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A Street Car Named Desire English Literature Essay

Paper Type: Free Essay Subject: English Literature
Wordcount: 1702 words Published: 1st Jan 2015

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A Street Car Named Desire by Tennessee Williams is a very controversial novel that involves many irregular topics such as rape, homosexuality and other topics. There are many conflicts and characters in this story with a fanatical plot. There are multiple characters in the story. Stella Kowalski Which is Blanche’s younger sister, around twenty-five years. Then there is Stanley Kowalski he is Stella’s husband. Stanley is the symbol of necessary force. He is usually nice to his friends. He is very loving to his wife, and mercilessly evil to Blanche. Harold Mitchell Stanley’s close friend from the army where they both served he is around in his thirty’s he was nice to Blanche until he knew about her real past, Eunice who is Stella’s upstairs neighbor, which is the epitome of low class in which she has chosen for herself. Last but not least of the Major characters in this story is Blanche DuBois and the one that is based in this writing.  Blanche is a destroyed female from the start in society’s view. Her family’s money and property are gone, her young husband committed suicide, and she exiled herself from society because of her sexual conduct. She also is an alcoholic that is not covered up in persistent means. Blanche in total is uneasy, corrupted person. She is an aging woman who lives in a period of continuous fear about her vanishing prettiness. Stanley rapidly sees through Blanche’s act and tries to find out more information about her past life. Blanche Dubois is revealed in the first scene clothed in white, the representation of purity and virtue. She is shown as fragile, sophisticated, and sensitive. She showed a sense of cultural inheritance and intellect. She can’t stand a rude mention or a offensive act. She would never deliberately harm someone. She doesn’t want reality she prefers to live in her own fantasy world. She doesn’t always tell the reality, but she lets people know “what should be true.” She although lived in a way in the past that would make any person hesitant. She is in universally one of Williams’ characters who do not belong in such a world in this time of society. Blanche was influenced by a succession of deaths in her relatives also the vital loss of the family estate. The deaths were vulgar and twisted. They demonstrated the ugliness and brutality of life that she had to accept in order to survive in such a world. In order to escape from such brutalities and to flee from the abandoned emptiness formed when her husband died, Blanche turned to alcohol and sexual promiscuity to help bear such tragedy’s and forget the tragic events in her life by alcohol. When she is bothered, the tune that was playing when

Allan committed suicide troubles her pending the large amounts of drinking, enough to hear the shot which then indicates the end of the tune. She is hardly a female heroine. Her kind of personality will constantly be at the pity of the vicious, realistic world of this time.

Blanche’s edition of Strictness and seriousness in conduct and religion most likely donated to her husband’s suicide. Her incapability to understand her fault led her into a void of fear and regret. A teenage girl of her backdrop would have almost no info about sex. She would surely have not a bit of the sympathetic and understanding mind that is required to deal with the troubles facing a bisexual husband. Blanche adores love for Allan, her total love of him the hideous unearthing of his sexual affair with another male. She had an evenly passionate repugnance for his deviation; also her astonishment at his aggressive reaction turned out to be the main essential plot of her life. Most of her actions throughout the story derived from this cluster of events. Her special spotlight on young men, even when she matured older, had indicated of a fixture on the youthful poet-husband whose writing she held in her trunk. The moment when Stanley gets his hands on the letters, she turned panic-stricken and nauseous. She has an attraction to Mitch since he has lost someone in his life also. She appears to have become a prisoner of her memories that happened in the past repeating it memories becoming a habit or preference in her daily present life. Also Williams has believed that he considers Blanche’s freethinking: for a lady originating from a Southern town to have lived such a self-sufficient life throughout the middle years of this century was brave without a doubt. Thus this wasn’t a life that she could be proud about. Her essential goal at such a period in her life is for a fine husband, even one as boring and awkward such as Mitch. He has a profound concern for his mother that makes him look like a sissy in the man’s perspective, which makes him cute and likable to Blanche a gentleman. Blanch frowns on his masculine violence when it turns to harsh, turning him into the position of the loving suitor. She recognizes that only during the courtship does the woman have the benefit that she supports by withholding sexual favoritism and asking for a lot of respect. Blanche knows the rules and regulations of the game of counter ship. Blanch and Stella both comprehend that the conventional female has not many choices she has to be a excellent daughter, protected and pure of heart never disobeying her father staying a virgin doing as told. Then there is the first-class wife, confined, faithful, honest and loyal to her husband cooking dinner always being there when needed.

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Last but not least of the few choices women have in a Patriarchal society is the good mother, loving and wise taking care of the children while the husband works. If she is obligated by her own situation to work, she must take on feminine duties educating the youth or nurturing and taking care of the old. It was not appropriate for a gentle frail lady to labor outside the quarters, but various accommodations became necessary when women more and more established themselves without male suppliers. Also inside the home, the lady was not anticipated to do the serious labor. Her main role was to be a spoiled doll, lingered on by servants, appreciated and loved by her husband and children. Blanch seek the security of marriage as any other regular female would in such times, but she finds marriage has its own troubles for wives. Blanch wedded for love, but she chose an incompatible husband for her kind of personality. Blanche’s frustration in Allan’s confusing sexual categorization might have showed Stella to choose an aggressively heterosexual guy of the wrong class in society compared to her it was not a match in those times and in human history love is never enough to keep a marriage or relationship afloat there was no respect honesty or loyalty in their marriage.

In A Streetcar Named Desire the concept of the paradox performing as the field of subdued yearning operates on a diversity of various levels. Thus for Blanche DuBois her phobic symptoms comes out as she bottles up the shocking occurrence of discovering that her husband is heterosexual which is Allen. This agonizing denial of her sexual adoration for him turns her into a state of intense promiscuity. This promiscuity talks for her necessity to manage her sexuality with men and be given sexual acceptance through their longing of her due to the dramatic events that have happened with her husband. The decisive testimony of Blanche’s need to authorize and manage her sexual wanting is her affiliation with a seventeen year old undergraduate. Blanche’s unattainable aspiration to have her husband to find her sexually attractive leads her into the sphere of promiscuity. The unmanageable case of her homosexual husband having sexual interactions with a male makes Blanche keen to not at all drop control to any man ever yet again. The paradox of this relationship is by trying to get men to keep their attraction to her she gets carried away and turns to a unmanageable, immoral behavior. In addition, her promiscuity

she turns herself unwanted to the man she wants to marry which is Mitch. The view of the paradox as the kingdom of reserved desire in Streetcar named desire is the structure of Blanche’s reality. Blanche’s incapability to digest the reality into her life’s tale is a indication of her craving to have a past that never existed at the start. Blanche’s creation of her individuality as the typical southern bell with an adequate kind of appeal is the dream of what her life perhaps might have been had she not endured the shock of the finding of her husband’s sexual course and loving of the same sex. The psyche of Blanche is controlled by a strong id that envelops all her actions to be unreasonable and stupid such as going crazy when Stanley takes the letters trying to convince her sister to leave her husband. Her very reality is transformed into what she wants without thinking her id makes her a own reality in which she is rich and living a luxurious life. Her sexual desire the wanting of a young man that will love her is due to the id with no balance from the ego or superego she goes uncontrollable thus resulting in her going to a mental institution.

In conclusion, A Streetcar named desire by Tennessee Williams is a very controversial novel with many interesting and peculiar topics that represents women in a more negative way than good Blanche being mentally ill and controlled by Stanley in many parts her total exclusion of reality resulting in traumatic events leads her to live in her own “Dream World” out of reality. The rape of Blanche shows how the working class is tired of being oppressed and disgraced by the higher class and the lower class rebelling against the higher class. All this shows the oppression of females in a man’s world or patriarchal society thus making this story anti-feminist and concluding that Blanche is mentally unbalanced. Her kind of personality will constantly be at the pity of the fierce, brutal world of this period in life.

Sources: sparknotes.com

 

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