A Streetcar Named Desire, Research Paper Example

Emotions can play an essential role in influencing how human beings behave. The impact may be even more pronounced in situations where individuals are not conscious of their psychological position regarding the daily realities of life. For example, a man’s love for a lady he wishes to marry may blur his ability to see the opposing sides of her personality. In her top play, The Street Named Desire, Tennessee Williams promotes this idea that individual emotions are vital in determining how such persons see reality, and these perceptions also determine their relationships with others in social settings. The author mainly explores the problematic subject of desire and how it affects people’s trajectory in life. And she has achieved this objective by deliberately framing the journey of characters and how their emotions contribute to pain and loss. In A Street Named Desire, the characters live in a world filled with illusions to escape their brutal reality.

The play features members of one family who have changed their residence to pursue their desires. One of these characters is Blanche Dubois, an English teacher who married while young and quit her job due to a series of losses to pursue life goals elsewhere. After she lost the family home to foreclosures, Blanche leaves Laurel in Mississippi for New Orleans to live with her younger sister, Stella. The latter is married to Stanley Kowalski. The couple welcomes Stella to their rented house, but soon Stella disapproves of this residence because it is located in a lower-class neighborhood. The relationship between Stanly becomes cold because each party does not approve of the other’s character. While living at Stella’s home, Blanche meets Harold Mitch Mitchell. Blanche also learns about Stanley’s neighbor’s brutal character, which she contrasts with Mitch’s personality. However, the friction between Blanche and Stanley becomes so intense that the latter leaves the Stanleys.

Perhaps the most prominent character who pursues illusions that prevent them from seeing reality is Blanche Dubois. Blanche arrives in New Orleans, an impoverished woman seeking the help of the sister and her husband. She was married as a teenager, but his husband died when she discovered that she was gay. Allan Grey was a handsome man who wrote poems but did not fulfill Blanche’s sexual desires and died when Blanche highly upheld his illusion. The death was caused by the nasty comments that Blanche made against her teenage husband. But the reality is that Blanche is a woman with strong sexual desires, especially for young men. Her flirtation and an intense kiss of the young newspaper collector are a testament to her unhealthy preoccupation with sexual relationships with men. In referring to her behavior after Grey’s death, she admits, “Yes, I have had many meetings with strangers, after the death of Allan-intimacies with strangers was all I seemed able to fill my empty heart with” (Zhao 464). Such statements show that Blanche chose to pursue the illusions of sexual comfort to deal with loneliness and grief, a strategy that did not work anyway.  According to Senejani and Mojgan, Blanche makes efforts to satisfy her suppressed needs with men strangers, which heightens her illusionary conceptualization of life and makes her fall into even more damaging challenges than previous ones (151). Therefore, the unreasonable desire for sex as a solution to marital challenges is depicted as false that be destructive to an individual because it underscores the value of desires over reason.

Even when Blanche knows that she is experiencing considerable loneliness in her life, she does not bring herself to this reality and, instead, chooses to live a life of denial with the hope of fulfilling her desires. Zhao posts that she is a beautiful woman who learned the codes of affluent life in the South and desired to uphold such values whenever she interacts with people (464).  In her social interactions, she always sought to portray herself and as a lady who enjoys life by following the stipulated codes of conduct. However, behind these expressions lay the reality of the mental anguish that the character is experiencing in her life. She pretends to be a young and happy woman when she is nervous and depressed on the inside regarding her age and waning beauty. The torturing psychological condition and anxiety reflect her continued expression of false-self (Senejani and Mojgan 152). The lack of acceptance of reality motivates Blanche to pursue men hoping that she would live a good life, but, unfortunately, such a decision worsens her life experiences in love relationships.

One of the other characters appearing to live an illusionary life to escape the reality they face is Stella Kowalski.  She shares a background with Stella because both come from wealthy families. Despite this background, Stella resolves to left Mississippi for New Orleans to marry Kowalski, who hails from a lower-class family background. She shares a passionate relationship with Stanley, which attracts a lot of disdain from Blanche. In point, Blanche is not amused by Stanley’s aggressive behavior where he erupts into a rage while playing the poker games with Mitch, which made Stella so terrified that she runs to the safety of her neighbor upstairs. The scene takes an exciting turn when Stanley recovers from his trance and calls Stella from upstairs, who responded by coming down and then accepting to be carried to bed. These are essential in building the story in that they depict Stella as a woman who chases sexual illusions, compromising her ability to discern the reality of her husband’s violent character (Zhao 464). It is clear that Stanley is violent, evidenced in his act of raping his sister-in-law at the end of the play, and also struggles with class identity issues, as seen in his distaste of Blanche’s derisive attitude towards their house. But sexual fantasies of Stella fueled perhaps by her ex-military husband’s muscular body structure blinds her from seeing the ugly side of the husband when she rejects Blanche’s negative views about Stanley and denies the allegation of rape against her husband. To a large extent, Stella is a victim of her own self because she chooses to pursue the dictates of the feelings instead of facing the reality of Stanley as an abusive husband (Zhao 465-66). Although she presents herself as different from her sister in valuing relationships and family, her denial of the rape incident reveals that she follows the desire for a sexual relationship, which prevents her from discerning the reality surrounding her. Therefore, she is lives under an illusion, just like her elder sister, Blanche.

The last character for discussion is that of Stanley. He is a veteran of World War 2 and lacks imagination which makes him impatient with Blanche’s pretensions. One of the most defining traits of Stanley is that he is an authoritarian character who does not respect the dignity of women and marriage as an institution. Therefore, he desires to dominate to fulfill his illusions as a man who sees women as objects. In the presence of other people, who desired domination and guided Stella in almost everything, a trait put him in collision with Blanche (Zhao 466). An essential defining aspect of Stanley’s desire is that he metes out domestic violence to Stella, but the latter does not see any problem with this situation. At the end of the play, he rapes Blanche, but his act does not attract condemnation of the sister. While Stanley is depicted as a good family man, Blanche is portrayed as an outcast. Perhaps the author aimed at rebuking society for condoning domestic violence and not defending women from this vice (Grogan 1; Senejani and Mojgan 152).

In conclusion, Williams effectively demonstrates how the pursuit of desires can lead to additional misery for people in social settings. If individuals cannot adopt a life true to themselves, it can be challenging for them to lead a fulfilling life. Through Stella, Stanley, and Blanche’s characters, Williams honestly speaks to the reader about the possibility of pursuing desires over realities in decisions. For The Streetcar Named Desire, acknowledgment of reality is vital for one to be successful and lead a fulfilled life.

Works Cited

Grogan, Bridget. “The Balcony Scene: Class, Descent and Spatial Metaphor in A Streetcar Named Desire.” ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes, and Reviews, 2020, pp. 1-3.

Senejani, Akram, and Eyvaz Mojgan. “Blanche Dubois’s tragedy of incomprehension in ‘A Streetcar Named Desire.'” Journal of English Literature, vol. 3, no. 7, 2012, pp. 150-153, doi:10.5897/IJEL11.038.

Williams, Tennessee. A Streetcar Named Desire: Play in Three Acts. Dramatists Play Service, 1953.

Zhao, Yang. “An Analysis of the Characters in A Streetcar Named Desire.” Proceedings of the 2016 4th International Conference on Management Science, Education Technology, Arts, Social Science and Economics (msetasse-16), vol. 85, no. 1, 2016, pp. 463-467.