Theme Of Identity In A Streetcar Named Desire

“You can disguise any set with lights and shadows” - indeed you can, even with a paper lantern. It simply depends on what type of “set” one has. It might be a scene, a place or even a person, as in the case of A Streetcar Named Desire. Tennessee Williams describes the main character in his play as a woman named Blanche DuBois, desperate to cover the truth of her real self. Although the constant strive of Blanche to maintain an impression of youth, purity and innocence in the night, her real guise succeeds to crack the shell of demureness, insecurity and guilt, which lead to her losing touch with the reality. She believes she is a victim of the harsh world that deprived her from love and forced to succumb to indecent desires. Feeling guilt and filthy, she tries in all sorts of ways to cleanse herself from the past …show more content…
As a young girl Blanche marries a boy, with whom she claims to had love just like a “blinding light”. She describes him as a tender and gentle man that eventually, turned out to be homosexual and Blanche admits that she said to him that he disgusts her, for which he committed a suicide. Dedicated to the idea of having a man beside her, who could make her happy, she throws herself into many unsuccessful liaisons. Blanche’s scared of her fading beauty and realizes that, in order to have better chances to attract men, she has to hide her true age: “- How many candles you putting in that cake? - I'll stop at twenty-five.” ; a woman that uses the night as an ally to trap men and find a love that she’s longing and craving for, hoping that a prospective husband [like Mitch] could help her to escape away from her miserable life: “…I think it was panic, just panic, that drove me from one to another, hunting for some protection-here and there…”