The Metamorphosis Of Blanche Dubois In A Streetcar Named Desire

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. …show more content…
Vulnerable from the dark secrets of her past, Blanche finds solace in the dark because the light is an illuminating reminder of a tragedy in her past. Through a climactic conversation with Mitch, Blanche flashes back to the moment love “turned a blinding light” into her life and cleansed her from the dark “half shadow” that protected her (Williams 1859). Love and acceptance are the only things that seem to be able to draw Blanche from the darkness. After her husband Allan committed suicide, “the searchlight which had been turned on the world was turned off again” (Williams 1859). Blanche, from this moment on, refused to live in anything but the shadows and feared light as something that could only expose her deepest insecurities. Ironically, she finds comfort in darkness and distress in light. Allan was once the light in her life because he filled her with honest love and admiration that she desperately desires and made her feel safe in exposing her flaws. Blanche seems to feel as though her best days are behind her, thus, contributing to her