The aim of this essay is to present you with a portrait of Blanche DuBois, the leading female figure of the play ‘A Streetcar named Desire’ written by Tennessee Williams, a widely acknowledged theatrical writer whose works have been greeted with lots of admiration and enthusiasm. Most of his works have been generating tones of enthusiasm and admiration, attracting people’s interest constantly ever since their first appearance on stage. Some of his roles like the one of Stanley or Blanche in ‘The Streetcar named Desire’ or the one of Kim Cattrall in ‘The sweet birth of youth’ have been considered great challenges for actors and actresses respectively, hoping to be given the chance to represent a role of Tennessee’s classics. Tennessee’s plays deal with issues of great importance regarding human existence such as loneliness, the conflict between females and males, the collapse of personal dreams, the hide and seek taking place between one’s soul and social conventions and the effect of the family relationships and environment on one’s personal development and evolution. The aim of this essay is to present you with a portrait of one aspect of the thematic core of the play ‘A streetcar named desire’ which is the issue of desire. How is desire depicted as a concept by Tennessee Williams, how desire turns into the main motivating power of the main figures in the play and what the effects of a non-well-realized desire may be for one’s life, are the questions which this essay aims at answering.
The main thematic core of the play ‘A Streetcar named desire’ is the visit of Blanche DuBois to her sister Stella who is married to a Polish man named Stanley Kowalski. Blanche appears out of nowhere since she was supposed to live happily in their hometown and work as a teacher there. She shows up with lots of baggage which indicates her intention to spend lots of time at her sister’s house, telling her that she has taken some time off work in order to get some rest and deal with her pain on her husband’s loss and loss of their house. Stella accepts her and tries to make room for her sister in the borders of her family life. The three main persons enter a maze of relationships and conflicts developed which reveal unkown aspects of themselves and of their inner thoughts.
Blanche appears to have hidden lots of information regarding her past and her real reason of visiting her sister. It soon becomes evident that the reason she decided to move to her sister’s house to another town is the fact that she failed to keep a descent life in the place she lived. Not only was she caught to have developed a strange relationship with one of her teenage students and ended up getting fired and losing her job but she appears to have found shelter in alcohol and be suffering from broken nerves. She seems to be the female figure who feels bad at herself and disappointed at her actions but at the same time she does not seem to have the strength to take control of her life and make a new beginning. Quickly enough her past starts revealing itself since her attitude and behavior lead Stanley to digging into her past to find out what is really happening with his wife’s sister and why her behavior is so provocative towards men. Blanche appears to be the woman who tries to get hold of a man’s love so that she can find the shelter she has always wanted in order to deal with her personal failure and collapse of her life. Blanche ends up losing track of reality and since her last choice of a husband, Mitch, does not have the future she hoped for since Mitch tells her that he cannot marry a woman who has lost her decency, she ends up with being unable to deal with her reality of her life. The last scene of the play is the scene in which Blanche is transferred to an asylum whereas she has been told that she will be taken to the city where Mitch is waiting for her to get married. Stella cries since she cannot really help her sister deal with the wrecks of her life and Stanley talks to her with love trying to make her realize that each one is responsible for the outcome of his / her life and it is not in her hands to help her sister get well.
One of the most challenging traits and relationships of this play is the underlying relationship as developed between Blanche and Stanley. Each one of this persons represents the archetype of female and male sex respectively and as a result their conflicts and relationship is the portrait of the desire as experienced by both sexes and drawn during one’s life. Blanche seems to desire at first look to find a shelter where she can find the love and tenderness she believes she has lost forever. On the other hand, Stanley is the male who desires to be the dominant personality in a house and family life which is put into tempest upon Blanche’s arrival. Blanche is the female who wakes up all the primitive desires and instincts well hidden in Stanley’s soul. Stanley is the powerful male who lives happily married with a Stella, a woman of a low profile who gives in to his sexual needs and desires and follows his lifestyle and commands as portrayed during their living together. But this image is suddenly ‘destroyed’ or at least ‘endangered’ upon Blanche’s arrival. Blanche is a woman who wakes up the wild sexual instincts of Stanley and makes him angry at himself. Stanley feels on one side attracted to Blanche’s sexuality and on the other hand angry towards her since she makes his life upside down. So the whole action of the play goes round the underlying conflict between these two persons. In his effort to make her lose her power over him, Stanley tries to dig into Blanche’s past and as a result he finds out the truth about her life. He confronts her with this painful truth and suddenly he seems as if he gets control of his male power. Blanche starts finding shelter in false ideas and a false world in which she tries to convince herself that she can still have a chance to making her desire come true. She desires to be happy and she believes she still has a chance to make it come true. But this results in her being treated with distrust on behalf of her sister Stella who sees Blanche falling into the illusions of her false world in which she believes that a millionaire husband can provide her with the life she desires. The night Stella gives birth to her child, Stanley finds himself alone with Blanche in the apartment. And Stanley rapes her in an action of his to show his dominating power over her. Stella can never believe that Blanche’s accusations of Stanley’s raping her can be true and Blanche is finally taken to the asylum.
It is this portrait of the relationship between Stanley and Blanche which reveals the real masque of desire. Desire generally speaking is one the primitive motivating powers of humans. It is their strong wish, their desire which forms their dreams and empowers them in order to go after their goals and look into how they are about to act in order to achieve their goals. But each person’s desire is different and at the same time it may be self-contradictory. This is the ambiguity of desire as portrayed by Tennessee Williams who reveals in this play his mastery in depicting aspects of human nature. Stanley desires to have a happily married and calm life but this desire is in constant conflict with the primitive desire of being the dominant male attractet to a beautiful female like Blanche who he wants to conquer. This is the real underlying reason why he rapes her. She seems so difficult to be tamed but he desires to conquer her and he thinks he does so since he rapes her. But the moment his primitive desire is satisfied there is the most powerful desire again, which is the need to have a calm, family life and this is what he does. He manages to get rid of Blanche who seems to be an obstacle in his having a calm, peaceful family life with the low-profile wife of his so he takes all measures necessary that Blanche is sent away from his home without being a danger anymore to making him come face to face with his other sleeping desire of sexual satisfaction. Stanley therefore is a man torn in two pieces because of his double edged desire which is torturing him during the whole play.
Blanche on the other hand is a woman who has not managed to come in terms with her real desire and look into the deepest part of her soul where all her desires, the apparent ones or the suppressed one are hidden. Blanche is a woman who desires to have a life her siste full of safety and feelings of love which can make her feel secure and calm. But at the same time she is tortured throughout all her life by her selfish desire to be the most dominant female figure of all others. She wishes to be holding a powerful position in the society circle within which she lives and acts. She wishes to be the center of attention and this desire does not comply with her other desire.
In other words Blanche is another example of a torn into two pieces desire. There is one desire of one side of her character and another conflicting desire of her other half. It appears that Blanche has not chosen what she desires most so she ends up in the asylum where she finds the false world in which she will have to learn to live making and pushing all her desires to fall asleep. This is the only way she could go on living but of course she won’t have a real life. she will fall into the illusionary world of lies where she will eventually lose all her tracks of her desires.
Probably this is what Tennessee Williams wants to put across to his readers and audience. There is a great issue when it comes to desires. Not all desires can be fulfilled and neither can all desires be going hand in hand. People will come face to face with lots of conflicts throughout their journey in lives when they will have desires which will have no place it their lives the way they will have organize them. This is the compromise which Tennessee Williams wants to suspect his readers and audience upon. Life is not simple ad definitely is not characterized by only one-sided aspect. Tennessee Williams has been characterized as ‘the loner who would spend most of his time upon his typewriter’. Paraphrasing this it could be argued that desires according to Williams are the ‘typewriter’ upon which humans have to spend their lives in such a way that they write their lives’ plots the way they really desire.
Works cited
Bloom Harold, ed. A Streetcar Named Desire. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1988.
Gross, Robert F., (2002), ‘Tennessee Williams: A Casebook’. Routledge
Leverich, Lyle. (1997), ‘Tom: The Unknown Tennessee Williams’, W. W. Norton & Company, Reprint edition (1997)
O’Connor, Jacqueline. Dramatizing Dementia: Madness in the Plays of Tennessee Williams. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1997.
