One`s Destiny Many people would say that Blanche is innocent and pure. However her lies and difficult life experiences, it is proven that the way Blanche portrays herself is a pure show for the others. The play A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams portrays Blanche’s dramatic shift in beliefs, which through her encounters literally destroys her. Blanche originally grew up as an innocent young girl, but life was just simply a tough journey encouraged this to change her and cause her to become insane. Blanche’s own actions is what lead her to her tragic downfall by the end of the story, but many may consider Blanche a “victim”. Blanche’s dramatic shift in beliefs, which through her encounters, figuratively and literally destroys her. From the beginning, Blanche considers herself to be innocent, but through many conflicts she begins to suffer and regress mentally and physically.
Early on in the play Blanche Dubois was a wealthy, innocent, and beautiful young woman. After experiencing the hardship of loss, these characteristics slowly but surely went away. The tragic loss of Blanche’s husband, Allan Grey, and her childhood home in Belle Reve is what caused a turn of events in Blanche’s innocent life. Blanche Dubois had never been able to relieve herself from the guilt she feels due to the loss of her husband. Blanche is ultimately responsible for her husband's
Blanche’s financial decline, illuminating her vulnerability, links to Aristotle’s theory that the tragic heroine must fall, allowing the audience to relate to her. Her insecurities – “I won’t be looked at in this merciless glare!” stereotypically reflects the insecurities women feel about their appearance and age. The uses of imperatives and exclamatory sentences suggests Blanche’s obsession over her appearance, a flaw leading her to dismiss her true identity. Her inability to avoid drink and her compulsive lies, demonstrated in her frequent references to Shep Huntleigh’s letters, makes her a more authentic woman than Stella, who is described by Williams as the “gentle, mild and contented one”. Blanche’s loss of identity, dominated by her homosexual husband’s suicide, exacerbates her solitude – “The boy-the boy died. (She sinks back down) I’m afraid I’m – going to be sick!” The fragmented, repetitive speech Blanche uses illustrates her guilt and pain, whilst the physical act of “sinking” highlights the extent of her regret, giving a sense of foreboding for her downfall. Her guilt is also exacerbated by the implied physical act at the end which shocks the contemporary audience, who would not sympathise with homosexuals, evoking pity and reinforcing that “Streetcar” is a tragedy for Blanche.
The Greek tragedian Aeschylus once wrote that “a god implants in mortal guilt whenever he wants utterly to confound a house,” and as the creator of A Streetcar Named Desire, Tennessee Williams is no exception. The guilt of Blanche DuBois makes the emotional, tragic, and often extreme circumstances of the play possible. Williams creates Blanche’s vulnerabilities, including her dependence on others and her inability to face reality, so that her guilt over Allan’s death becomes the primary cause of her promiscuity, neurasthenic behavior and ultimate downfall.
In Tennessee William’s A Streetcar Named Desire, Blanche DuBois unveils the theme of the story through her representation of the struggle to maintain innocence in a tragically guilty world. The main theme of the story is that the façade of performed perfection will always be unsuccessful; fantasy cannot overcome reality. As hard as Blanche tries to hide in her fantasy, eventually truth persists and, in the end, overtakes the delusions she holds. Blanche uses her appearance to suggest innocence and youth, yet with a closer look, readers see that, though she attempts very hard to be, she is neither. She also has a symbolic relationship with Mitch; the further they draw apart, the further into madness she descends. While it is clear that Blanche is not entirely innocent, the author creates her as a symbol of such. This way, as she slowly loses her mind—and Mitch—she symbolizes the loss of said innocence. Blanche can also be considered an embodiment of Williams’s older sister Rose, who is known to have been institutionalized for her erratic behavior. Rose Williams’s inability to overcome her mental instability is directly represented through Blanche, a character who also cannot maintain fantasy and ultimately succumbs to reality. Had Blanche been able to sustain her pretense of innocence, it is possible she could have avoided the harsh realities of life.
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.
Throughout Tennessee William’s play “A Streetcar Named Desire,” Blanche Dubois exemplified several tragic flaws. She suffered from her haunting past; her inability to overcome; her desire to be someone else; and from the cruel, animalistic treatment she received from Stanley. Sadly, her sister Stella also played a role in her downfall. All of these factors ultimately led to Blanche’s tragic breakdown in the end.
The movie “A Streetcar Named Desire” contains many elements of insanity. The character that displays the most tragic insanity is Blanche Dubois. Blanche is from Laurel, Mississippi were she loses her home Belle Reve, after the death of her relatives. She then travels to her sister’s home where her actions lead her to insanity. She goes to her sister home as a fallen woman of society. She has a difficult time distinguishing between what is real and what is fantasy. Blanche Dubois is a complex individual who provokes strong reactions from other characters. The main factors are her lying, drinking and infatuations with men. Unfortunately, these actions drive her to the final breaking point and lead her to an
A Streetcar Named Desire is a play of multifaceted themes and diverse characters with the main antagonists of the play, Blanche and Stanley infused by their polarized attitudes towards reality and society ‘structured on the basis of the oppositions past/present and paradise lost/present chaos’(*1). The effect of these conflicting views is the mental deterioration of Blanche’s cerebral health that, it has been said; Stanley an insensitive brute destroyed Blanche with cruel relish and is the architect of her tragic end. However, due to various events in the play this statement is open to question, for instance, the word ‘insensitive’ is debatable, ‘insensitive’ can be defined as not thinking of other people’s feelings but Stanley is aware of
In the beginning of the play A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams, Blanche first arrives from Laurel Missouri and immediately becomes the antagonist. As the play goes on Stanley starts to go against Blanche. At the end of the play Blanche becomes the victim. In the end, Stanley sent Blanche off to a mental asylum. This plays demonstrates domestic violence. In the beginning of the play A Streetcar Named Desire, Tennessee Williams shows how society accepted it and ignored it.Stanley, one of the characters in the play, found domestic violence to be a positive and very sexual part of him and his wife, Stella's, relationship. Throughout the play, Williams shows that he believes that it is wrong.
In Tennessee William’s masterful play, A Streetcar Named Desire, the reader meets a middle – aged woman by the name of Blanche DuBois. Blanche lives in her own faerie tale world, one of a young, beautiful debutante, surrounded by admirers, and loved by all whom she encounters. In reality, Blanche is an aging woman who cannot cope with the actualities of life. She makes up wild stories, and when Stanley Kowalski, her brother – in – law, rapes her, the realities of life cause her to drift into absolute lunacy.
In Tennessee William’s famous play A Streetcar Named Desiree, the main character, Blanche Dubois, is a unique, multifaceted individual. She enters the play having experienced many tragedies in her life, which greatly affect the person she is over the course of the play. After analyzing all the details in the text referring to Blanche Dubois, from dialogue to stage directions, it is evident that she is a fascinating, complex character. During the performance, the audience is constantly learning new information about Blanche from scene to scene, which helps them to develop a better overall understanding of her. Also, the audience observes Blanche’s complex character to undergo several changes throughout the course of the show.
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 play “A Streetcar Named Desire” madness continues to get progressively worse in the lives of the main characters Stanly, Stella, and Blanche. Because of low self esteem and her delusional thought process Blanche is most affected by the madness. Blanche’s delusional life style leads her to compulsively lie, live a promiscuous life style, and alcoholism. Blanche tries constantly to deal with her own madness, but her delusional mental state is constantly effect by the people around her. Although she causes most of the problems in her life some of her madness is justifiable. By the end of the play Blanche can no longer fight off the madness and is sent to an insane asylum. Even though most of the madness that occurs
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
In the play A Streetcar Named Desire the tragic hero Blanche Dubois is a “Southern Belle” from Mississippi who was born to a wealthy family. Blanche is a former schoolteacher who says that she lost Belle Reve (family estate) due to cost of the funerals and deaths of family members, but she avoids the fact that she does not have a job or money when she goes to stay with her sister Stella and bother in law in New Orleans. She seems to be on the run from her past because of her husband’s suicide after she expressed her distaste on his sexuality. She later had many affairs trying to numb her grief on the death of her husband.
In Tennessee Williams’ story, A Streetcar Named Desire, the protagonist, Blanche Dubois, acts heavily on her primal instincts. After losing her husband, Blanche is “hunting for protection” because she feels she can’t survive on her own, leading to her “many intimacies with strangers” in a failed effort