“A picture is worth a thousand words.” This timeless saying embodies the ability of imagery to convey multiple messages and themes in an overarching structure. Through detailed nuance, the playwright Tennessee Williams utilizes the imagery found in his characters’ actions and settings to surpass the...
“A Streetcar Named Desire” is a story of damaged people. Blanche DuBois, a repressed and sexually warped Southern belle, seeks either atonement or reassurance; she wants someone to help lift the burden of her guilt for her twisted sexuality. Meanwhile, Stanley Kowalski, a horrifyingly abusive...
A Streetcar Named Desire, Abuse, Blanche DuBois, Characters in plays, Domestic violence, Drama film characters, Fictional French-Americans, Marlon Brando, Stanley Kowalski, Stella Kowalski
By the time she speaks her famous closing line about depending on the kindness of strangers, it has become apparent that the ability of Blanche DuBois to survive in a world of men—and not just animalistic throwbacks like Stanley Kowalski, either, but men of all...
A Streetcar Named Desire, Blanche DuBois, Characters in plays, Kindness, Marlon Brando, Reality vs Illusion, Sexual Desire, Stanley Kowalski, Stella Kowalski, The Distant Future
Blanche in “A Streetcar Named Desire” is a character who will throughout the duration of the play invoke all sorts of contrasting, even opposite emotions. To analyze one’s emotions is no easy task, and to do so most effectively one must break the play into...
Throughout A Streetcar Named Desire, Blanche is caught between the contradictions of her own character and the society surrounding her. She persistently fights to conceal the truth of her personality and past, failing to comprehend the changing conditions of post-WWII, post-New Deal America. In the...
Blanche DuBois, Electric Light, Incandescent light bulb, Lauren Reed, Lighting, Reality vs Illusion, Sexual Desire, The Old South and the New South, The Play
Tennessee Williams’s play, A Streetcar Named Desire, illustrates the struggle of power between economic classes and the changes taking place in America at that time, regarding social status. The constant tension between Blanche and Stanley represents the conflict between social classes, and the clash of...
Achieved status, Bourgeoisie, Class consciousness, Karl Marx, Marxism, Masculinity and Physicality, Max Weber, Means of production, Middle class, Petite bourgeoisie
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 well as to others in order to recreate the...
A Streetcar Named Desire, Blanche DuBois, Characters in plays, Fantasy, Reality, Reality vs Illusion, Sexual Desire, Stanley Kowalski, Stella Kowalski, Tennessee Williams
In Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire, despite Blanche Dubois’ desire to start fresh in New Orleans, her condescending nature, inability to act appropriately on her desires, and denial of reality all lead to her downfall. Blanche believes that her upper class roots put her...
A Streetcar Named Desire, Blanche DuBois, Characters in plays, Dames Blanches, Elysian Fields, Elysium, Reality vs Illusion, Sexual Desire, Stanley Kowalski, Stella Kowalski
Using the first three scenes of “A Streetcar Named Desire”, it is safe to use certain words to describe Stanley Kowalski: animalistic, dominance-driven, and hotheaded. Stanley has grown up as a city-boy who developed a behavior that would drive most people into the opposite direction....
Since the focal theme of “A Streetcar Named Desire” is that of integration and adaptation, the relationship between Blanche and Stella is important and its function evident: Williams establishes a contrast between them. For example, when Stella says, in Scene One, that ‘the best I...
A Streetcar Named Desire is at its surface, an undoubtedly heterosexual play. Allan Grey, its unseen gay character, makes homosexuality a seemingly marginal topic within the play. But a deeper reading of the text suggests the opposite. Tennessee Williams uses heterosexual characters as surrogates to...
The brutality and inescapability of oppression is a dominant theme in literature as it is a key theme presented in A Streetcar Named Desire. Williams calls for the reform of social constructs such as patriarchy in this play and brings to light modes of oppression...
Abuse, Build-up of violence, Crescendo of violence, Domestic violence, Inescapability of oppression, Light modes of oppression, Male dominance, Norm, Oppression, Patriarchy
The postmodernist writers emerged after the Second World War, and their fierce critiques of human nature showed a race that was vile and heinous at best, with Tennessee Williams’s depiction being no different. In his play A Streetcar Named Desire, Williams explores the gruesome nature...
Throughout scenes 1 and 2 of A Streetcar Named Desire, playwright Tennessee Williams presents Stanley as extremely powerful and authoritative through the use of dialogue as well as stage directions. The audience immediately learns how strong Stanley is in a physical sense; however, we soon...
The tragedy in A Streetcar Named Desire can be interpreted through the medium of not just watching it, but reading it. Williams achieves this through the use of stage directions written in poetic prose, which create imagery with likeness to a novel. Arguably, the most...
A Streetcar Named Desire, Blanche DuBois, Cultural Conflicts, Domestic tragedy, Domestic violence, Drama, Poetics, Stanley Kowalski, Stella Kowalski, The Old South and the New South
The shape of American drama has been molded throughout the years by the advances of numerous craftsmen. Many contemporary playwrights herald the work of Anton Chekhov as some of the most influential to modern drama. Tennessee Williams has often been compared to Anton Chekhov. When...
Tennessee Williams uses a variety of techniques to produce a strong sense of dramatic tension throughout A Streetcar Named Desire, as he mainly focuses on the interactions between characters to create an edgy mood. For example, Williams’ presentation of Blanche suggests she is actually the...
Blanche is a character who has been conditioned by the society in which she was brought up, her background influencing her personality. Unhappy with her life, she is unable or unwilling to change it for the better. She prefers to retreat from reality into illusions...
After seeing a play such as Cat on a Hot Tin Roof or A Streetcar Named Desire, a viewer may be hard pressed to remember that there was once a time in Western culture when the revealing of a woman’s bare foot proved entirely scandalous....
Class differences lie behind conflict in the play. Through close analysis of the dramatic methods used in the play, and drawing upon relevant external information on social class in the southern states of America, show to what extent you agree with the statement above. Throughout...
Blanche DuBois, Bourgeoisie, Class consciousness, Cultural Conflicts, Marxism, Middle class, Petite bourgeoisie, Proletariat, Social class, Social classes
Introduction In the 1947 play A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams, the relationship between Blanche and Mitch is a key subplot in the tale of Blanche’s descent into madness and isolation. Whilst Williams initially presents Mitch as the answer to all Blanche’s problems and...
Power is the underlying current that runs through both Webster’s ‘The Duchess of Malfi’, a 17th century revenge tragedy, and Williams’ ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’, a 20th Century modern domestic tragedy. Both plays offer stark representations of power’s tendency to corrupt, a corruption that often...
Expressionism was key in many of Williams’s plays – so much so that it was he who came up with the term ‘Plastic Theatre’. Throughout his plays, and particularly in A Streetcar Named Desire, Williams uses expressionism to show emotions or themes which may not...
The measure of a man’s character is what he would do if he knew he never would be found out. Thomas Babington Morality is the very foundation of goodness and the pillar of righteousness. Immorality, however, is the threshold towards conspicuous malevolence. These two extremes...
Both Harold Pinter and Tennessee Williams depict vivid and intimidating oppositions in their characters Stanley Kowalski and Goldberg and McCann. The oppositions in both A Streetcar Named Desire and The Birthday Party strive to assert their power over their victims, Blanche DuBois and Stanley Webber,...
A Streetcar Named Desire, Abuse, Alec Baldwin, Audience, Birthday party, Blanche DuBois, Comedy of menace, Domestic violence, Harold Pinter, Intersectionality
In both Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar named Desire and Sylvia Plath’s Ariel, there is extensive concern for how masculinity and femininity are portrayed. Both texts present archetypical interpretations of gender as well as juxtaposing figures that undermine these stereotypes, either actively or passively. One such...
“Blanche is a victim of the fact that she is a female.” With reference to the dramatic methods used in the play, and relevant controversial information, show to what extent you agree with this statement. The play “A Streetcar Named Desire” written by Tennessee Williams...
A Streetcar Named Desire, Blanche DuBois, Characters in plays, Domestic violence, Drama film characters, English-language films, Female, Femininity and Dependence, Fictional French-Americans, Gender
A Streetcar Named Desire is a play which reflects the cultural tension that pervades after World War II. It was happened when an idealistic and ambitious American nation attempted to prove it’s superiority and it’s power to global community by attempting to and succeeding in...
112th Cavalry Regiment, A Streetcar Named Desire, Abuse, Blanche DuBois, Cultural Conflicts, Femininity and Dependence, Global conflicts, League of Nations, Napoleonic Wars, New Orleans
A Streetcar Named Desire and Blues for Mister Charlie are both concerned to a large extent with tensions between different ethnic groups and, since in both plays the ethnicity of each group defines its social position, different social groups as well. The two plays are...
The theme of contrast is key to A Streetcar Named Desire as it is so obviously displayed in every aspect of the play. Most importantly, Blanche is in a stark contrast with Stanley – a contrast which ends up being very problematic – and there...
A Streetcar Named Desire, Blanche DuBois, Characters in plays, English-language films, Holger Ernst, Reality vs Illusion, Southern United States, Stanley Kowalski, Stella Kowalski, Tennessee Williams
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