The Character of Blanche DuBois in Tennessee Williams A Streetcar Named Desire :: A Streetcar Named Desire Essays

The Character of Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire Blanche, S circulateas of age(p) sister, until recently a high school English teacher in Laurel, Mississippi. She arrives in New Orleans a loquacious, witty, arrogant, fragile, and ultimately crumbling figure. Blanche once was unify to and passionately in love with a anguish young man. He killed him egotism after she discovered his queerness, and she has suffered from guilt and regret ever since. Blanche watched parents and relatives, all the grey guard, die off, and then had to endure foreclosure on the family estate. Cracking under the strain, or peradventure yielding to urges so long suppressed that they now could no longer be contained, Blanche engages in a series of sexual escapades that set forth an expulsion from her community. In New Orleans she puts on the airs of a fair sex who has never knget indignity, but Stanley sees through her. Her past catches up with her and destroys her relationship with Mitch. Stanley, as she fears he might, destroys whats left of her. At the end of the escape she is led away to an insane asylum. This is indeed the story of what happened to Blanche in the dally but what flaws in her own character were to blame for her subsequent tragedy. Blanche is by far the most complex character of the play. An intelligent and sensitive woman who values literature and the creativity of the human imagination, she is besides emotionally traumatised and repressed. This gives authorise for her own imagination to become a haven for her pain. One senses that Blanches own view of her real self as opposed to her ideal self has been increasingly blurred over the years until it is sometimes difficult for her to tell the difference. It is a challenge to go through the key to Blanches melancholy but perhaps the roots of her trauma lie in her early marriage. She was haunted by her inability to help or understand her young, troubled husband and that she has tortured herself for it ever since. Her drive to lose herself in the kindness of strangers might also be understood from this period in that her sense of confidence in her own feminine attraction was shaken by the knowledge of her husbands homosexuality and she is driven to use her sexual charms to attract men over and over. Yet, infra all this, there is a desire to find a companion, to find fulfilment in love.