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The Tragic Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire Essay examples

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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
Ethel Barrymore Theatre. While recognizing his compassion for frustrated and sensitive persons trapped in a highly competitive, commercial world, question whether he has not sacrificed his talent for popular success (Mood 43). “He [Williams] continued this study with Blanche Dubois of A Streetcar Named Desire (1947).” Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire is epitome of full-bodied male pulchritude and Williams’ most radiant symbol of virility. “In A Streetcar Named Desire the Southern …show more content…

“This play eventually became one of Williams’s most effective blends of lyrical vision and dramatic irony in the agony of Blanche’s cry against Stanley to Stella Kowalski, his wife and her sister” (Mood 53). “Blanche Dubois cannot live with what Williams and most men of our time unhappily regard as reality” (Mood 57). Blanche Dubois is an aging Southern Belle and an insecure, dislocated individual who panics about her fading beauty and constantly attempts to hide from reality. Blanche pretends to be a woman who has never known indignity. Lying to herself as well as others allows Blanche Dubois to make life appear as it should be rather than as it is. Blanche Dubois refuses to tell anyone her true age. “Throughout A Streetcar Named Desire, Blanche Dubois constantly bathes herself” (Qurine 260). Blanche Dubois feels as if these baths calms her nerves. “Blanche Dubois is a loquacious and fragile woman around the age of thirty. She’s a fading, though still attractive, Southern Belle who pretensions to virtue and culture only thinly mask her alcoholism and delusions of grandeur” (Qurine 262). Blanche Dubois is Stella Kowalski’s older sister who once was a high school English teacher in Laurel, Mississippi until she was forced to leave her post. “Blanche Dubois is driven by guilt over the very indulgences that give her brother in law Stanley Kowalski life a vital intensity” (Qurine 263). By the way of a Freudian

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