Essay On Blanche Dubois

3.2.2 Blanche----A Fragile and hypocrisy Southern Belle
Blanche is a controversial figure throughout the play, on one hand, brought up and educated in Southern culture, she has been used to embracing a certain order of custom and certain culture rules. She represents fantasy for her many outrageous attempts to elude herself, and she likewise represents the old South with only her manners and pretensions remaining after the foreclosure of her family plantation--Belle Reve. In the south, the lack of opportunity to voice for female self-consciousness has long been the norm since the lack of economic independence. Women have been living in the chain of patriarchy and have been discriminated against politically, culturally as well as economically. They are usually, and
Shortly afterwards she explains to her gentleman caller Mitch that her name is a French name. It means white and woods. Like an orchard in the spring!”(Williams 74). But Williams never let her role Blanche has any sort of catharsis or release in any way. He created an immoral woman in the character of Blanche Dubois, the haggard and fragile southern beauty whose pathetic last grasp at happiness is cruelly destroyed. For all her airy pretensions to grandeur, she is anything but a fine lady. She is soft, sensitive and fragile on the surface, but to look at this figure more closely, she is more of mingled fragility and hypocrisy. As a character coupled with distorted values, she deliberately guides people around her to respect her with compassion. Across the play as a whole, we find her lies from time to time, when Stanley offers her a shot, she replies, “No, I--rarely touch it”( Williams 100). But ironically Stanley finds his empty whiskey bottles and responds with sarcasm, “some people rarely touch it, but it touches them often” (Williams 100). Blanche is gradually out of sorts. But she has to struggle with the differences in culture and values,