Professor Angie Willis
English 1102
14 July 2017
Over-Dependence Is a Dangerous Thing
Sometimes being dependent on someone else is necessary, such as when a person is too sick to take care of themselves. However, when somebody actively seeks to be dependent on the company of others simply because a person is insecure about themselves is when it needs to stop. People should not depend on the kindness of strangers, like Blanche DuBois did, but instead should learn to be strong and independent, because being too dependent is never a good thing.
Blanche is overly dependent on men because she is a severe alcoholic, insecure and belittles herself about her age. She seeks men to make her feel better about herself. She drinks because …show more content…
She is surely evocative of pathos. Nevertheless, on my reading Blanche can be described as pathetic only if one considers solely her irresponsibility, her self-deceptions, and her escapist actions as the fundamental truth about her. But they are not. Blanche is a deeply damaged person - damaged from her former life and from what seems to be an innate temperamental sense of horror. At the same time Blanche DuBois is a survivor, she is also something more - an artist fashioning a unique life. At the very door of madness, Blanche exits her sister's apartment like an artistic work-in-progress with her now legendary words, "Whoever you are, I have always been dependent on the kindness of strangers." Blanche DuBois has faced many horrors: death after death in her family; her unintended but thoughtless role in the suicide of her homosexual husband; her forced exit from her family's plantation for financial reasons; her exile from her town for sexual misconduct with some of her teenage pupils; her desperate, doomed attempt to find security in her sister and a new "beau" in New Orleans; her rape by her brutal brother-in-law; and at the end of the play, her coerced removal from her sister's house to an insane asylum.” (Tracy, “Horrors and Horror: The Response of