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Hysterical Women In A Streetcar Named Desire

Decent Essays

Tennessee Williams once said that, “Every artist has a basic premise pervading his whole life, and that premise can provide the impulse to everything he creates. For me the dominating premise has been the need for understanding and tenderness and fortitude among individuals trapped by circumstance.” Williams is an individual trapped by circumstance who gained inspiration for many of the characters in A Streetcar Named Desire from his own life. The play consists of a dysfunctional bunch of characters: a hysterical woman, a ditzy wife, and an aggressive husband, each with a connection to Williams’s personal life.
The protagonist Blanche DuBois; otherwise labeled as the hysterical women, is the embodiment of Tennessee Williams in A Streetcar Named …show more content…

Blanche disgusted and saddened by the life she lives decides to create her own reality, the “beautiful dream,” Belle Reve. Belle Reve, the Dubois plantation, was lost due to foreclosure. Blanche lies about this situation and pretends she still has life fully figured out, for it is the only way she can handle the unjust world that she lives in. This is only the beginning for Blanche, as the play goes on her suffering worsens. Blanche’s hysteria is inspired by Williams's own mother, Edwina Williams, who has been avoiding similar problems. In an article written in the New Yorker, comparing Edwina Williams to other characters Tennessee Williams has included in his plays, it describes her as this, “Edwina’s many malignant qualities included being a frigid hysteric, given to manipulative bouts of fainting, and a non-stop talker, whose barrage of chatter oppressed her mute and hapless children,” (The New Yorker). Although Tennessee owes her for giving him the confidence to be a writer, he still admits that Edwina caused many hardships in his life, and had a deep, lasting effect on his …show more content…

Williams, taking on facets of Blanch, has related other characters to her in order to mimic the personal relationships in his life.
Stanley Kowalski, the aggressive husband, represents all the men who have mistreated Tennessee in his life, especially one in particular: his father. Stanley is boisterous and abusive. “Williams's father loved poker and drinking and his life at the International Shoe Company -- but not, Williams felt, his doubly strange, gay-writer son,” (Today in Lit). Stanley’s personality could not be more different than Blanche’s; in the same way Williams personality contradicts his father's.
Stella, Stanley's wife, isn’t the sharpest tool in the shed. She is fairly ignorant to her situation, and to the situations of those around her. In the story Stella doesn’t create her own thoughts, she simply follows and obeys others. At the end of A Streetcar Named Desire Blanche is sexually assaulted by Stanley while Stella is waiting to deliver her baby at the hospital. Blanche, being the protective and caring sister that she is, tells Stella the truth, but doesn’t get the reaction she expects. Instead Stella says, “I couldn’t believe her story and go on living with Stanley,” (Williams 165), and kicks Blanche to the curb, sending her to a mental hospital. Stella embodies the judgement Tennessee received in the past, as she represents the ignorant and unaccepting society that he lived

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