Major Themes of A Streetcar Named Desire Essay

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.

This essay will describe whether or not Blanches’ unfortunate eventual mental collapse was due to her being a victim of the society she went to seek comfort in, or if she was solely or at least partly responsible. The factors and issues that will be discussed include, Blanches’ deceitful behaviour and romantic delusions which may have lead to her eventual downfall, the role Stanley ended up playing with his relentless investigations of her past and the continuous revelations of it, the part society and ‘new America’ played in stifling her desires and throwing her into a world she could not relate to or abide by.

An astonishing drama was written and captured the attention of many people. Behind the success of the drama is the author. Tennessee Williams wrote A Streetcar Named Desire back in 1947 with the setting of New Orleans in the 1940s. A Streetcar Named Desire was famous that Williams recived the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. New Orleans inspired many of his plays such as A Streetcar Named Desire when he moved to Old South after college (“Tennessee Williams Biography.” Biography). Williams’s dramas were based on the way life was in New Orleans during the 1940s. His dramas were also inspired by the people he encountered throughout his life. The story contains numerous themes and symbolism, especially the meaning of the title. The play has many ironies

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.

It is clear that Blanche DuBois is willing to do what she believes is necessary to get what she wants. This often includes deceit. She feels that she needs to lie about herself in order to seem more appealing. Because Blanche is so afraid of aging, she keeps her age to herself. While she is dating Mitch, she often deceives him by never letting him see her in bright light in order to conceal her faded looks. When she comes to New Orleans, Blanche does not tell her sister that she was fired from her job; she says that she is merely taking a vacation from the job. She says this in order to keep up the fake persona she holds. Blanche is very open about her lies with her sister. “I know I fib a good deal. After all, a woman's charm is fifty per cent illusion, but when a thing is important I tell the truth.” (69) This shows that Blanche’s lifelong choice of avoiding harsh realities leads to her breakdown. With all of the lies and deceit Blanche tells, she is living an unreal existence.

Blanche’s and Stella’s reliance on men and inability to support themselves are used to illustrate the subliminal pressure for women to follow society’s norms. Women without men are seen as weak, and those who break away from their rigid social classes are looked down upon. Since these social norms have been instilled into Blanche, she believes that she has to have a man fawn over her feet at all times. She realizes that she is aging and thus by engaging in sexual trysts with men, she thinks that she is still wanted and that she still has a place in society despite her current status. “After the death of Allan - intimacies with strangers was

The way this theme contributes to Stanley destroying Blanches’ mental health is that his necessity for reality intrudes on Blanches’ desperate attempt at surviving illusions. Stanley is ‘simple, straightforward and honest’ (S2:pg.137*) and incapable of understanding Blanches’ delicate

Stanley is a character in this play, whose perspective is clearly reality based. Since Blanche’s outlook on life is fantasy based, there is a lot of hostility between the two characters. Stanley is the one that always exposes the lies that Blanche is always hiding behind. He is constantly trying to get her to accept his perspective. When she finally begins to understand him, it’s too late. With such a huge change, she loses her mental state. Her personal beliefs get interchanged between fantasy and reality, to such an extent, that it seems as if she no longer realizes what is true or what is malign.

Stella, too, is a major character who lives in a world of hopes and fantasies. Stella’s tears over her sister as Blanche was taken away at the end of play reveals that Stella’s fantasies have been crushed by Stanley’s brutality. Stella calls her sister, “Blanche! Blanche! Blanche!”(142) , as if she does not want to let go of her sister. In spite of the fact that Stanley tried to justify and to relief her, Stella knows that something acquitted and abandoned had banished. She knows that her happy and humble world and her sister’s hopes had gone. Through her fantasy world, she thinks she could keep her sister for ever, but fantasy does not always work and makes life appear as it should be rather than what reality is. Also, Blanche imagines the doctor as a gentleman who is going to rescue her from a life that she imagines it as a life that does not want to accept her. Blanche finishes the play by saying, “Whoever you are—I have always depended on the kindness of strangers” (142). Blanche’s irony is demonstrated for two reasons. First of all, the doctor is not a gentleman; he came to take her to a mental health care. Second of all, strangers are not kind to her; they are kind only for trade of sex. Instead, they feel sympathy for her for creating a world where she is the victim. Blanche never perceives stranger’s kindness as something that people take advantage of. Instead, she thinks that Stanley is the one who does not treat her well, although he wanted

due to her past blanche’s actions are unusual and to many they are considered inappropriate. Blanche lives through some very dark and intense incidents before the play takes place, she witnesses the death of her entire family, she loses her family home, and to add to the misery she believes she is the reason her husband killed himself. In an act to move on she retreats into illusion acting as if these incidents never happened. Blanche decides to lie to everyone, from her sister to the man she potentially wanted to marry, she does not give them the truth. She wants to marry mitch but does not tell him about her past, mitch had all right to know, yet she led him on, actions like these in an environment of connection is inappropriate beyond a doubt. Because of her lies and illusions Blanche ends up losing everything, she loses her only chance at a future with Mitch and her freedom when she is sent to the mental institution. Blanches motivation by the past caused her life around her dissolve.

I agree that characters in the book A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams, use lying and deception to fuel their social status. These lies develop trust and relationship issues and threaten the wellbeing of everyone involved. Blanche, was a high school english teacher in mississippi who was forced to leave her life behind there. With nowhere to go Blanche moves in with her sister Stella and husband Stanley, who has a suspicion about Blanche's past life which lead to some unwanted events.

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

Although the constant strive of Blanche to maintain an impression of juvenility, purity and innocence in the night, her real guise succeeds to crack the shell of demureness and finds its place along the daylight of Blanche’s life.

In his article, “The Tragic Downfall of Blanche duBois,” Leonard Berkman states that Blanche’s tragic beginning and end do not meet at the same low point. He brings up the late 1940s and ‘50s American dramatist value of “the belief in intimate relationships […] as paramount among life’s pursuits” (Berkman). He goes on to describe Blanche’s struggle to not only achieve intimacy in her life, but her struggle to bring order and the difficulty at which it takes for her to form such connections. Berkman describes Blanche’s delicate relationship with her family and how her affectionate nature toward Stella, and that received from Stella, is mutually reluctant. He describes her previous marriage with Allan Grey as not a source of her fall from grace,

It started with the death 0f her y0ung husband, a weak and "perverted" b0y wh0 c0mmitted suicide when she taunted him with her disgust at the disc0very 0f his perversi0n. In retr0spect, she kn0ws that he was the 0nly man she had ever l0ved, and fr0m this early catastr0phe ev0lves her pr0miscuity. She is l0nely and frightened, and she attempts t0 fight this c0nditi0n with sex. Desire fills the emptiness when there is n0 l0ve and desire bl0cks the inex0rable m0vement 0f death, which has already wasted and decayed Blanche's ancestral h0me Belle Reve..