Symbolic Dichotomy in a Streetcar Named Desire

¶ … Streetcar Named Desire:

The symbolic dichotomy and opposition between Blanche DuBois and Stanley Kowalski

Tennessee William's Blanche Dubois from an "A Streetcar Named Desire" is one of the most complex characters in dramatic literature. On one hand, Blanche represents fine, southern gentility. When she speaks of losing the family estate Belle Reve, in contrast to the practical Stanley Kowalski, she is vague about the legal and financial complications which led her to such dire straits. She simply does not seem to understand or care. "I think it's wonderful that Belle Reve should finally be this bunch of old papers in your big, capable hands" she says sarcastically to Stanley, mocking his emphasis on his legal entitlement to his wife's share of the estate (44). Hoping that a man will save her from her predicament, she flits like a moth in her sister's apartment, creating 'magic' with paper lanterns. She represents a fragile version of aristocracy that is literally and figuratively crushed by the Stanleys of the world.

Yet Blanche is also a highly sexualized woman. Although she relies upon the 'kindness of strangers' and the protections accorded to Southern women in traditional views of femininity, she lost her job because of improper relations with a male student. "I've got to be good and keep my hands off children" (99). She is devastated when her husband, whom she loved, was revealed to be gay and could not satisfy her sexually. Her need for sexual desire as well as sensitivity and poetry is not commensurate with her self-image as someone who needs constant protection and is above the earthly aspects of life. Within Blanche's own soul, there is a divided consciousness, that of a woman who has sexual desire and the ideal of the Southern belle who is virginal and decorous.

Throughout the play, Blanche is 'pitted' against Stanley. Williams makes this explicit when Blanche urges Stella not to sink to the level of 'the brutes' and to leave her husband. When Stanley rapes Blanche at the end of the play, he says that this is a 'date' that they have had all along, stressing the vengeful and brutal nature of his sexual assault upon her. "We've had this date with each other from the beginning" (162). Stanley's rape, although he is as highly sexualized a character as Blanche, is clearly a manifestation of 'tit for tat' rather than a sexual act, and manifests the duality between the characters. Stanley obsessively investigates into Blanche's past and deliberately sunders her relationship with Mitch, to show the corrupt nature of female southern aristocracy. He eventually shows his dominance over her body through force. Blanche can no longer flirt with men and hope that the kindness of strangers will protect her.

Stanley is proud that he has brought his wife Stella 'low' and taken her off of her Southern belle pedestal. He stresses that Stella loves this, when the two argue about Blanche. Arguing and violence is a kind of foreplay between Stella and Stanley, but while it seems relatively normal and harmless to a point when the husband and wife fight, between the oppositional forces of Blanche and Stanley it deteriorates in to a fight to near-death, and Blanche loses her sanity.