An examination of the character of Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire

In Tennessee Williams’ play, A Streetcar Named Desire, the nature of theatricality, “magic,” and “realism,” all stem from the tragic character, Blanche DuBois. Blanche is both a theatricalizing and self-theatricalizing woman. She lies to herself as nicely as to other folks in order to recreate the planet as it need to be—in line with her higher-minded sensibilities. To that extent, a lot of her creations arise from a longing for the previous, nostalgia for her lost adore, her dignity, and her purpose in life. She is haunted by the ghosts of what she has lost, and the genteel society of her Belle Reve, her personal lovely dream. Blanche arrives at Stella’s doorstep with, essentially, a trunk full of costumes from her past. She is intensely self-conscious and a performer in the utmost sense. We meet Blanche at a point in her life exactly where few, if any, of her actions do not look contrived or performed to some extent.

In Scene three of Act I, she produces a small functionality for her suitor, Mitch, in her efforts to seduce him. She turns on the radio for soundtrack, directs Mitch to “…turn on the light above now!” and exclaims, “Oh, look! We’ve made enchantment (39)!” as she dances away as the self-cast star of the impromptu functionality. Stella applauds from the sidelines as her audience, and Mitch sings and sways to the music. This caricature of a production is repeated in Scene 1 of Act II, where Blanche assigns roles to others as nicely. With her slightly unwilling newspaper collector, she attempts to set the mood as narrator of sorts. Although he answers her request for the time promptly, Blanche chooses to meander into a dreamy digression—“So late? Don’t you just enjoy these extended rainy afternoons in New Orleans when an hour isn’t just an hour—but a tiny bit of eternity dropped in your hands—and who knows what to do with it (59)?” Soon after she drapes herself in a gossamer scarf from her costume-like trunk, she directs the boy across the stage of her space to receive a kiss ahead of his exit. Mitch’s right away following entrance with an “absurd small bunch of flowers” further emphasizes the surreal, parody good quality of this exaggerated production. “Bow to me first!” she orders adamantly, “And now present them!” Blanche’s deep curtsy and melodramatically impacted, “Ahhh! Merciiii!” give this scene a profoundly self-aware sense of the theatrical. Stanley himself indulges in theatricality at the end, when he dons his wedding evening silk pyjamas to celebrate alongside Blanche, who is clad in her tiara and “fine feathers.” Commenting on their mutual costuming, Stanley acquiesces, “I guess we are both entitled to place on the dog! You getting an oil millionaire, and me obtaining a baby (90)!” Even so, Stanley’s explanation for celebration is grounded in reality (Stella is providing birth in a nearby hospital), and Blanche’s purpose is pure fantasy.

Streetcar is filled with such instances in which audience and performer are one particular. The play has been observed by numerous as postmodernist in this deconstruction of the self. There is no correct self—just performances projected out into the world in endless recursivity. In her final confrontation with Mitch, Blanche comes to terms with her deceitfulness. “I do not want realism. I want—magic! …I try to give that to individuals. I do misrepresent issues to them. I don’t inform the truth, I tell what ought to be truth. And if that is a sin, then let me be damned for it! Do not turn the light on (84)!”

Significantly of Blanche’s fabrications outcome from an acute awareness of sexual double-standards she tries to offset—disadvantages that Williams himself was extremely attuned to as a homosexual writer. Blanche lies mainly to manipulate her situations to far better suit her feminine agenda, explaining to Mitch that she refuses to accept the hand fate has dealt her. Streetcar is, at heart, a operate of social realism. Blanche’s want to alter reality by means of fantasy is partly an indictment of the failure of modernity for women, a critique of the social institutions and postwar attitude of America that so restricted their lives.

Blanche lies about her age due to the fact she views it as another setback of reality. She puts on an act of propriety for Mitch as nicely, to greater match the function of a desirable, acceptable lady. As she confesses to Stella, “I want [Mitch’s] respect. But…men shed interest rapidly. Especially when the girl is over—thirty…of course, he—he doesn’t know—I mean I haven’t informed him—of my actual age (57)!” When Stella asks why she is so sensitive about her age, Blanche responds, “Because of the challenging knocks my vanity’s been provided. What I imply is—he thinks I’m sort of—prim and proper, you know! I want to deceive him just adequate to make him—want me…” Blanche’s creation of magic is borne of a necessity to cope with and survive reality. Her complete dependence on guys blurs her distinction among survival and marriage, and as an alternative she associates Mitch with valuable reprieve. When Stella asks Blanche if she even wants Mitch (following Blanche’s rambles of wanting Mitch to want her), Blanche’s response is extremely telling: “I want to rest! I want to breathe quietly once more! Yes—I want Mitch…Just feel! If it takes place! I can leave right here and not be anyone’s problem…” Her desperate obsession with securing Mitch’s desires glosses more than the fact that she probably does not need Mitch for who he is, only what he represents. Their differences are jarring, and his bumbling and boorish nature falls far from her romantic ideals. This is sadly reminiscent of her not possible enjoy for her closeted husband, Allan Gray—that is, really like of an image she produced. The part she created for her very first really like proved in the end unreal and irreconcilable with his accurate identity.

In her present desperation, Mitch represents a sort of emancipation to Blanche, who is incapable of seeing about her dependence on males for monetary and social sustenance. This limiting view deprives her of any realistic conception of how to rescue herself, and further deludes the logic of her planet and secures her downfall. Her obsession with her own sense of mortality stems from her inability to see life outdoors of marriage—a life of solitude to her is synonymous to destitution, social death, and basically, the finish of life as she knows it. 1 has an image of Blanche drowning, struggling to stay afloat, and her developing exhaustion from keeping up pretenses is ominous, marking a looming deadline for the tragic heroine. “It isn’t sufficient to be soft—you’ve got to be soft and attractive—and I’m fading now. I don’t know how a lot longer I can turn the trick (56).”

All through the play, Blanche also avoids appearing in direct, vibrant light as part of keeping her painstakingly constructed image. She especially avoids light in front of Mitch so that he does not see the reality of her fading beauty, refusing to go on dates with him in the daytime or to effectively-lit places. She also covers the light in the Kowalski apartment with a Chinese paper lantern when she arrives. Light also symbolizes the reality of Blanche’s past, and her inability to tolerate it foreshadows her escalating inability to tolerate reality as effectively.

Blanche describes becoming in really like with Allan Gray as having the world abruptly revealed by a blinding, vivid light. Considering that his suicide, the vibrant light has been missing—“And then the searchlight which had been turned on the planet was turned off once again and never for one moment because has there been any light stronger than this kitchen candle (68)…” The vibrant light reflects Blanche’s higher acceptance of reality back then, as well as her youthful sexual innocence. In the aftermath of Allan’s death, she has skilled only dim light through inconsequential sexual affairs with other guys, which represents her sexual maturity and disillusionment.

These sexual experiences have created Blanche an increasingly hysterical woman, and her frequent need to have to bathe herself is yet another kind of employing fantasy, in that they symbolically cleanse Blanche of her illicit previous. Just as she can never ever totally erase or recreate the previous, Blanche’s bathing is by no means completed. This use of water to undo a misdeed is turned upon Stanley as properly, whose violent temper is soothed by the shower after he beats Stella, rendering him remorseful and longing for his wife. Nonetheless, Stanley’s use of water does not serve to alter reality to the exact same extent. This disparity in usage is seen in their use of alcohol as well. Stanley and Blanche both drink excessively in the play, though Stanley’s drinking is social and Blanche’s is antisocial. Blanche drinks on the sly in order to withdraw from reality, and her drunken stupors enable her imagination to take flight, e.g. concocting fantasies of escaping with Shep Huntleigh. While Stanley can rebound from his drunken escapades, Blanche additional deludes herself and sinks into higher departures from sanity.

Williams dramatizes fantasy’s inability to overcome reality through the antagonistic relationship amongst Stanley and Blanche, which is symbolic of the overarching struggle in between appearances and reality. This struggle drives the plot, and establishes a tension that is ultimately resolved with Blanche’s failure to recreate her own and Stella’s existences.

Stanley’s disdain of Blanche’s fabrications stem from being a practical man firmly grounded in the physical globe, and he does every thing he can to unravel her lies. Nevertheless, a single quickly realizes Blanche and her fantasies are one particular and the same—the more Stanley succeeds at unraveling her produced-up globe, the a lot more he unravels Blanche herself—ultimately to insanity. As Blanche gradually fails at rejuvenating her personal life and saving Stella from a life with Stanley, her nerves make her increasingly hysterical over the far more minor upsets, and the smallest of setbacks appears insurmountable. It is intriguing to note that her final struggle with Stanley is also a physical a single in which he rapes her, causing Blanche to retreat completely into her own world. Whereas she originally colors her perception of reality according to her wishes, at this point in the play, Blanche ignores reality altogether.

The play also explores the boundary amongst the exterior and interior via use of the set. The versatile set permits the surrounding street to be seen at the exact same time as the interior of the Kowalski apartment, expressing the notion that the house is not a domestic sanctuary. Blanche can not escape from her past in Stella and Stanley’s home because it is not a self-defined world, impermeable to greater reality. The characters frequently bring into the apartment concerns and problems encountered in the larger atmosphere, such as Blanche bringing her prejudices against the operating class. The back wall of the apartment also becomes transparent at various points in the play to show what is taking place on the street. A notable instance of this is just ahead of Stanley rapes Blanche, and the struggles on the street are shown to foreshadow the violation about to occur within the home.

Though reality ultimately triumphs over fantasy in Streetcar, Williams suggests via Blanche’s final, deluded happiness, that fantasy is an crucial and beneficial tool, a vital force which colors every individual expertise, despite the inevitable triumph of objective reality. At the finish of the play, Blanche’s retreat into her own private fantasies enables her to partially shield herself from reality’s harsh blows. Her sensitive nature is observed in her reproach to Mitch, “I thanked God for you, since you seemed to be gentle—a cleft in the rock of the globe that I could hide in (85)!” To Blanche, the globe is challenging, cold, and unfriendly like the rock, and she is unable to face its indifference directly.

Blanche’s insanity emerges as she retreats completely into herself, leaving the objective globe behind in order to keep away from accepting reality. In order to escape totally, Blanche should come to perceive the exterior world as that which she imagines in her thoughts. When Mitch accuses Blanche of lying to him toward the finish, she answers, “Never inside. I didn’t lie in my heart (85).” Thus, objective reality is not an antidote to Blanche’s fantasy world rather, Blanche adapts the exterior globe to fit her delusions.

In Scene Seven, Blanche sings the popular ballad, “It’s Only a Paper Moon,” although she bathes. The lyrics of the song reflect Blanche’s fantastical understanding of herself and her method to life:

“It’s a Barnum and Bailey world

Just as phony as it can be

But it wouldn’t be make-believe

If you believed in me.”

Similarly, Blanche views her fibs as harmless and as a means of enjoying a much better way of life, requiring only her object of devotion to think in this imagined reality as nicely. Williams ironically juxtaposes her bathroom singing with Stanley’s revelation of her sexually corrupt past to Stella in the room outdoors. Right here, even inside the domestic set, these fantasies can't be compartmentalized properly. Though the bathroom homes a temporary reprieve from reality, the boundary in between fantasy and reality is primarily permeable on all levels—in each the physical and psychological realms, between the apartment and the street, and inside the two-area apartment as effectively.

While fantasy and theatricality begin with Blanche, they do not end with her departure in the play. As Blanche leaves with the medical professional, Stella is still living in denial. “I couldn’t think her story and go on living with Stanley!” she tells Eunice beforehand. Stella chooses to reside with herself and Stanley by telling herself a significantly higher lie than any ever concocted by her sister. The necessity of fantasy in handling reality is reinforced a final time, as Eunice assures Stella, “Don’t you ever believe it. You have got to maintain on goin’, honey. No matter what occurs, we’ve all got to preserve on going.”