Blanche Dubois Victim

creates a dilemma for Blanche; she has never been rejected before, and I think this creates sexual tension between Stella and Stanley. It creates an atmosphere between them which comes to its climax towards the end of the play (scene ten), where Stanley says “we’ve had this date with each other from the beginning”.

Now the first really bad thing to happen was when stanley was talking to stella about how blanche must be rich, now stella didn’t really mind what blanche had she was just happy for her to be their. Blanche arrived back to the apartment/house and stanley would not all the way really ask how blanche had gotten her fuzzy coat or how she had all this nice jewelry but then he finally came out and him and blanche fought and he went through her things to look for papers and everything.

Though Blanche doesn’t necessarily want Stanley, she still feeds off the attention given to her. Though what Blanche does may be immoral, there is evidence of her wanting to be clean and virtuous. Almost anytime Blanche’s clothes are described, they are white, an innocent color. The reader can see that Blanche wants to be the virtuous person she often pretends to be.

The person may be unable to cope with losses or failures.” which in the case of Blanche, appears to be her problem. She showed the provocative behavior towards Stanley at first and during points within the movie while also performing to gain the attention of those around her.

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.

In the play A Streetcar Named Desire, Tennessee Williams’ portrays Blanch DuBoise as the character who suffers inner struggles all through her life. She is a fallen woman in the eyes of society. She would prefer to live in her own imagination. Her name is befitting for her in that she acts more as a woman of the night - she would rather be out at night or in the dim lights. She is a southern woman on all counts who lives in Laurel, Mississippi. Her life has been full of disappointments, death, and sexual propriety. Through her misfortunes, she becomes more unstable. She wants to create a life within her life to cope with all the stresses of her reality. Blanche is unable to find an escape from herself. She finds herself as a victim at the hands of her sister’s husband. Blanche hopes for new beginnings when she leaves Belle Reve from which she has been evicted. She moves to New Orleans to be with Stella, her sister, and her husband Stanley. Leonard Berkman “pities her and views her as a ‘misunderstood’ character, a tragic figure trying to start a new life for herself in New Orleans” (34). As much as she tries, she can never fully gain peace.

Blanche responds to all this pain by escaping. After going through life as a rejection, being fired from her job after sleeping with one of her own students, losing Belle Reve, and having multiple sexual discretions, her last resort was to flee and utilize her imagination to conjure up a whole new reality as a distraction from the pain. Blanche’s escapism can be interpreted as weak, but because Blanche only had her imagination, she kept herself under control in a world that is full of pain. Blanche creates her perfect world, dodging huge blows coming right at her, directing her strength to put up with the imperfect world she lives in, creating a world in which she is brilliant, vivid, and loved, not derided, discarded, or fading. This is how she survives.

Blanche has personally had a lot of loss already in her life, such as losing her husband, home estate, job, and even sense of dignity where she had lived. This dignity had been torn down by self-loathing and guilt from her husband’s death, and many rumors that were circulating about her. These rumors were a direct result of expectations and societies ideal image of how a woman should behave and look during this time. In “Overview: A Streetcar Named Desire,” Joyce Moss and George Wilson explain that as a southern woman who grew up in an area with aristocratic traditions, Blanche would have been “considered inferior to men,” but was also expected to be “virginal and morally superior to the male” (4). When gossip about her past caught up to her, she was treated unfairly because of her failure to meet these traditional standards. These standards came with many societal pressures that caused Blanche to create an image for herself; a façade to protect her from her past and judging eyes. She used this façade to maintain a sense of dignity, and it helped her to cope with the many losses from her

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

At the end of their discussion, Blanche breaks down in front of Mitch, giving him even more of a reason to cut ties with her. The one person in the story that was willing to fully give in to Blanche had inevitably given up on her as a consequence of her past and her reliance. This shows that you cannot rely solely on others to make you whole, you have to put in the effort to improve yourself otherwise others will view you as an inconvenience and that the wise decision would be to simply remove you from their lives. Stanley shows the biggest degree of callus towards Blanche. Stanley actively tries to get Blanche out of not only his life, but her sister’s.

Blanche was an English teacher in the town of Laurel and is motivated by the books she read from the authors she briefly mentions. Her knowledge and experience of reading inspired her to write, act, and live her life in fantasies and illusions; hence, it is what led her to believe that her lying is harmless and was essentially blinded to the harm she caused in Stanley’s home and her relationship with Mitch. Author Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote cautionary tales that suggest that guilt, sin, and evil are natural qualities of humanity and most of his works revolved around deep psychological themes that bordered surrealism. Hence, this author represents in her life all the frequent baths she took in the act of washing away her guilt from the death of her husband, and all her sexual sin. Walt Whitman wrote about prostitution in which Blanche slept her way in town

It was not just her self that put her in the lime light of being a victim; it is also her new change of environment and people. Stanley is Stella's husband; he is described to be very masculine and aware of his sexual magnetism. “Strongly, compactly built”. He is mostly at ease with people however, if they lack loyalty and affection to him, he will bully them. Especially women, as he believes them just to be easy conflict. It is seen in scene 3 that Stanley has little respect for women. “I said to hush up!” This is addressed to his wife who is seen emotionless and impassive in this play. As for Blanche how is fussy and at edge, she would be very effected by the crude attitude that Stanley presents and so tries to hysterical take Stella away from her husband. Stanley does not forget of this act of interference and makes him all the more determined to be rid of Stella’s “charity case”. The real reason for Stanley’s bulling is that Blanche immediately received all Stella’s attention. “How about my supper huh? I’m not going to no Galatorires’ for supper” This made Stella dominant in power over Stanley and Blanche, something Stanley was not used to. “I put you a cold plate on ice”.

It is clear from the beginning that Blanche is not a very honest character. She lives in a fantasy world of her own design. One of the very first things she does when she enters Stella’s

Although Stanley’s power works mainly to downgrade Blanche, his violent and aggressive nature also disempowers Stella. She is abused during poker night, a moment of masculine bonding. Following the poker night she is made powerful when she retreats to Eunice’s Flat. However, she returns to disempowerment when she leaves Eunice’s flat and Stanley ‘bears her into the dark flat’. Stella’s decision to stay with Stanley is not based on choice, but rather on the fact that she must. This enforces the dominant belief that women are unable to support themselves, emotionally and financially.