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.…
"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.…
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.…
In A Streetcar Named Desire, Blanche refuses to accept reality and tries to resuscitate her idealized past through memory. She allows desire to conduct the way she lives and as a matter of fact is ultimately destroyed by the pursuit of her sexual desires. The correlation between death and desire is a prominent aspect that Williams explores in A Streetcar Named Desire. Throughout the play, death and desire are frequently and consistently entwined on many levels, particularly in the connotation of sexual desire inevitably leading to death or extreme wreckage of some kind and vice versa.…
Tennessee Williams’s Blanche is the epitome of the bygone era of a southern belle; she embodies the classical social inequalities. As her social and cultural stances deeply diminish she develops a fear of fleeting beauty and old age. Williams conveys this idea of vanity, fear of death and old age throughout the play. In scene 5 the use of the Young man is in essence part of Williams’s exposition, he uses the Young Man to foreshadow Blanche’s fatal flaw and expose the importance of age in A Streetcar Named Desire. Elia Kazan’s adaptation of Williams’s play reflects this quintessential theme as he adopts Williams’s dialogue in Scene 5 accurately. Kazan’s film adaptation of Scene 5 is more or less true to Williams’s play as he encompasses the main themes evoked that of beauty, vanity and old age through the precise dialogue and the sequence of events. Nevertheless the similarities found in the adaptation of A Streetcar Named Desire remain superficial, Kazan’s interpretation of Williams’s stage directions in regard to the Young man are poles apart. Although the original and its film adaptation aim to foreshadow Blanche’s denouement and portray the fear of vanishing beauty…
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…
Thesis: In the play A Streetcar Named Desire Tennessee Williams ultimately portrays the struggles of a woman in the 1920s. Through the demonstration of the main character, Blanche, we depict the struggles between alcoholism, the conflicts in social classes and the indifferences in sexuality.…
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.…
"Our fears are more numerous than our dangerous and we suffer more in our imaginations…
In Tennessee William’s play A Streetcar Named Desire, audiences discussed the explicit tension between reality and illusion developed by the theme of isolation. By situating at a time of transition in America where the modernism transcended the classical values, the isolation of Blanche due to her disparate semblances and adherence to delusions is represented as her loss of conformity. The arrival of modernist era leads to Blanche’s irreproachable deceiving of herself, illustrating illusions that eventually begets her discretion. This is demonstrated in the stage direction as “Her delicate beauty must avoid a strong light…as well as her white clothes, that suggests a moth.” Blanche’s beauty is conspicuous in an environment like New Orleans,…
By examining Stella's ineptitude to recognize Stanley’s true character, Blanche’s solace in her own fantasy, and contrasting them with Stanley’s hard set realistic view of life, Tennessee William reveals the only way to shield themselves from the horrors of reality is to live life in one’s own fantasy.…
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.…
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.…
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…
A Streetcar Named Desire, a play by Tennessee Williams, takes place in New Orleans in the mid-1940s. It follows the lives of Stanley Kowalski, Stella Kowalski, and Blanche DuBois and the story about a woman coming to visit her sister, which ends up going just as bad as any family reunion has ever gone. From the moment Blanche got to Elysium Fields, her and Stanley, Stella’s husband, appear as polar opposites and are constantly at war with each other. They never can agree on anything, are always arguing and shouting at one another, and want the loyalty of Stella all for themselves. Their constant power struggle can only end with one character the victor and the other leaving defeated. One of the main themes about conflict is that Stanley and Blanche are in a battle to win Stella and neither of them will give her up. However, Stanley and Blanche represent something bigger than two conflicting characters. Blanche represents the old south, with dying traditions whilst Stanley represents the new south where chivalry no longer exists and it 's every man for themselves and just like in real life, the old south is overcome by the new south.…