Preview

Blanche's Loss In A Streetcar Named Desire

Good Essays
Open Document
Open Document
398 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
Blanche's Loss In A Streetcar Named Desire
In Tennessee William’s A Streetcar Named Desire A woman named Blanche Dubois, sister to Stella Dubois comes to visit her and her husband Stanley Kowalski. To Blanche’s surprise her sister's husband Stanley is not like the men she knew growing up. Blanche is a fading southern beauty who has experienced many things since the loss of her home, Belle Reve. Throughout the story the reader sees Blanche having episodes that have the reader thinking Blanche is crazy. By the end of the story the reader sees Blanche actually become completely crazy.

The first time the reader gets a hint that something could have traumatized Blanche is when she talks about all the deaths that happened before Belle Reve was lost. Blanche says “…And funerals are pretty

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • 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

    In the 1947 play A Streetcar Named Desire written by Tennessee Williams, there is an on going battle of rivalry between Stanley and Blanche, resulting to Blanche retreating into a world of illusions in order to protect herself. The two come from completely different societal worlds and have contrasting personalities, Stanley being powerful, controlling and strong and Blanche, being fragile, weak and vulnerable. Despite their hatred for each other and their differences they have many similar traits, including their use of sexuality and desperation to control others.…

    • 847 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    At the beginning of the play, when we are introduced to Blanche, and our initial impression of her is that she is a judgemental person who seems to think quite highly of herself. Although Eunice is trying to help her, Blanche is rude and brief in response. She is in disbelief that her Sister would live at Elysian Fields and makes that quite obvious by having a haughty attitude, “They mustn’t have - understood - what number I wanted…”. She continues questioning whether Stella lives there “I’m looing for my sister, Stella DuBois, I mean - Mrs.Stanley Kowalski.”, “This - can this be - her home?” despite already being told that she is at the right place. She is also very abrupt when Eunice is trying to make conversation with her only answering with “yes”, even for questions. She even then says “What I meant was that I’d like to be let alone”. She continues to be offensive when she sees Stella, saying that not even in her “worst dreams” could she imagine this place that her sister is living in. “Only Poe! Only Mr. Edgar Allan Poe! - could do it justice!” Poe’s best known fiction works are gothic; his most recurring themes dealing with questions of death, decomposition and mourning, and so thinking her house of as something that only an author who writes about morbid subjects could describe, is highly offensive. Being so rude about where Stella lives is not a very sisterly thing to do, but being so impolite to Eunice, a complete stranger, is a way in which Blance breaks a moral code of politeness.…

    • 1229 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    1. Blanche who is homeless, comes to her sister’s house at the beginning. Blanche had been a schoolteacher, married Allan, a man she later discovered to be gay. Her reactions to his sexual orientation caused him to commit suicide. Lonely, she becomes a prostitute, who loses her teaching career when her sexual relationship with a teenager is found out. After the family plantation Belle Reve is lost, she turns to her little sister Stella, who lives in with her husband Stanley in a poor area of New Orleans. She is a very deluded character; She hides her past and fragility behind her Southern aristocrat clothes and manners and is very harsh and mean to Stanley, calling him “bestial” (71). When her past is revealed, she loses a guy named Mitch’s love and the possibility of getting married to him. At the end of the play, she is raped by Stanley (Stella’s husband), goes crazy, and is taken to the state mental asylum. Blanche is the main focus of the play. She is a complex character. “If a single character in contemporary American stage literature approaches the classical Aristotelian tragic figure, it must surely be Blanche DuBois. Deceptive, dishonest, fraudulent, permanently flawed, unable to face reality, Blanche is for all that thoroughly capable of commanding audience compassion, for her struggle and the crushing defeat she endures have the magnitude of tragedy. The inevitability of her doom, her refusal to back down in the face of it, and the essential humanity of the forces that drive her to it are the very heart of tragedy. No matter what evils she may have done, nor what villainies practiced, she is a human being trapped by the fates, making a human fight to escape and to survive with some shred of human dignity, in full recognition of her own fatal human weaknesses and the increasing…

    • 2794 Words
    • 12 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    Blanche Dubois Victim

    • 136 Words
    • 1 Page

    Blanche DuBois is one of the central characters in Tennessee Williams’: “A Streetcar Named Desire”. She is the sister of Stella Kowalski, she is in her thirties and works as a school English teacher. Blanche can be described as many things; a “slut”, because of her relations with soldiers and numerous men in a hotel, a “predator”, because of her affair with a young school boy. However, a “victim” because of her gender would not be one that many would first think of or even agree with.…

    • 136 Words
    • 1 Page
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    A Streetcar Named Desire written by Tennessee Williams is a play about a southern lady named Blanche from Mississippi visiting her sister Stella, who is married to Stanley and currently living in Elysian Fields, New Orleans. Blanche arrives in Elysian Fields, and throughout her entire stay with Stella and Stanley, there is tension and conflict occurring in Stella’s house. Even though Blanche and Stella were brought up in the South under wealthy conditions, the conflict is mainly caused by Blanche’s dislike of Stanley because, as a blue-collar worker, Stanley's status is lower than the DuBois’. In another aspect, Stanley’s conflict is caused by him being suspicious of Blanche since her arrival. Blanche explains to Stella that…

    • 1339 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Streetcar Named Desire’s Tennessee Williams explains how Blanche and Stella are both living a lie and existing in a fantasy, where in time they must come face to face with their own realities. People that live lives they wish to have eventually with have to come to terms and realize to enjoy the life they have and stop comparing their lives to…

    • 768 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    "A Streetcar Named Desire" by Tennessee Williams tells the tale of Blanche Dubois and her steady decline into insanity through a series of events. Throughout the story the harsh, realistic world of Stanley clashes with Blanche's filmy, illusionary world. These differences can be seen in how Stanley is portrayed, how is portrayed and how Stella is a bridge between the two worlds. Stanley represents the realistic world.…

    • 168 Words
    • 1 Page
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    The main characters in ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’ are Blanche, Stanley and Stella. Blanche is from old world America. She moves to New Orleans with her sister Stella and her husband Stanley after she goes through a bad time in her life and losses her job along with her family house. Blanche has power over her sister, and she abuses this power. This is first demonstrated when Blanche asks her sister to get her a drink from the drug store and she does so ‘Blanche- Honey, do me a favour. Run to the drug-store and get me a lemon-coke with plenty of chipped ice in it! – Will you do that for me, Sweetie?’ This demonstrates the power of fear which Stella feels. She believes that if she does not comply with her sisters ‘orders’ then she will have a more stressful and difficult life so she obeys.…

    • 1013 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    How is the character of Blanche presented in Scenes 1 and 2 in ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’?…

    • 926 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    In the drama "A Streetcar Named Desire" by Tennessee Williams, Blanche Dubois finds her way to the chaotic city of New Orleans in hopes of an escape from her painful life, and to find refuge with her younger sister Stella, as she is her only living relation. In light of her efforts to forget and shed her illicit past, she utilizes the bathroom and resorts to the act of bathing. Blanche's continuous desire for the bathroom manifests escape from those around her and a need for cleansing away her wrong doings. Blanche, a bewildered woman, arrives to New Orleans with an inadequate past. As she reconnects with her sister, she begins searching for ways to forget her past.…

    • 536 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Research Paper

    • 1228 Words
    • 5 Pages

    The play A Streetcar Named Desire revolves around Blanche DuBois; therefore, the main theme of the drama concerns her directly. In Blanche is seen the tragedy of an individual caught between two worlds-the world of the past and the world of the present-unwilling to let go of the past and unable, because of her character, to come to any sort of terms with the present. The final result is her destruction. This process began long before her clash with Stanley Kowalski. It started with the death of her young husband, a weak and perverted boy who committed suicide when she taunted him with her disgust at the discovery of his perversion. In retrospect, she knows that he was the only man she had ever loved, and from this early catastrophe evolves her promiscuity. She is lonely and frightened, and she attempts to fight this condition with sex. Desire fills the emptiness when there is no love and desire blocks the inexorable movement of death, which has already wasted and decayed Blanche's ancestral home Belle Reve.…

    • 1228 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Powerful 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

    In the play, A Streetcar Named Desire, by Tennessee Williams, Blanche and Stanley are well-known, as opposite characters with symbols of conflicting deals, but these two characters also have many similarities with each other. For example, Stanley and Blanche both have a well-built desire for love. Stanley, has no need to seek for love because he yearns, his marriage life with his wife Stella. Blanche, on the other hand, is seeking for respect and love for a new husband, since she lost her last husband. Also, Stanley and Stella are a couple that appears to be loving and compassionate with each other, until Blanche comes for a visit to New Orleans to live with the couple. With conflicting issues dealing with Blanche and Stanley, it causes an unhealthy, abusive problems with Stella and Stanley’s marriage.…

    • 175 Words
    • 1 Page
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    First of all, Blanche's inability to accept the reality of her decline in social status is seen when she is forced to go live with her sister Stella in the Elysian Fields. She tells everyone that she left Laurel which is her illusion of what happened.…

    • 815 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays