Blanche Dubois is a southern debutante who has lost everything most valuable to her. She lost the family’s mansion due to the deaths of family members. It broke the inheritance that she had with Stella. She’s a fallen woman in the eyes of society. In this scene Blanche is pretending to talk to bachelors who are infatuated with her while she is wearing her tiara. The beginning of this scene renews the differences between Stanley and Blanche. She is living in this world of illusion, luxury and falsehood. Stanley simply cannot understand it. In her earlier life, she was the most fancy, popular, and rich person. The mirror that she smashes represents how she is broken and fallen apart. Not only is she upset with herself, Stanley has ruined the way people view her by pointing out all her flaws just because she is wealthier than him and Stella. He thinks she is there just to use them. Stanley arrives drunk and not in his best mind set which already sets the negative and brutal mood of this scene. Stanley’s wife and Blanche’s sister Stella is at the hospital in labor while they are home alone at the apartment. This part of scene ten foreshadows that something is going to happen between them because Blanche and Stanley have never been left alone in the apartment together. Blanche rejects Mitch because she was once mean and cold-hearted to her ex-husband. She said that cruelty is unforgivable. Blanche views herself as being unforgivable for her actions to her ex-husband. At this
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.
Finally, Stanley rapes Blanche because “he has tried and tried to keep her down to his level” (Kagan 26) but she cannot go there. The rape is his way of getting her there. In the powerful scene where Stanley loses total control of his actions and strikes the person whom he has sworn to protect, love and cherish, William's shows Stanley's lack of control and hatred of the new threat in his life, Blanche. What makes this scene so important to the topic is the way that the three characters react once the party has broken up. Blanche is in her usual state of panic; Stella has retreated upstairs, while Stanley stumbles around calling out 'Steeelllaaa' in a drunken sweaty animal-like manner. Surprisingly Stella answers her mate's calls and embraces him, the two of them exchanging words of compassion and kisses. Stanley then picks up Stella and carries her off to his den to make love, which is Stanley's way of apologizing. Stanley has to be the dominant male figure in all his relationships, not only with Stella and Blanche, but with his friends as well. He is a leader and instantly rises to the challenge whenever his status is threatened.
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.
From the moment Mitch and Blanche met it was a strong connection, it had the sense of love, but that feeling of love changed to a feeling of betrayal and disgust; Once Mitch was informed of Blanche's web of lies and her horrible past. It started off with a little “fib” as Blanches says, about her age. From there it got worse, she betrayed Mitch by breaking his trust because she never told him about her dirty past. Blanche tried to cover it up by putting a filter over her personality, and that filter was her long gone southern morals. She had tried to hide her bad past from just lying to Mitch and deceiving him, acting as if he wasn't smart enough to find out. But the time did come for Mitch to find out about this ultimate betrayal of his trust, and once mitch confirmed the information about Blanche's past ; that feeling of love transformed to rear its ugly head of deception to symbolize what his relationship with Miss Blanche Dubois really was; just a
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.
Before one can understand Blanche's character, one must understand the reason why she moved to New Orleans and joined her sister, Stella, and brother-in-law, Stanley. By analyzing the symbolism in the first scene, one
Desire is prominent in Stella and Stanley’s relationship; Stella is drawn to Stanley because he has a strong male sexuality and he is drawn to her because of her traditional feminine sexuality. Stanley abuses Stella, and when Blanche finds out she is perplexed. Stella explains that, “there are things that happen between a man and a woman in the dark—that sort of make everything else seem—unimportant.”(1.4). Stella and Stanley stay together because they use sex to smooth out their disputes. Stanley views sex as an important aspect in marriage (Panda ). He views women as sexual objects; Williams gives an insight on Stanley, he says, “[Stanley] sizes women up at a glance, with sexual classifications, crude images flashing through his mind”(1.1). Stanley ends up raping Blanche at the end of the play; thus causing Blanche to lose her sanity. Although Blanche’s husband is only mentioned a few times in the play, the audience is able to see that his own sexual desire leads to his
A Streetcar Named Desire continues to build suspense among every page and through every act. Scene six begins with Mitch and Blanche returning from a long night out. Blanche insists that since the man and lady of the house aren’t home yet, that he come in. She leaves the lights off while she explains to him that Stanley simply doesn’t like her. Also, she tells him the story of when she was younger and how the boy that she loved and married had cheated on her with a man. It is then the next scene and considered to be Blanche’s birthday. Stanley tells Stella many lies that he found that Blanche had dug herself into while Blanche was taking a warm bath to calm her nerves. Stella refused to believe them! Meanwhile, the three occupied chairs
He desperate attempts to reinvent her self in front of Steila and Stanley ends up with her sympathizing with her self and allowing them to pick up on her disturbing past. On Stanley’s behalf they end up rejecting her like she rejected her husband and shortly enough she slips into her own insanity.
The damaged character of Blanche Dubois in A Streetcar Named Desire is led to her own psychological death due to her tendencies towards idealism. The streetcar that held the name desire promised a future for Blanche, it held empty promises of fulfillment that caused an immense amount of pain in miss Dubois's life. The car took her away from her own life and brought her to her own psychological graveyard hidden behind the promise of a perfect and respectful future. The first stop of desire was a transfer to a car named cemeteries where Blanche was confronted by ideologies contrastingly different from her own. The next stop was Elysian fields, this is where Blanche finally had the privilege of her utopia despite the winding and gravel road
The themes of A streetcar Named Desire are mainly built on conflict, the conflicts between men and women, the conflicts of race, class and attitude to life, and these are especially embodied in Stanley and Blanche. Even in Blanche’s own mind there are conflicts of truth and lies, reality and illusion, and by the end of the play, most of these conflicts have been resolved.
The way this theme contributes to Stanley destroying Blanches’ mental health is that his necessity for reality intrudes on Blanches’ desperate attempt at surviving illusions. Stanley is ‘simple, straightforward and honest’ (S2:pg.137*) and incapable of understanding Blanches’ delicate
The play A Streetcar Named Desire revolves around Blanche DuBois; therefore, the main theme of the drama concerns her directly. In Blanche is seen the tragedy of an individual caught between two worlds-the world of the past and the world of the present-unwilling to let go of the past and unable, because of her character, to come to any sort of terms with the present. The final result is her destruction. This process began long before her clash with Stanley Kowalski. It started with the death of her young husband, a weak and perverted boy who committed suicide when she taunted him with her disgust at the discovery of his perversion. In retrospect, she knows that he was the only man she had ever loved, and from this early catastrophe
Stanley, for example, exposed the aggressiveness within him when Blanche stays with Stella and him. This is evident as his animosity towards Blanche manifests in his actions toward her. From investigating her past, his sabotage of Blanche’s relationship with Mitch, to her birthday gift. Blanche’s fantasies are lies to Stanley and he responds with these deceitful actions allowing the evil within him to do things such as beat Stella and rape Blanche. Stella on the other hand, allows her nurturing side to come out when Blanche falls into her fantasies. This is evident in the last scene of the play when she goes along with Blanche’s fantasy to keep her calm from what is actually happening to her. Throughout the play, Stella always sides with Blanche as Stanley starts to uncover information about Blanche’s past. “You didn’t know Blanche as a girl. Nobody, nobody, was tender and trusting as she was. But people like you abused her and forced her to change” (8.50). This was one of the several times Stella stood up for Blanche as Stanley tries to expose