Streetcar Named Desire Tennessee Williams

Streetcar Named Desire

Tennessee Williams play "A Streetcar Named Desire" is filled with various symbols, literary elements, and techniques that carry special meaning and touch the reader's innermost thoughts. It places the reader in a particular historic time when society and a people used to coexist in different ways compared to today's attitudes. One of the most complex characters in the play, Blanche Dubois, experiences numerous incidents and has certain dynamics that solidify her tragic elements, such as leaving Belle Reve, losing her family house, losing a young husband to suicide, deaths of her family members, and these develop into dependence, desperation, superiority, and poverty. The play opens with Blanche's visit to New Orleans to be reunited with her sister. The play's ending is tragic because of the many downfalls and disappointments in her life, and the fact that instead of overcoming them, she allows them to ruin her life. In fact, she allows others to take over control over her life, signifying her life has spun out of control. She does not have control over her own mind, she has lost her sanity, and she does not have control over her future, as indicted when Stanley commits her to the insane asylum at the end of the play.

Blanche is a tragic character and the main character in this play. She is filled with illusions of what life should be like, but which cannot possibly apply to real life. Between reality and her ideals, she struggles to overcome her own weaknesses, but not nearly hard enough. She literally self-destructs by pretending and lying. She pretends to be an innocent Southern belle, but of course, she is aging fast and far past the young innocent stage. This is clear when she tells Stella, "Men don't want anything they get too easy. But on the other hand, men lose interest quickly" (Williams 81). She believes the way to catch a man (which she believes she must do to stay alive), is to act innocent and girlish, and she is not innocent and girlish at all. This shows how tragic her character is, and how self-defeating her dreams and hopes are, because she is setting herself up for failure, and she will not admit it. From the beginning of the play, the reader knows Blanche is a lost woman, left without a home, her attraction to younger men, and the death of her husband by suicide. The reader also sees that she has problems with drinking and sexual behavior. Overall, she is nothing but an empty human in society; she belongs nowhere, not even with her sister. She continually makes the same mistakes in her life, and these eventually lead to her tragic downfall at the end of the drama.