Topic > A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams: Blanche's Personal Identity

Blanche is a character who has been conditioned by the society in which she grew up, her background has influenced her personality. Dissatisfied with her life, she cannot or does not want to change it for the better. He prefers to retreat from reality into illusions and fantasies, building multiple facades of his identity, which he presents to the characters he interacts with. She was raised to imitate the ideal of Southern femininity: the beautiful woman, sometimes shy, sometimes flirtatious but always chaste. But the harsh realities of 20th-century urban America contradict this ideal, and Blanche is disillusioned, forced to make her own way in a world that doesn't understand her and that she doesn't understand. Her promiscuity and alcoholism are means of escaping these difficulties, as she tries and fails to reconcile reality and illusion, to reconcile the woman she is with the woman she wants to be and wants others to believe she is. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay The key to the negative turn her life has taken is the discovery that her beloved young husband was homosexual and the shock of his subsequent suicide. Blanche tells Mitch about this traumatic experience and her disgust and revulsion: “It was because, on the dance floor – unable to contain myself – I suddenly said – I saw! I know! You disgust me!" She turned her back on him and instead of offering him love and the possibility of a heterosexual life, she offered him hatred and contempt. Gripped by a mixture of remorse and self-pity, Blanche has no way to come to terms with the disaster, her shock becomes illness, and illness ultimately triumphs, as Blanche is sent to a mental institution at the end of the play is Stanley Becoming her destroyer, he also becomes the avenger of her homosexual husband As guilty of destroying Blanche as she is of destroying her husband However compassionate the reader may be towards her (after all she has lost everything: her plantation, her love, her dream of a life of gentle kindness) , she is still a woman who, in fact, killed her husband through her cruelty. In the last scene, when she is helpless and defeated, Stanley acts with the same kind of cruelty that Blanche was guilty of when she told her husband. which disgusted her. Blanche and Stanley are presented as complete opposites. From the perspective of their attitude towards the world, Blanche lacks the stamina to handle the stress that her experience in New Orleans brings, and ends up in a sanatorium. Stanley faces the world with vigor and his path seems destined for triumph. Endowed with sexual virility and a keen sense of the way of the world, he is ready to overcome all obstacles. In Blanche sexuality allies itself with sentimentalism, a kindness in decline but not without attractiveness, in a word, the collapse of a tradition. In Stanley, with a new coarse order, vigorous but rough and rude. There is therefore a dualism between victims and winners, a protagonist against an antagonist. However, this opposition is not absolute: Blanche is cruel to her husband, condescending to her sister, arrogant to Stanley. Although he is cruel to Blanche, Stanley is humanized by being a faithful friend to Mitch and a satisfying husband to Stella. Blanche's identity is divided between who she really is and who she pretends to be in front of others. Her true personality is determined by the environment in which she grew up. In her essay “Tennessee Williams and the Predicament of Women,” Louise Blackwell includes Blanche in the category of women “who have learned to be maladjusted through adaptation to relationshipsabnormal family members and who strive to break their bondage to find a mate." While her sister Stella left home to settle into a home in her own world, Blanche remained with her elderly parents well past the age of marriage for most women. As a dutiful child, she stayed behind trying to save the family estate, Belle Reve, even as the plantation was lost to “grandfathers, fathers, uncles, and brothers, who traded the land for their epic fornications. Because she had adapted to an abnormal family life, she was unable to adapt to her sister's so-called normal world when circumstances forced her to. His sister instead belongs to the group of women who "submitted to an overbearing regime". and often inferior in attempting to achieve reality and meaning through communication with another person.” Although Stella is superior to Stanley in terms of background and personal qualities, she submits to his way of life because they have a satisfying sexual relationship. When Blanche is disgusted by her rude husband, Stella explains that "there are things that happen between a man and a woman in the dark – that make everything else seem – unimportant." When faced with a crucial choice at the end of the play, Stella agrees to send her sister to a mental institution rather than believe that Stanley raped Blanche, demonstrating the lengths to which she will go to defend her sexual partner. Blanche builds a fantasy world in which she takes refuge from reality. Throughout most of the eleven scenes, she displays different shades of her role as a true Southern lady. At the beginning she plays the “grande damme” to her sister, criticizing her for the conditions in which she currently lives. In the second scene she plays the “sex kitten” for Stanley, while in the third she puts on the façade of a “fine lady” for Mitch, claiming that she “can’t stand a naked lightbulb any more than I can stand a rude remark or a 'vulgar action'. She later takes on the role of an "indignant aristocrat", complaining to Stella about her brutal husband and begging her not to "stay with the brutes". She continues to act like a refined lady in front of Mitch (even though, shortly before their date, she had flirted with the young man while raising money), but the memory of her tragic marriage destroys that role. In the eighth scene, Stanley destroys her aristocratic image when he gives her a bus ticket to Laurel, alluding to his humiliating past. She then tries to resume her role as a refined lady with Mitch, but ultimately confesses her promiscuities, explaining that she tried to turn away from death for its opposite, desire, but ultimately failed. In the climax of scene ten, she calls Stanley an animal, but he turns the animal accusation against her, calling her a tiger. In the last scene Blanche becomes a victim of her own Southern belle illusion. He confuses the role he played with reality, as he doesn't seem to recognize poker players. Her famous line to the doctor who came to take her away highlights her suffering: “Whoever you are – I have always depended on the kindness of strangers” – it is precisely this heavy dependence on others that has brought her to this point. The work abounds in symbolism, some lines, characters and objects acquire another level of meaning. For example, the famous paper lantern that Blanche uses to cover the light bulb symbolizes her desire to “mask the light of truth to make it more acceptable to her.” When Mitch asks her why, she states that she hates being in a strong light, which is also symbolic for her status as "a fading woman who looks best in a fading light." The two streetcars of New Orleans are also emblematic,.