Lies In A Streetcar Named Desire

Improved Essays
Imagine a family dinner with a wife beater, liar, and a girl caught in the middle all holding a secret protected at all costs.Tennessee Williams captivates the audience in A Streetcar Named Desire following the main character, Blanche, to New Orleans to stay with her sister and brother-in-law, Stella and Stanley. Stanley’s actions places readers in a love-hate relationship with Stella flocking back to Stanley after violent incidences. Blanche attempts to reason with Stella to leave Stanley but Blanche’s present creates mountains of drama. Secrets willing to keep prevent the correct morals of challenging personal love and that we all seek, judging a book by its cover, and where the truth overcomes evil. Often individuals that make love complicated …show more content…
Following taking a bath in scene eleven, Blanche says this simple line that seems like a normal gesture but the craziness has already sunk. “That cool yellow silk--the blousé. See if it’s crushed. If it’s not too crushed I’ll wear it and on the lapel that silver and turquoise pin in the shape of a seahorse.” (Scene 11, page 165) She dresses like nothing happened, yet in the same instance, everything has already changed. She know that Shep won’t take her on a cruise, but she believes that he will arrive to pick her up for the trip. Succeeding what Stanley did to Blanche, she fears the worst and slowly fades away from the true form of herself. The party following around Blanche thinks that she honestly turned insane, but they don’t comprehend why she acts the way she does. When the Stanley entered to remove Blanche from the house for the doctor, her mind flashed back to the horrible time and did anything to get away from Stanley. Comparable to Blanche wanting to escape from Stanley’s presence, many others hope to leave behind memories in disguise as nightmares. We would like to think a change one’s wardrobe would solve the issue, but we can’t out run any problem due to it defining us. All the makeup can’t hide the imperfection hiding underneath, yet people only notice how one presents themselves to the world. Another form of judging not done by the eyes …show more content…
“He’d stuck the revolver into his mouth, and fired--so that the back of his head had been--blown away! It was because--on the dance-floor--unable to stop myself--I’d suddenly said--’I saw! I know! You disgust me..’” (Scene six, page 115) So madly in love with Grey, the secret hit Blanche like a pound of bricks when she uncovered why he didn’t love her the way she thought. Awe struck in when the person who she thought she married loved someone else, it felt like the walls around her started crumbling down. The feeling of pain replaced the feeling once held with love and admiration. Love to pain fits with those who their significant other cheated on them. Many would rather get told that the bond between the couple faded away than learning or seeing their boyfriend or girlfriend with someone else. It may hurt now when the split happens, but in the long haul, finding out now could save oneself from the lies and heartache later. We all hope to find a love everlasting to find to go through life with, but love make one do crazy deeds.
Blanche, Stanley, and Allen Grey held their secret so high corrupting the correct morals of healthy, loving relationship, everything doesn’t seem as it appears, and telling the truth drove to the ultimate price. We all change our appearances to follow society’s standards and rules put in place. The capability of loving someone comes when one

Related Documents

  • Improved Essays

    Blanche Dubois Flaws

    • 639 Words
    • 3 Pages

    After opening up about what happened to her husband, the inner meaning of the play started to reveal itself and the reader can understand what makes Blanche act in the manner she does. When unable to escape from her past, Blanche turned to drinking, sex, and lies which only furthered the decline of her mental health. Being unable to cope with the loss of her husband, she ran away from her past, putting on a facade for others to see in an unsuccessful attempt to escape from facing reality. All of these external flaws stemmed from internal flaws, which were caused by the loss of her husband, and eventually led to her mental…

    • 639 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Stanley ridicules Blanche by saying, " 'Washing out a few things '… 'Absorbing a hot tub '… Temperature 100 on the nose, and she absorbs herself a hot tub. " She washes each day and does not go out in certain lights since she supposes them excessively uncovering of her. On top of her over the top cleanliness, she wears lovely and extravagant garments that are just impersonations of the genuine style.…

    • 1806 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    “Only fools fall in love” they say, yet so many people do. As beautiful and graceful love may seem, its ambiguity makes it a thin line between success, and failure. In both the Great Gatsby, and the Nightingale and the Rose, characters attempt to follow an ideal thought on what love is; in hopes to shape love in the way they want it to be. Since love cannot be restraint or conformed, characters setup their own demise, by trying to manipulate love as if it were a puppet. This produces a whirl wind of events that lead to failure, and in one case death.…

    • 864 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    Similarly in A Streetcar Named Desire one of the main characters Blanche Dubois has the same problem with being delusional. She goes and meets her sister Stella and begins to fabricate a story about what has happened to her. She tries to go about finding love by telling Stella, Stanley and countless men lies about her past. When Blanche arrives at Stella’s house she is talking to Stanley and he asks her if…

    • 1103 Words
    • 5 Pages
    • 2 Works Cited
    Superior Essays
  • Superior Essays

    “Love is an endless mystery, for it has nothing else to explain it” a quote by Rabindranath Tagore, summarizes the themes implemented in “Hills like White Elephants” by Ernest Hemingway, and “What we Talk About When we Talk About Love” by Raymond Carver. These two stories, contain a husband and wife who attempt to decipher the meaning of love. Hemingway’s characters do this subliminally, whereas Carver’s character’s discuss the meaning in a much broader fashion. Both authors have similar writing strategies, but have a few differing literary techniques. These two aforementioned stories, use similar structures and setting, but contrast in their use of symbols, to convey the author’s negative attitudes of love through their themes.…

    • 1350 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Throughout the stories “Janus”, “A good story” “What we Talk About When We Talk About Love” and “The Lottery”, the authors use characters and symbolic objects to help us better understand the role diversity and oppression play on individuals and groups. Literary critic Christopher Decker describes one 's connection to their surroundings saying, “The notion of home as an enclosed and protective space together with the relationship between private and public, self and community, is constantly challenged.” (Decker). When decker uses the words “public” and “community” he is referring to those who have conflicting views with with the protagonist in each of the short stories.…

    • 1363 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    The deterioration of Blanche’s character is a result of her attempts to and inability to keep the facade. To Tennessee Williams, hiding behind an illusion is pointless because reality will always come around. A great appearance means a great deal to Blanche. In Blanche’s wardrobe lies feathers, furs, pearls, bracelets,…

    • 1362 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    In A Streetcar Named Desire, playwright Tennessee Williams gradually reveals Blanche’s intense disillusionment with the aid of stylistic elements. Although her situation significantly contrasts the extent to which Stella and Stanley view reality, all three share an underlying similarity of attempting to avoid it. Williams uses the recurring theme of illusion versus reality in order to further portray the imperfection of his play’s characters. Blanche’s world is an illusion when she repeatedly attempts to escape the harsh circumstances around her, her past, and the lack of true confidence in herself. When Blanche moves into Stanley and Stella’s apartment, she immediately feels out of place and unwelcomed.…

    • 1420 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Great Essays

    Tennessee Williams’ dramatic presentation of violence in A Streetcar Named Desire is evident within relationships of the play. Prominent scenes from the play include intense portrayals of violence, such as Stella being domestically abused by her husband Stanley, Blanche recalling the suicide of her past closeted boyfriend Allen and when Stanley rapes Blanche at the end of scene ten. However, physical abuse is not the extent of this key motif as Williams’ presents verbal and emotional violence as well. These are all further intensified by the stage directions, physical theatre, lighting and sound- all of which are key ingredients in Williams magnetically ravenous play. 

Evidence of violence are explored through physically abusive relationships…

    • 1854 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Superior Essays

    We all poses emotions. Sometimes these emotions are good for us as they enable us to feel, while other times, these emotions hinder our ability to think clearly and rationally. One such emotion that can have such an effect on all humans is love. Love makes us feel special and provides us with a goal that we then strive towards. However, love can also cloud our judgment and not cee the entire truth.…

    • 1041 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Consequently, her fear of being caught lying lead to Blanche finally revealing her history of promiscuous behavior with men after the death of her husband, Allan Grey. Her actions and preservation of a false narrative allude to Tennessee Williams's criticism of female gender roles in A Streetcar Named Desire. Blanche’s promiscuous nature signifies a sexual freedom that contrasts with whom Blanche believes she should be. Blanche sees her independence as a failure of womanhood, which questions the role of women’s dependence on men and is a social criticism at the time of the play’s publication. In Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, the tune, “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” (sung to the tune of the Wheels on the Bus), is sung again and again through the play.…

    • 1083 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Blanche’s relationship with bright light reveals the most about the complexity that subsists beneath her vanity. Blanche associates bright light with both love and awakening: she describes falling in love as “suddenly turn[ing] a blinding light on something that had always been half in shadow” (Williams 67). However, it also reveals the harshness of reality and she dims the lighting (with the paper lantern) to maintain an illusion of “magic” and present “what ought to be truth” (Williams 84). Blanche associates bright light with a time when her life truly was magical; Blanche was young, beautiful and in love before her life was stripped away and her persona suddenly displaced.…

    • 527 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Great Essays

    Blanche lives in a fantasy world of sentimental illusion because reality would ruin her. Throughout the play, Blanche constantly bathes herself as if she can wash away the dirt of her guilt and she only appears in semi-darkness and shadows, intentionally keeping herself out of the harsh glare of reality. Her sign of purity is an ironic illusion because of her growingly evident promiscuity, but even that is just a part of her act and is not the real Blanche. Blanche exerts efforts to maintain the appearance of being an upper-class young innocent woman, even though she is, by all accounts, a “fallen woman” (Abbotson 47).She says to…

    • 1132 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Superior Essays

    She then reminisces to herself about the bloodstained pillowcases and how the family had become too poor to afford a servant to look after the dying for them. Blanche remembers how she and her mother sat at opposite ends of the room while death was so close and yet they pretended it wasn’t there, acted as if they had never seen or heard of it, which reveals how Blanche’s life revolved around trying to escape from the death and the dying. Later in the play Blanche significantly talks in detail about her own death to Stella and Eunice whilst waiting for Shep Huntleigh. This speech summarises Blanche’s character as Williams makes use of imagery to show how she will die as a…

    • 1100 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Blanche does this to mask her age. She repeatedly tries to convince herself that she still is as pure and youthful…

    • 539 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays

Related Topics