A Streetcar Named Desire Feminist Analysis

Improved Essays
A Streetcar named Desire’s time of production in 1947 depicts the metamorphosis of societal change in America’s ideas of society and the sudden naturalisation of the arrival home of war-ridden soldiers. Although the majority of America has naturalised to the hedonistic lifestyle and the freedom of society, the traditional values continue to subsist on. America appears to be in transition as is depicted through Blanche's fading southern values being compromised by the emerging New America that is represented by Stanley Kowalski. A dominant masculinity is presented via Stanley through brutal dialogue and shocking plot developments. A Streetcar named Desire is a dramatic text that revolves around Blanche DuBois and her visit to her sister, Stella …show more content…
Blanche challenges the notions of America’s change of society and her lack of femininity roles that have been exploited. In 1947, the time period post World War Two began the Baby boom era in which the societal expectation of women was to be regarded as a mother and a housewife. Blanche’s inability to confer to her feminine stereotype as a mother and housewife challenges America’s presumptions of women gender roles. Blanche portrays this masculine view through A Streetcar named Desire’s plot of Blanche’s suicidal husband and inability to achieve male company from Stanley or Mitch. Another aspect Blanche challenges is the ideas of the New America as her incapability to reform from her views of the Old South. Blanche represents the deterioration of the Old South by her ideal of the Southern values specifically in male attention of New Orleans. “Please don't get up” depicts Blanche’s contrast of the New American men to a Southern gentleman’s usual act as Stanley replies “Nobody’s going to get up, so don't be worried”. This deterioration of the society’s south is further unveiled in her deterioration of mental stability. Williams uses Blanche’s mental health to expose that the Old South was deteriorating in society and the New America had become the societal

Related Documents

  • Improved Essays

    In Scene 4 Blanche uses the image of “that rattle-trap street-car” to explain her sexual desire to her sister, Stella. Williams uses Blanche to explain that if one is driven by desire, it is inevitable that self-destruction occurs soon hereafter. Williams stresses Blanche’s ordained fate with the use of the streetcar image. Debatably Stella is also driven by the same force of desire because she dropped everything to be with Stanley. Her final ending is not clear, however.…

    • 1336 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    One theme that constantly appears in A Streetcar Named Desire is a contrast between the reality and fantasy of love. This dichotomy is represented by Blanche and her grasp on life. Blanche attempts to supplement the hard times in her life by creating fantasies where everything is going her way. While playing cards with Stanley, she states, “I know I fib a good deal.…

    • 316 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    After the war, the country experienced one of the biggest economic booms in history - with the return of soldiers came an increase both in the production and in the consumption of goods, and the economy soon soared after the end of the war. Consequently, you could say that America experienced a second Industrial Revolution after World War II. This revolution effectively killed the mystical charm of the Old South, where aristocracy and chivalry reigned. Women in the South seemed to possess an intangible charm that could enchant any man, and men prided themselves on their manners and a mysterious code of conduct that valued honor rather than industriousness. The ongoing power struggle between Blanche and Stanley thus reflects the battle between old Southern values and new industrial…

    • 687 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    To communicate the truths of history is an act of hope for the future-Daisaku Ikeda. The influence of history greatly affect literature and how we view it compared to other times. By using the historical/topical theory we bring to light how the major issues, circumstances that produced it, and main aspect of the book were influenced by the time period it was wrote in. The major issue in “a streetcar named desire” is the idea of sexuality.…

    • 807 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Great Essays

    From the first scene the audience learns that Blanche and Stella were brought up on a plantation and that Stanley and his friends are poor and uneducated. In the first scene the two families come together in a scruffy environment, it is therefore Blanche who must adjust to the situation. When Stanley exposes Blanche's past and when he rapes her, he turns her ‘upper-class’ upbringing (of which she is very proud) into something without any meaning. The conflict, therefore, is bigger than Stanley vs. Blanche or even male vs. female, it is the Old South vs. the new ind ustrial age and the upper-class life vs. the ‘common’ life. With Blanche, it is not only her sinful ways that causes her misery, it is her upper-class upbringing and clinging to the past that is one of the reasons for her downfall - a tragic end for a tragic character.…

    • 1478 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Where there is an appetite for desire, there is an appetite for disaster. Well-known American playwright, Tennessee Williams, in his iconic play, A Streetcar Named Desire, eloquently illustrates the life of Blanche DuBois, an impecunious woman that has moved to New Orleans and is now living with her sister Stella and her sister’s husband Stanley, after being evicted from her ancestral home in Laurel, Mississippi. Stanley is a catalyst in Blanche’s fall from reality, as he makes it his mission to exploit the secrets of her past. When all her hopes for the future have collided with her sins from the past, Blanche falls off the deep-end and succumbs to her own imaginative fantasies. Symbols are used to indirectly give the underlying meaning through objects, people, and places.…

    • 692 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    At times when individuals become wrecked by reality, they tend to cast astray from realism and begin to survive within the depths of delusions and illusions. And so because of their choices to elude from the harsh reality, they lose themselves among waves of self-oppression and in the course of time suffer from differentiating what is reality and deception. An individual who fled from her cruel past and the reality that substantially made her the epitome of psychological hysteria is Blanche Dubois; the protagonist of the Southern Gothic novel, A Streetcar Named Desire, composed by Tennessee Williams. It focuses on her recurring psychotic meltdowns as she suffers from the graveyard of her former self. She is an ocean and the sea who becomes…

    • 890 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    Gender equality has been debatably the most pressing issue for the last century. Unfortunately for many this equilibrium between the rights of men and women has yet to be reached. Throughout the play A Streetcar Named Desire, it becomes clear that characters conform to gender roles, which have been set forth in our history. More specifically in the way men treat women and how women expect to be treated. These gender roles have been changed over time, but many examples of these events can still be found today.…

    • 1059 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Superior Essays

    In A Streetcar Named Desire, Tennessee Williams makes it so the notions of brutal desire and death dance together in a vicious waltz around Blanche DuBois, the tragic main character of the play. The pair constantly haunts her from the moment she arrives in Elysian Fields in the form of two streetcars, Desire and Cemeteries, representing her inevitable downfall that stems from her unyielding wishes for intimacy and to fit into society, both created from terrible past experiences. Blanche’s existence within an endless cycle of destruction caused by illusory aspirations, which not only damage herself but the people and things around her as well, exhibits the significance of the play’s title. Along with that, the fact that she has to cope with…

    • 2012 Words
    • 9 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Tennessee Williams wrote his play A Streetcar Named Desire in a time where women were heavily oppressed by the patriarchal society in which they lived. While men were seen as the superior gender, women were constantly undermined and expected to stay at home to raise their family rather than go out and pursue their own jobs or independent lifestyles. Throughout the play, the reader can observe the downfall of a character like Blanche DuBois who was nothing like the idealistic conservative female that society expected her to be. Living in the household of the aggressive Stanley Kowalski, who was used to controlling everything around him, her feelings of inferiority were only intensified. By Williams representing both genders like this, it helped…

    • 829 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    This is advocated from a New Historicist perspective. New Orleans is a city that embodies the thrusting, rough-edged, physically aggressive materialism of the new world. Stanley personifies this new civilisation in several ways: he is perceived as a foreigner, he works as a manual labourer, he is dirty and coarse, and he is satiated with a virile energy that contrasts starkly with Blanche’s desperately fabricated gentility. Stella and Blanche condemn his lack of refinement through instances of vilification, hurling derogative phrases at him: “pig—Polak—disgusting—vulgar—greasy!” Yet Stanley recognises his own vulgarity, telling Stella “I was common as dirt...…

    • 1140 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Great Essays

    “All of us grow up in particular realities-a home, family, a clan, a small town, a neighborhood. Depending upon how we’re brought up, we are either deeply aware of the particular reading of reality into which we are born, or we are peripherally aware of it”(Chaim Potok). The definition of a relationship between man and women has adjusted with our ever changing society, while some people are able to adapt with societies modifications, others are too intune with the ideals they grew up with. In Tennessee Williams’ play, A Streetcar…

    • 1343 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Superior Essays

    Blanche has been so affected by this experience because of both the depth of her love and because she blames herself. Blanche knows that Allan shot himself because of her words to him, which reveals death to be a major theme in ‘A Streetcar…’ because Blanche is unable to think about his death without with an immense sense of guilt and sorrow. Williams also uses these deaths to serve the purpose of leading Blanche into what becomes her bleak and dangerous past. Blanche’s explanation of her actions shows how psychologically scarred she is as a result of a life burdened with death. She tells Mitch she lived in a house where “dying old women remembered their dead men” and of how after Allan’s death she sought protection “in unlikely places.”…

    • 1100 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    “A Streetcar Named Desire” written by Tennessee Williams, shows the story of two sisters, Blanche and Stella. The sisters have been separated for a lengthy period, however, Blanche has come to visit Stella and her husband, Stanley, in their home in New Orleans. Upon arrival, Blanche tells her sister of the news of losing their ancestral home, Belle Reve, following the deaths of all their relatives. Blanche also tells Stella the news of her leave of absence from her teaching job in Laurel. However, Blanche is not the only sister with news to share.…

    • 197 Words
    • 1 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    A Streetcar Named Desire is one of the major works of the 20th century. Williams applied many autobiographical elements in his play. The title is significance as it shows that desire is the basic driving force in the play that will destroy the lives of each of the main character. The play belongs to the genre of the Southern Gothic as Blanche represents the faded, corrupt culture of the South. The play is a classical tragedy as it presents the downfall and the tragic end of the main character.…

    • 295 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Improved Essays