A Streetcar Named Desire Essay

A Streetcar Named Desire is focused almost completely on its three protagonists: Blanche, Stella, and Stanley. It could be suggested that this play was influenced by Williams’ own upbringing: his sister Rose was mentally ill, and Williams’ was a doting older brother. Potentially, Blanche was inspired by Rose and that this play uses his unique perspective to comment on the treatment of the mentally ill. Williams may be using Stella’s conflict to highlight this.

Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire, and Elia Kazan’s film adaptation of the play, are both perceived in different ways by the audience. Though Tennessee Williams advocated his visions for the film adaptation, Elia Kazan interprets this in his own way, and this is reflected in the choices made by his actors in their interpretation of their characters. Kazan and Brando’s choices emphasise Stanley Kowalski’s masculinity and downplay his aggression, and this unbalances the tension Williams envisaged between the “ravishment of the tender the sensitive, the delicate, by the savage and brutal forces of modern society”. Though, Williams’ idea of the decaying old world and the rising new world is evidently publicized in both.

In Tennessee Williams’ play A Streetcar Named Desire, Williams explores the internal conflict of illusion versus reality through the characters. Humans often use illusion to save us pain and it allows us to enjoy pleasure instead. However, as illusion clashes with reality, one can forget the difference between the two. When people are caught up in their illusions, eventually they must face reality even if it is harsh. In the play, Blanche suffers from the struggle of what is real and what is fake because of the difficult events of her past. Blanche comes to her sister Stella seeking aid because she has lost her home, her job, and her family. To deal with this terrible part of her life, she uses fantasy to escape her dreadful reality. Blanche’s embracement of a fantasy world can be categorized by her attempts to revive her youth, her relationship struggles, and attempts to escape her past.

In the classic fairytale of Cinderella, the main character is trapped in an abusive household. However, Cinderella’s self-perception of optimism and hope, enables her to believe that ultimately, her life will naturally improve with these attributes. True to her convictions, Cinderella gets her happily ever after by going to the ball where the prince falls in love with her. Cinderella is saved from her evil. On the other hand, Cinderella can be viewed as a victim who does nothing to enable herself to escape her abusive reality, insteads helplessly waits for fate to intervene. She does not confront the situation nor independently strive to improve her circumstances. Correspondingly, how individuals act when faced with conflict is strongly influenced by their self-perception. It is possible to become confused between reality and illusion, which is determined by their level of self-awareness. In Tennessee Williams’ play, A Streetcar Named Desire, the character of Stella struggles between the control of her husband and sister. Throughout the play, this conflict is demonstrated as she struggles with becoming aware of her abusive household and the contrast to the fairytale illusion she desperately clings to. Ultimately, Stella’s choice to maintain her illusion, rather than confronting her reality, is due to the self-perception of her need to depend on others and desire for idealism, which overall controls her fate.

The author, Tennessee Williams, does a phenomenal job of portraying Blanche Dubois as a deceiving, manipulative, arrogant person in his book “A Streetcar named Desire”. Williams first showcases these characteristics during the arrival of Blanche. This introduction not only sets a mood and tone but it gives us our first impression of Blanche. Overall this impression leaves the audience with a sour taste in their mouths and ill feelings towards the new girl. However, don’t be so quick to jump the gun. What if I said Blanche isn’t the villain she’s depicted as in this story?

The play A Streetcar Named Desire, was remade into a movie that was filmed in New Orleans. The film takes place in the 1950s with Blanche who moves in with her sister, Stella, and her brother in law, Stanley. The movie is about Blanche’s experience and eventually demise all in New Orleans.

From the very title of the novel and beginning poem Levi implores us to consider the essence of what it is to be human, presenting to us the thought-provoking question, if this is a man? Levi this way allows us to engage on an emotional level with the events of the holocaust and examine our own consciences, and as he details in his preface ‘furnish documentation for a quite study of certain aspects of the human mind’, and accuses society of subconscious reasoning that ‘every stranger is an enemy’. In explicit stripping the prisoners depicted in the text of their humanity, making this uncomfortably apparent to us as we are consistently encourage to draw comparisons, or rather contrast, with our own lives and hence are perhaps

A Streetcar Named Desire written by Tennessee 0portray a play center and revolving around characters and New Orleans. The two settings are completely different we are introduced to Elysian Field where the Kowalski live and then Blanche from Belle Reve a high class society. Stella has written to Blanche “She wasn’t expecting to find us in such a small place. You see I’d tried to gloss things over a little in my letters” (31). Blanche meanwhile travelled to stay with the Kowalski on two streetcars which will ultimately determine her faith she longs for desire but could not bear the sign of death.

A Streetcar Named Desire, by Tennessee Williams, is the chronicle of the tragic deterioration of Blanche Dubois. The play begins as Blanche enters the home of her sister after struggling to uphold herself and the family property, known as Belle Reve. Her sister, Stella, is “all [she has] in the world (Williams 13),” because all of her other known relatives had died. She is presented as a broken woman, therefore most of the audience sympathy lies with her. However, once Stanley – Stella’s husband – begins to question Blanche’s past, sympathy begins to waver.

The play A Streetcar Named Desire takes place after World War II in New Orleans, Louisiana. Stella is 25 and pregnant; she lives with her blue collar husband, Stanley. Blanche who is Stella’s older sister came to visit them and her and Stella had a heart warming reunion until Blanche had to tell Stella that there family mansion (Belle Reve) has been lost. Blanche has always secretly resented her sister because she has to stay behind and take care of their sick family while Stella left to live her life with Stanley. The longer Blanche stay there the more her and Stanley continue to disagree and not get along. Stanley believes that Blanche cheated Stella out of her share of the mansion and Blanche doesn't like that Stanley is so rough with Stella

In the film “A Streetcar Named Desire”, the producers do an excellent job of showing how the film plays with light and dark, illusion and reality, and brutality conflict. Blanche, Stella, Stanly and Mitch successfully portray the concepts of light vs dark, illusion vs reality, brutality conflict through various transitions of each.

After reading A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams and watching the film directed by Elia Kazan, I noticed many differences between them both. The difference for me was tone. As in any book the reader creates the characters, the dialogue is read and the tone and character dynamic is created in the readers own eye. As I read the book, I felt sorry for the Blanche’s character. I felt her story was a cover yet recognized her love and concern for her sister as something that was real and genuine.

Throughout A Streetcar Named Desire the dark and gritty filming allows the audience to focus in on the dependency that woman can show men. The film shows that both Stella and Blanche seem to need a man to be happy and complete in their lives. For example, when Blanche recognizes that Stella may not be happy she proposes going to Shep Huntington, another male, to save them from Stanley therefore making themselves dependent on him instead. Another example is that Blanche can’t seem to not have a man. She tries wooing Mitch almost immediately after meeting him in hopes he will keep her safe and allow her to forget her troubles.

The play “A Streetcar named Desire” is driven by the protagonist romantic Blanche Dubois and the other characters in the play. The fantasy of Blanche and the other characters is revealed in the play when they try to hide from their reality. The characters acts as if what they were undergoing did not actually happen or were not of any importance.  The play is well written by Williams as a work of social realism. The concept of illusion or fantasy vs. the reality projects the idea of characters who want to run from their real world.

Elia Kazan directed the film A Streetcar Named Desire and produce by Warner Brothers in 1951. The novel was originally written by Tennessee Williams and promoted as a play in 1947 and turned into a film later through out its success . The awards received were the Pulitzer price award in 1948 and was nominated for best motion picture, best writing and screen play. The novel was basically about a former English school teacher named Blanche Dubois (played by Vivien Leigh), who decided to join her sister at her house, Stella Kowalski (Kim Hunter) and her husband Stanley Kowalski (Marlon Brando) in New Orleans. During Blanche is at Stanley’s and Stella’s home, Blanche is trying to