been friends for years...” (p. 95) and “I’d suddenly - said I saw you disgust me...” (p. 96). She loved her husband but he was…

    • 1759 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Just as things had started to calm down they went downhill very quickly the night that Stella goes into labor. “Stanley ultimately betrays Stella's trust by raping her sister while Stella is in labor at the hospital, Stella passively accepts Stanley's denial of Blanche's report and even acquiesces to his demand that her sister be institutionalized for her delusions” (Hovis) Not only is Blanche used and abused, but she is punished for it. Everything is turned against her, because Stella “couldn't believe her story and go on living with Stanley” (Williams 133). It would complicate everything to face the truth so they do not even give her a chance to show she is being truthful. She was betrayed by everyone and then sent off and forgotten about as if nothing had ever happened. After the decision is made to send her to an institution Blanche she reveals a quote to the doctor “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers” (Williams 178). The irony here is that she really does, and it is the sad truth. She is constantly depending on the approval and compliments of others. She was taken advantage of by strangers in her old town and it's what is happening now. The truth for blanche is very twisted and depressing. After the falling out of Blanche and her young lover, she was almost destined for a misfortunate…

    • 1608 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Powerful Essays