Blanche DuBois: The Antithesis of a Modern Woman Essay

In the book “A Street Car Named Desire” by Tennessee Williams, the story takes place in an apartment building on Elysian Fields street in New Orleans (Roman, 2011. pg. 2). The protagonist, Blanche takes a street car named Desire to get to, where her sister and her husband Stanley lives. The character that I chose book to write about was Blanche. Throughout this book Blanche shows herself to be conceited, vulgar and an extravert. Blanche is about 30 years old, a teacher in Laurel, Mississippi, and the sister of Stella. Blanche grew up on a plantation with her sister named Belle Reve. As her family died off, she ended up losing the plantation because her family didn’t take diligent care of it. Blanche was also kicked out of her home town for having sexual relations with one of her students. She was also known for getting around and sucking men dry. So, she had to move from her hometown to come live with her sister where she is going to stay for a while. However, her past is quick to catch up with her and may ruin her future.

A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams is a play about a woman named Blanche Dubois who is in misplaced circumstances. Her life is lived through fantasies, the remembrance of her lost husband and the resentment that she feels for her brother-in-law, Stanley Kowalski. Various moral and ethical lessons arise in this play such as: Lying ultimately gets you nowhere, Abuse is never good, Treat people how you want to be treated, Stay true to yourself and Don’t judge a book by its cover.

The arts stir emotion in audiences. Whether it is hate or humor, compassion or confusion, passion or pity, an artist's goal is to construct a particular feeling in an individual. Tennessee Williams is no different. In A Streetcar Named Desire, the audience is confronted with a blend of many unique emotions, perhaps the strongest being sympathy. Blanch Dubois is presented as the sympathetic character in Tennessee William's A Streetcar Named Desire as she battles mental anguish, depression, failure and disaster.

Tennessee Williams is regarded as a pioneering playwright of American theatre. Through his plays, Williams addresses important issues that no other writers of his time were willing to discuss, including addiction, substance abuse, and mental illness. Recurring themes in William’s works include the dysfunctional family, obsessive and absent mothers and fathers, and emotionally damaged women. These characters were inspired by his experiences with his own family. These characters appear repeatedly in his works with their own recurring themes. Through The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire, Tennessee Williams presents the similar thematic elements of illusion, escape, and fragility between the two plays, proving that although similar, the themes within these plays are not simply recycled, as the differences in their respective texts highlight the differences of the human condition.

“Stella has embraced him with both arms, fiercely, and full in the view of Blanche. He laughs and clasps her head to him. Over her head he grins through the curtains at Blanche.” (Williams 73) A Streetcar Named Desire written by Tennessee Williams exemplifies the theme of a struggle to attain happiness. The play not only portrays this theme in its characters and setting, but through the literary devices of Foil, Imagery, and Intertextuality. Williams took great care in applying each of these literary device techniques to the theme as he presents an intriguing contrast between Blanche and Stanley, vivid images both animalistic and broken, and imploring the use of the Odyssey to further

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.

A Streetcar Named Desire, Tennessee Williams symbolizes the main character Blanche DuBois as that to a moth. The story is of a fragile and neurotic woman on a desperate need for someplace in the world to call her own. Blanche DuBois, after being exiled from her hometown of Laurel, Mississippi, for seducing a seventeen-year-old boy at the school where she taught English, Blanche explains her unexpected appearance on Stanley and Stella 's (Blanche 's sister) doorstep as nervous exhaustion.

I would like to analyze a tragic heroine Blanche DuBois appearing in a play A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) written by Tennessee Williams. My intention is to concentrate on the most significant features of her nature and behaviour and also on various external aspects influencing her life and resulting in her nervous breakdown. I would like to discuss many themes related to this character, such as loss, desire and longing for happiness, beauty and youth, pretension, lies and imagination, dependence on men and alcoholism.

In Tennessee Williams’ story, A Streetcar Named Desire, the protagonist, Blanche Dubois is experiencing an early mid-life crisis because she is mentally trapped in a dreamlike past life that has clearly ended. Blanche burningly desires to return to her previous youthful days and tries to avoid accepting the

Tennessee Williams has become one of the best known literary figures on the American Scene and also one of the most controversial. A Streetcar Named Desire is a 1947 play opened on Broadway on December 3,1947, and closed on December 17, 1949, in the

Blanche’s Psychological Decline In A Streetcar Named Desire, Tennessee Williams characterizes Blanche DuBois as a woman who uses deception as a way to be immersed in her fiction of sexual desire and snobbery and pursues this to shield herself from the harsh truth of her situation which Stanley unfolds and leads her to become weak and psychologically confused. Blanche’s physical appearance is very important to her and links to her social class. Blanche Dubois appears in the first scene in a white dress, the symbol of purity and innocence. She is delicate, refined and sensitive.

From this point forward, Blanche has lost touch of reality, and Stella has no choice but to send her to a mental institution. Blanche is a tragic character who can be seen as both the villain and the hero of Tennessee Williams’s “A Streetcar Named Desire” through her misunderstood ways, more specifically, her reluctance to modern city-life, promiscuity, and relationship with Stella and

Tennessee Williams was a well known Modern English playwright. He was born in Columbus, Mississippi and moved to St. Louis, then to Memphis, and later graduated from the University of Iowa in 1983. Williams began to turn his short stories into plays and later on into films. His wildest audiences were in contemporary dramatic literature. Williams’s plays have been produced in England, France, Hally, Germany, Greece, Austria, Switzerland, Holland, Poland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Belgium, Cuba and Mexico. One of William’s most intriguing plays is Streetcar named Desire. Streetcar was produced around 1947. The “setting of Streetcar” is a combination of raw realism and deliberate fantasy” (Riddel 16). The main character of the play is Ms.

When we look at the drama in A Streetcar Named Desire (Williams) I would say Blanche DuBois is worth a closer look at. Blanche DuBois is a confused-delightful figure. She’s out of place both geographically and temporally (that is, she's stuck in the wrong time). Blanche is lost, confused, and conflicted, lashing out in sexual ways, and living in her own fantasies. With her fictional past as a teacher of American literature and her former social conditions like the Old South traditions Blanche could be every human being transferring to another culture with different social and traditional backgrounds and customs she has to cope with. And still in today's society it could happen that someone is suddenly confronted with totally new and different

This study explores the mythic dimension of one of Tennessee Williams’s best-known and most enduring plays. The author’s revival of ancient myths and archetypes in Streetcar illustrates his professed