Essay about Character Analysis: Blanche Dubois

Tennessee William’s play A Street Car Named Desire offers a glimpse into the harsh reality faced by single southern woman in the 1940s. The 1940s was a time when females were viewed as delicate and fragile; therefore, it was understood that a male companion was a necessity to keep them safe and secure (Cook 84). The character of Blanche Dubois embodies the 1940s distressed female as she struggles with her environment. She is battling guilt, loneliness and financial insecurity when she arrives in Elysian Fields. Critics and audiences alike have mixed reactions to Blanche and her role as the tragic protagonist. In “The Space of Madness and Desire” Anne Fleche suggests Blanche is mad from the outset of the play. Others such as Leonard

Blanche portrays herself as a refined and sophisticated woman, but when you get further into the story you realize that she’s neither of those things. Blanche pretends to be innocent and good while she has a very arresting past. Implying unhappy sexual relationships, alcohol abuse, and death, which she wants to hide from others. Blanche likes to seek approval from everyone she meets because it makes her feel wanted and loved. But, she feels complete loneliness even when she’s surrounded by others. It’s as if she’s on a quest to find someone who thinks she’s special and loves her unconditionally. Blanche is a symbolic character, an alcoholic, and an attention seeker.

Tennessee Williams (1911-1983) was born in Mississippi but moved to New Orleans at the age of 28, there he found the inspiration for his play A Streetcar Named Desire. The play is set in New Orleans and cooperates the vibe of the setting particularly through music. Williams uses vivid music in this play which heightens its themes such as madness and social differences.

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.

Blanche’s fear of becoming undesirable has caused her to create an illusion in an attempt to revive her youth. Throughout the entirety of the play, Blanche is constantly worried about her appearance and looks for compliments from others. When she is first introduced, “her appearance is incongruous to this setting. She is daintily dressed in a white suit with a fluffy bodice, necklace and earrings of pearl, white gloves and hat, looking as if she were arriving at a summer tea or cocktail party in the garden district”

Blanche lives in a fantasy world of sentimental illusion because reality would ruin her. Throughout the play, Blanche constantly bathes herself as if she can wash away the dirt of her guilt and she only appears in semi-darkness and shadows, intentionally keeping herself out of the harsh glare of reality. Her sign of purity is an ironic illusion because of her growingly evident promiscuity, but even that is just a part of her act and is not the real Blanche. Blanche exerts efforts to maintain the appearance of being an upper-class young innocent woman, even though she is, by all accounts, a “fallen woman” (Abbotson 47). She says to Mitch: “I don’t want realism. I want magic! [Mitch laughs] Yes, yes, magic! I try to give that to people. I misrepresent things to them. I don’t tell the truth, I tell what ought to be truth. And if that is sinful, then let me be damned for it! – Don’t turn the light on!”

“A Streetcar Named Desire” is not only considered to be the best play written by Tennessee Williams but is also arguably one the greatest plays ever written. The play has a very Shakespearean sensibility with a southern twist while also having an original complexity woven throughout the entire body that became unique as William’s signature artistry. The most important attributes of the play is the construction and motivation of the characters, the juxtaposition of illusion and reality, as well as the relationship between the dialogue and stage directions. The play’s characters are ultimately defined and driven by their gender identity and sexuality, hence the title “A Streetcar Named Desire”. This is evident in the number of

Throughout Tennessee Williams’s play, “A Streetcar Named Desire” one can learn a large portion about his personal life. In the play the character, Blanche has a mental illness the same as his sister Rose had in her lifetime. Blanche’s ex-husband was also homosexual and he made the point to say that he left her for a man and Williams himself was also a homosexual. Tennessee chose for the story to be based in New Orleans, which was a crumbling town at the time and Williams was living a crumbling life, due to he was battling depression. In his plays a reader can see that he has different views than most men of his time, he developed many of these views due to his travels throughout his life. ““Streetcar” tackled themes of desperation, sexual

The disorder she suffered from may have had its groundings in that southern way of raising girls during that era. In the movie, Blanche relies on her upbringing to portray the helpless female image she uses to get what she wants from a person or in a situation. One of the lines in the movie caters to her narcissistic self, while at the same time using her belle of the south upbringing to her advantage when she was speaking with Mitch, a possible love interest. Blanche states, “I can't stand a naked light bulb, any more than I can a rude remark or a vulgar action.” By making that statement, Blanche first attempts to cover her aging from the harsh light and then pulls out the dainty little lady card by making the point of tolerating neither rudeness nor vulgarity.

Blanche does this subconsciously, always using the excuse that her “nerves are in knots” as she believes so. However, these are futile efforts that vanish at once when the night comes, as darkness is a true part of her and she is in love with the night that allows her to live out a fantasy of being a different person and having a different life: “I don't want realism. I want magic! [Mitch laughs] Yes, yes, magic! I try to give that to people. I misrepresent things to them. I don't tell truth, I tell what ought to be truth. And if that is sinful, then let me be damned for it!” Blanche is devoted to the idea of being a Southern belle: angelic, pure, without a single vulgar word coming out of her mouth. At the same time, she hides her alcoholism, claiming that she is “not accustomed to having more than one drink,” disregarding the fact that she takes frequent shots. Lying to everyone that surrounds her and in some way even lying to herself, she continues making fruitless efforts to present the image of an unsullied damsel. And yet, she still tries to wash off her self-disgust in the

In the opening two scenes of ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’ by Tennessee Williams, the audience has its first and generally most important impressions formulated on characters, the plot and the mood and tone of the play overall.

Social upheaval in many senses was explicit through the beginning of the twentieth century; two world wars had - for a short time - shifted the balance of power between men and women. Women were increasingly employed to fill positions which had previously been considered masculine. This was not to last however, and by the fifties men had reassumed their more dominant role in society. People were finding new voices at this time by taking pre-existing forms and pushing the boundaries to re-voice established literary forms. Tennessee Williams wrote A Streetcar Named Desire around the time this reversal was occurring in American society. Williams was a homosexual from the deep south of America, and his play is about physical, emotional

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

Tennessee Williams was an American writer known for short stories and poems in the mid 1950’s. His more famous writing was A Streetcar Named Desire. His writings influenced many other writers such as August Strindberg and Hart Crane. His writings A Streetcar Named Desire and The Glass Menagerie was adopted to films and A Streetcar Named Desire earned him his first Pulitzer prize. In A Streetcar Named Desire there is many elements that build the plot and story line. The story is about a girl who is drove crazy by his sister’s husband and eventually sent to the mental hospital. The main plot is towards the end of the story when Blanche Dubois is blackmailed by her sister’s husband and raped by him. Everything takes its toll on her until she begins drinking heavily and is thought to have gone crazy and placed in a mental hospital. In this story, many things play affect in the contrast of the writing such as Blanche arriving at her sister’s house, seeing her sister’s husbands attitude, the poker game, Blanche getting raped. These events make Blanche an easy victim. In Tennessee Williams, a street car named desire, the start of kindness turns to tragedy and pain.

Tennessee Williams' Use of Dramatic Devices To Create Contrast And Conflict In "A Streetcar Named Desire"