Williams Tennessee’s “A Streetcar Named Desire” Essay

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“All good and innocence is easily shadowed by evil” is a phrase that best defines the entire work of Williams Tennessee in “A Streetcar Named Desire”. The analysis of this work is a drama about the relationship between a married couple Stella and Stanley Kowalski. The couple is paid a visit by Stella’s older sister, Blanche who then is put in the central picture of the drama as the plot of the entire work unfolds. The drama reveals the story of the mental torture of a once delicate, repressed, fragile lady brought up in a wealthy family of Mississippi planters. The fragility, emotional demise and fragility gives Blanche the most complex character in the entire work.

All good and innocence is easily shadowed by evil is profoundly captured in this work in that Williams has explicitly exposed the degeneration of human feelings and social relationships. Good characters are eroded and personality traits are lost in the murky troubles of meaningless relationships that are the products of stress and depression.

Introduced by Williams as a complete symbol of innocence and chastity, Blanche is not only aristocratic, sensitive, beautiful and loving but she is also intelligent and fragile with a beauty described as moth like appearance. The positive traits and characters that in this context are aspects of good and innocence become diluted and completely overshadowed by the evils upon her arrival at Elysian Fields. Among the evils that overshadow the positive traits of the beautiful and loving Blanche are racism, homophobia, loneliness, pain, human brutality and sexual behavior of human beings. Elysian Fields is characterized by poverty, two street cars, desire and cemeteries, factors that symbolize it as an evil surrounding.

The fact that something wrong and evil will form part of Blanche’s life is depicted in the beginning of the work by the mysterious expressions that compound the descriptions of Elysian Fields. These mysterious expressions, which form the fundamental symbols of the drama point to one fact that things are not good for Blanche and that something out of order will definitely form part of her future life. The link between Blanche’s good past and dark future is well represented. The discovery that her husband Allan Grey is a homosexual is a heart wrenching life experience that Blanche finds very hard shoulder.

In her description,

“I didn’t know anything except I loved him unendurably but without being able to help him or help myself. Then I found out. In the worst of all possible ways. By coming, suddenly into a room that I thought was empty, which wasn’t empty, but had two people in it, the boy I had married and an older man who had been his friend for years…” (42).

This discovery leads Allan to commit suicide. Blanche blames herself for it and carries the burdens of the life. The pain and sorrow that compound her life after the death of her husband transforms the good depicted by her innocence and chaste to evil character depicted by prostitution and lack of self control for the rest of her life. She not only loses her husband but also watches as her other relatives die off; leaving lonely and resolute. A once beautiful, lovely, intelligent and sensitive young girl brought up in a wealthy family is transformed by the evils of the world into a completely different character whose life has lost total meaning.

Works Cited

Williams, Tennessee. A streetcar named desire. New York: Heinemann, 1995.

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