Reality And Reality In Jay Gatsby's A Streetcar Named Desire

The reader may view Blanche as someone who tried to escape her sordid past in Laurel and wanted to start a new life with her sister, yet due to the continuous investigations from Stanley, was unable to do so. Stanley reveals Blanches’ lies and deceits, commenting on them as her ‘same old act, same old hooey!’ This tells the reader that his research of Blanches’ past is way of stopping her from finding a new life. Blanche attempts to redeem her life by finding love with Mitch, yet Stanley again reveals to Mitch that she was not ‘straight’, resulting in Mitch not wanting to be with her and also contributing to her fate. Stanley, after mercilessly divulging all her truths and bringing her to the edge of her mental capacity, rapes Blanche which brought about her final collapse. The reader may view Stella as someone at blame for her sisters’ fate, as though she shows some moral support of Blanches’ situation and listens to what she has to say, Stella continuously throughout the play neglects to notice Blanches slow mental deterioration and ignores Blanches’ outcries and incessant need for attention. Stella chooses Stanley over Blanche, despite her warnings about him being ‘volatile, violent and sub-human which represents not

Tennessee Williams uses the constant battle between illusion and reality as a theme throughout his play A Streetcar Named Desire. Many use illusion to escape the reality they are living in. This theme is present in all of his characters in different ways.

     This play takes place in New Orleans Louisiana. New Orleans is a very lively town that is known as a party town and for it being a rough town. New Orleans is a town in which inhibition is suppressed and people try to have fun all the time, while not worrying about the little things in life. This is especially true for the French quarter of New Orleans, which is the setting for this play. New Orleans is know for Mardi Gras and illusion, but it is also a city of reality. Blanche does not

Blanche repeatedly lied to make herself look pure to others. It only served as a masquerade to hide her dirty, sinful reality. She lied about her age, alcoholism, promiscuity, and why she had to leave Laurel. When Stanley asked her if she wanted a shot, she replied, “No, I—rarely touch it” (Scene 1, page 1548). She could not confront her reality, so she retreated to her world of illusion. This was Blanche’s most prominent flaw. If she could have accepted things for what they are, she could have salvaged her sanity. If, from the beginning, she had been truthful to Stanley’s friend Mitch, he could have forgiven her. Dismally, Mitch would not trust her after finding out everything she said was fabricated. “I don’t want realism. I want magic! 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” (Scene 9, page 1590). Blanche feared lights which symbolized her fear of reality. She claimed that with Alan’s death, all light had gone out of her life. “And then the searchlight which had been turned on the world was turned off again and never for one moment since has there been any light that’s stronger than this—kitchen candle.”

Blanche Dubois is a troubled woman who throughout the play lives in a different reality, which she calls “Barnum and Bailey world”. She begins by going to New Orleans to stay with her sister Stella, and her husband Stanley for some time. At this time is

In this play Blanche has a praxis: She must get a companion to share her life with who can provide her with shelter, food, and financial support and that’s what makes the whole story happen. This praxis is created when two things happen: First, Blanche finding out that the man she married was having an affair with another man and he decided to shoot himself after she confronted him, and second, the loss of her house in Mississippi. These two things create her need of a shelter, financial support and food therefore she decides to stay with her sister Stella.

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.

As she sings this song, telling the story of her tendency to believe a more pleasant, warped view of reality over the actual reality, Stanley is telling Stella the horrifying truth about Blanche's scandalous past. These lyrics sum up Blanche’s approach to life. She believes that her lying is only her means of enjoying a better way of life and is therefore essentially harmless.

Both Gatsby and Blanche are vulnerable because of the illusions they create that form part of their identities. In the beginning of their respective novels, The Great Gatsby and A Streetcar Named Desire, they are cunning, calculating, and self-aware of their illusions. They try to escape from their barren pasts and create entirely new, magical lives for themselves, ones that they are able to control. Gatsby exudes power, status, and confidence, “picking his words with great care” at his party so that he can attain Daisy. Blanche is equally careful, telling herself to “ keep hold of [my]self” and restraining the amount of alcohol she drinks. But as the novel progresses and they unravel their true selves, they forget where they stem from and begin to believe in the magical world they are creating. Gatsby becomes so infatuated with Daisy that he completely forgets about the impracticality of their relationship as Daisy is already married to Tom; he thinks that he can “fix everything just the way it was before” with the power of his persona. Similarly, Blanche begins to believe that she can marry Mitch and achieve her dreams of being wealthy, being respected, and having an ideal relationship but without telling anybody about her past. But once they are close to achieving their dreams, their illusions are shattered by more powerful characters in the novel. Daisy openly admits her love for Gatsby, and they begin to regain the love they once shared, but Tom shatters both Gatsby’s

She begins to ramble on more, have more delusions and lie about crazy things such as Shep Huntleigh inviting her on a cruise to the Caribbean. She begins to shower more often or “hydrotherapy” as she calls it, because it “is necessary for her probably to wash away the feeling of guilt as also the stains of her promiscuous life” (Kataria 96). As the play comes to an end, Blanche becomes more psychotic and no one is on her side. Blanche appears to swirl into oblivion towards the end of the play when a fiight with Stanley gets physical. “She finally realizes to her dismay that she has lost her reputation, a place to go to, and what is worse, her charm. This realization, painful as it is, coupled with the rape, sends her reeling into a world of shadows from which she was never really far away” (Kataria 182.)

  Returning to the beginning of the play, Blanche, shocked with the dirtiness and gloominess of Stella and Stanley's home in New Orleans, looks out the window and says "Out there I suppose is the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir!", to which Stella replies "No honey, those are the L and N tracks." Blanche would assume that something so common and simple as noisy, dark railroad tracks might as well be "ghoul-haunted woodlands."   Further evidence of Blanche's warped view of reality and fantasy is shown throughout the entire play.   She seems to hint to Stella and Stanley, and therefore the audience, that she is actually much more than she seems.

            Blanche is not really lost in illusions; rather she uses them as camouflage. She wears them as she wears her clothes and her glass necklaces, as protection from a reality that she finds horrifying. One must not think of Blanche as just a fragile, delicate blossom. There is a fierce desire in her for life at any cost. Her masquerade may

Which further develops his materialistic personality. Finally, Gatsby's will to recreate the past to recreate the past is so strong that it pushes him to make unclear decisions. Decisions like waiting ‘’five years and [buying] a mansion . . . – so that he could ‘come over’ some afternoon to a strangers garden’’ (63-64) are key in the novel that highlights Gatsby’s need to relive the past. The action of wasting five years of his life waiting and plotting to get Daisy back strongly illustrates his desperate attempt of attaining his goal. Fitzgerald uses Gatsby’s past romantic relationship with Daisy to convey Gatsby’s drive to recreate the past, which develops multiple aspects of his stubborn personality. Not only the past is a key component that develops the characterization of character in The Great Gatsby but it is also a prominent aspect in the play A Streetcar Named Desire.

In the play A Streetcar Named Desire (ASND) by Tennessee Williams, one of the big themes from the play is the theme of illusion. Stella, Stanley, and Blanche allow illusion to shape and control their lives because they all see it as the best way towards happiness. Blanche’s life is an illusion because she wants to believe that she is still young, beautiful, and innocent while trying to hide from her past. While the role that illusion plays in Stella’s life is the fact that while she can see that her marriage is far from perfect, she acts like nothing is wrong just to keep herself from not having the family she would like. Stanley’s illusion is his delusion between love and desire, and not being