Blanche Dubois's Aggressive Response To Pain

Blanche is committed to a tradition and a way of life that have become anachronistic in the world of Stanley Kowalski. She is committed to a code of civilization that died with her ancestral home, Belle Reve. Stella recognizes this tradition and her sister's commitment to it, but she has chosen to relinquish it and to come to terms with a world that has no place for it. In a sense, Blanche is frantic in her refusal to relinquish her concept

In the end, Blanche Dubois is a tragic character. She works so hard to portray herself as a young innocent woman. She only wanted to have a good, clean life. Instead she acquired one full of pain, illusion and complexities with in her soul. Her life crumbles from her own self destruction. By the end she is able to release her true self through all the lies, drinking and infatuation with men. Her struggle with fantasy and reality is more then she can bear, therefore driving her to insanity. As she is taken to the mental hospital we can conclude that her self-torture is over and are witness of the final breakdown. All Blanche ever wanted was to be happy. Though she may have never obtained the life she wanted or even dream of, through the torture of her antics she is able to finally have closure.

Blanche has a devastating and scarring past in which her tragic flaw originates from. The elements of love, sex, and death haunt her until she is unable to handle it any longer and loses what is left of her sanity and sparks her unstable mind. To expatiate, Blanche was once married to the love of her life, Allen Grey, until she found

She said “I, I, I took the blows in my face and my body! All of those deaths! The long parade to the graveyard! Father, mother! Margaret, that dreadful way!” She fell apart even more as she saw all of her family around her pass away. She was face to face with death. They used flowers and ornamental caskets, but the funerals were the least of the problem. “Funerals are quiet, but deaths-not always. Sometimes their breathing is hoarse, and sometimes it rattles, and sometimes they even cry out to you, ‘Don’t let me go!’” This did not start her mental disorder, because it already existed, but it did not make it any better. Of course, all people must deal with the inevitable ending of life, but watching it all happen around you is different. She has to see people meet their fate and she sees that life is not a dream. The first death she had to deal with was her first loves and that is what starts her downward spiral. She came out of the dance to see where he had gone and heard people say “Allan! Allan! The Grey boy! He’d stuck the revolver into his mouth, and fired-so that the back of his head had been-blown away!” Ever since this traumatizing event she had a weakness for young men and hides under a façade of makeup, costume, and jewelry. If she is attracted to younger men she cannot attract them without looking younger herself. Blanche believes that

Blanche’s dependent nature makes her particularly susceptible to the effects of guilt, a vulnerability which Williams creates in order to allow her emotions to become so extreme that they lead to insanity. At the play’s conclusion, she tells the doctor that she has “always depended on the kindness of strangers,” (235) and although insanity has by this point deprived Blanche of her grip on reality, her statement rings true. Indeed, from Blanche’s first moments on the stage, the audience witnesses her dependence on others in both her imposition on the Kowalski household and her constant need for Stella’s attention and assistance. Psychotherapist Nathaniel Branden reports in The Psychology of Self-Esteem that moral independence is an essential element of self-forgiveness; a lack of psychological autonomy contributes to feelings of worthlessness and unquenchable guilt (Branden 165). Consequently, Blanche’s total dependence on others renders her incapable of forgiving herself for the role she played in Allan’s suicide. Instead of accepting her error and moving on, Blanche remains trapped in her emotional anguish, which grows in intensity and destroys her mental health. Williams creates in Blanche this psychological vulnerability because it allows him to imbue her with guilt that is severe enough to lead to madness.

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 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.

The audience always had the feeling that Blanche was a little nuts, but we see her condition worsening as the play goes on. During the final scene we see Blanche go with a doctor and nurse to, presumably, a mental hospitable. Eunice

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

The next major theme of the book is the relationship between sexuality and death. Blanche’s fear of death manifests itself in her fears of aging and of lost beauty. She refuses to tell anyone her true age or to appear in harsh light that will reveal her faded looks. She seems to believe that by continually asserting her sexuality, especially toward men younger than herself, she will be able to avoid death and return to the world of teenage bliss she experienced before her husband’s suicide. Blanche’s lifelong pursuit of her sexual desires has led to her eviction from Belle Reve, her ostracism from Laurel, and, at the end of the play, her expulsion from society at large. Sex leads to death for others Blanche knows as well. Throughout the play, Blanche is haunted by the deaths of her ancestors, which she attributes to their “epic fornications.” Her husband’s suicide results from her disapproval of his homosexuality.

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 reveals to Mitch in the end of the play, intimacies with strangers was all she seemed to be able to fill her empty heart with after the death of her young husband, Allan (Baym 2349). What Blanche obviously has not realized is that the unnatural, “messed up” relationship to her own desire has made it destructive and thereby inextricably linked it to death.

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.)

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

She turns to alcohol to help tame her nerves and to try and keep her problems from everyone especially her sister. Blanche lives in a fairytale world in her mind making it hard to trust and believe