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…
-In the end, Stanley's down-to-earth character proves harmfully crude and brutish. His chief amusements are gambling, bowling, sex, and drinking, and he lacks ideals and imagination. His disturbing, degenerate nature, first hinted at when he beats his wife, is fully evident after he rapes his sister-in-law. Stanley shows no remorse for his brutal actions. The play ends with an image of Stanley as the ideal family man, comforting his wife as she holds their newborn child. The wrongfulness of this representation, given what we have learned about him in the play, ironically calls into question society's decision to ostracize Blanche.…
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…
Everyone wants to live a life they do not have. Some people want to be rich, while others want to travel the world and never work a day in their lives. In order to live the lives they do not have, many people create their own fantasies. Tennessee Williams’ Streetcar Named Desire depicts Blanche and Stella’s lives as lies, while revealing how they do not wish to face their own realities, for they will never to able to live the life they have always hoped for.…
The character Blanche is quite a complex member of the play; you do not see a true representation of her until several scenes in. The two opening scenes show different sides to the character depending on whose company she is in. Having come from a good family with a “proper” upbringing, it can be said that she has led a somewhat sheltered life and therefore finds it hard to relate and sympathise other characters that did not experience the same quality of life. Her actions are impulsive, spontaneous and often she acts without thinking of the consequences; this makes it difficult for the audience to feel difficult toward her and can ultimately be traced back to the fact that she has little self-awareness. However, just as there are examples of other reasons that she is disliked by the audience and other characters, there are also examples of Blanche feeling and showing sympathy.…
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…
Reality can be a horrible thing for some people; reality can say that you’re broke, that your old, that you are an undignified whore. Some of us try to deny reality and live in a fantasy world. We see a lot of this denial in Blanche DuBois, the protagonist in Tennessee William’s play, A Streetcar Named Desire. Blanche fabricates her whole identity, creating a self-image as a woman who has never known indignity; she denies her past as a prostitute. This is why I say that Blanche DuBois is the Queen of Denial.…
EXPLAIN; Blanche doesn’t want anyone to find out about her past, but she knows Stanley has therefore he has a power over her and is almost black- mailing her and playing mind games because he makes her feel that he has one over her – creating an inferiority complex…
Blanche’s death speech plays a vital role in the development of the play “A Streetcar named Desire”. In the monologue the tension between Blanche and Stella comes to a zenith as Blanch explodes with rage as she expresses her jealousy-driven feelings to Stella. In doing so Blanche reveals much more, including her unstable mental state, her emotional reaction to the lost of Belle Reve, and most importantly her preoccupation with the theme of death.…
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.…
Each person has their own perception of reality, that doesn't always represent what the world really is. Our reality is a blend of attitudes, perceptions and influences from our environment, which is controlled by ourselves. In Tennessee Williams's play, 'A Streetcar Named Desire', all characters create their own reality, through their views on their experiences. It is made very clear that each character has a different reality from one another, emphasizing the fact that everyone constructs their own reality.…
At the start of the scene we can see that Blanche’s already eccentric character has retreated deeply into the world of fantasy, after being rejected by her previous suitor, Mitch in the previous scene. She is described as having “decked herself out in a somewhat soiled evening gown” and as the scene opens she is placing a tiara on her head. This very powerfully demonstrates how fragile and unstable she has become, as she appears to be dressing up for some fantastical event. Blanche’s fantasies are developed further as the scene continues; when Stanley arrives home she begins to tell him a variety of tall tales for example that she has been invited on a cruise with a millionaire acquaintance of hers. At first it seems she is merely lying to Stanley as she is described as “improvising feverishly” but as the scene develops she seems to become caught up in her own fantasy, leading to desperate attempts to contact her millionaire. All of this shows very clearly the rapidly declining stability of Blanche’s state of mind which is disturbing enough for the audience but when Stanley takes advantage of Blanche’s vulnerable state and rapes her, we are completely unsettled and disturbed as we see Blanche’s mind irreversibly damaged leading to her committal to a mental institution in the following scene. This disturbing decline in Blanche is symbolic of fantasy and illusion, key themes of the play; William’s demonstrates that when we are hurt unimaginably, we…
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…
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…
In the play A Streetcar Named Desire, Tennessee Williams portrayed Blanche to be an extremely complex character. She was depicted as a delicate, pure woman, and eventually a lonely alcoholic! She was neither completely good nor bad, because she was so torn by conflicting and contradictory desires and needs. It is evident that the tragedies that occurred in her life contribute to the complexity of her character.…