A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams - 1275 Words

In Tennessee Williams’ 1947 play, â€Å"A Streetcar Named Desire,† Stella and Stanley Kowalski live in the heart of poor, urban New Orleans in a one-story flat very different from the prestigious home Stella came from. This prestige is alive and well inside Stella’s lady-like sister, Blanche Du Bois. Over the course of Blanche’s life, she has experienced many tragedies that deeply affected her, such as the death of her gay husband, the downward spiral in her mental health that followed, and most recently the loss of her wealth and therefore social status. She constructs a proverbial lampshade to mask her pain and to control the last part of her world that she is able to, the image she projects into the world for herself and others to see. The†¦show more content†¦She began believing she wasn’t worth as much and began settling for men who just wanted to sleep with her and turned to drinking as ways to ease her pain. As this form of comfort b ecame less effective, she began altering her image to suit her needs and it progressed until even she was trying to convince others of the validity of it. The adoption of one’s own lampshade as a coping mechanism is common today in people who have experienced a wide variety of trauma. The media has expressed the different kinds of lampshades dealing with trauma in many forms over the years. A recent example is the Lifetime movie Starving in Suburbia, in which teen dancer Hannah is sucked into the online, glamorized world of anorexia. The pressures around her and the online group of anorexia â€Å"Ana† supporters cause her to contract the disorder and therefore she changed her lampshade. Originally she was healthy and got her exercise from dancing. She didn’t have anything she needed to cope with except common pressures from school, dance, and her parents. Her lampshade at this point was just her perception of the world, her own personal reality. After she became anorexic, her lampshade became self-destructive as Blanche’s did and her need to make her body â€Å"perfect† caused her reality to appear as if everyone had turned against her. Blanche andShow MoreRelatedA Streetcar Named Desire By Tennessee Williams1109 Words   |  5 Pagesâ€Å"A Streetcar Named Desire† is a play written by Tennessee Williams. Williams was born in Columbus, Mississippi but with a different name. He changed his name from Thomas Lanier Williams to what the readers know today as Tennessee Williams. (Forman). Williams is widely known for his plays, short stories, and poems across the world. He has won many awards for his work such as The New York Critics’ Circle Award and 2 Pulitzer awards. The play â€Å"A Streetcar Named Desire he won his first Pulitzer PrizeRead MoreA Streetcar Named Desire By Tennessee Williams1442 Words   |  6 PagesThroughout Tennessee Williams’s play, â€Å"A Streetcar Named Desire† one can learn a large portion about his personal life. In the play the character, Blanche has a mental illness the same as his sister Rose had in her lifetime. Blanche’s ex-husband was also homosexu al and he made the point to say that he left her for a man and Williams himself was also a homosexual. Tennessee chose for the story to be based in New Orleans, which was a crumbling town at the time and Williams was living a crumbling lifeRead MoreA Streetcar Named Desire By Tennessee Williams928 Words   |  4 PagesAnalysis Paper: A Streetcar Named Desire For my analysis paper, I have chosen the full-length play by Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire. The drama containing several forms of realism was released in December of 1947 and stayed open on Broadway for two years until December of 1949. The play in set in New Orleans, Louisiana in a simi-poor area, but has a certain amount of charm that goes along with it. Williams creates a vast web of emotional conflicts thought all the characters, whichRead MoreA Streetcar Named Desire, By Tennessee Williams1629 Words   |  7 PagesA Streetcar Named Desire, written by Tennessee Williams, was first performed on December 3rd, 1947. Chronicling the actions and events that take place when two sisters are reunited, A Streetcar Named Desire is regarded as one of Tennessee William’s most successful plays. Likewise, â€Å"Blank Space†, written and performed by Taylor Swift, was first performed November 23rd, during the 2014 American Music Awards. â€Å"Blank Space† s pent 22 weeks in the top 40 charts and is featured on the best selling albumRead MoreA Streetcar Named Desire By Tennessee Williams Essay1226 Words   |  5 PagesA Streetcar Named Desire In the summer of post World War II in New Orleans, Louisiana lives hard working, hardheaded Stanley and twenty-five year old pregnant, timid Stella Kowalski in a charming two-bedroom apartment on Elysian Fields. Stella’s older sister Blanche Dubois appears in the first scene unexpectedly from Laurel, Mississippi carrying everything she owns. In Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire, despite Blanche’s desire to start fresh in New Orleans, her snobbish nature, inabilityRead MoreA Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams672 Words   |  3 Pagesof the era—is Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire, a tale of one woman’s destruction due to Southern society’s changing moral values. The destruction of the Old Southern society around the main character, Blanche DuBois, causes her to go insane and she cannot stand the low morals that the New South is carrying in its baggage. Because of his Southern roots, Tennessee Williams’ past is able to shine through his work. Born to a drunken shoe maker and a Southern belle, Williams was supportedRead MoreA Streetcar Named Desire By Tennessee Williams1054 Words   |  5 Pagescalled â€Å"A Streetcar Named Desire†, there are numerous amounts of tragic events that not only affected the person in the event, but others around them as well. A tragedy, or tragic event, is known to bring chaos, destruction, distress, and even discomfort such as a natural disaster or a serious accident. A tragedy in a story can also highlight the downfall of the main character, or sometimes one of the more important character. In this book, â€Å"A Streetcar Named Desire†, written by Tennessee Williams, heRead MoreTennessee Williams A Streetcar Named Desire929 Words   |  4 PagesThe â€Å"Desire’s† Breakdown Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire is a web of themes, complicated scenarios, and clashes between the characters. Therefore, it might’ve been somehow difficult to find out who the protagonist of this play is if it wasn’t for Aristotle’s ideas of a good tragedy because neither of the main characters, Stanley Kowalski and Blanche Dubois, is completely good nor bad. According to Aristotle’s Poetics, a good tragedy requires the protagonist to undergo a change of statusRead MoreTennessee Williams A Streetcar Named Desire964 Words   |  4 PagesLike many people in the world, the characters in Tennessee William’s play, A Streetcar Named Desire, are troubled by anxiety and insecurities. Life in New Orleans during the 1940s was characterized by the incredible variety of music, lively and bright atmosphere, and diverse population, while in the midst of the ongoing World War II. Culture was rich and fruitful because the city developed into a â€Å"melting pot† of people from all over the world. Due to the wide-range in population, the people ofRead MoreA Streetcar Named Desire By Tennessee Williams1263 Words   |  6 Pagesgrowth in the suffrage movement in England and the United States, with women struggling to attain political equality. However, this was not to last however, and by the fifties men had reassumed their more dominant role in society. Tennessee Williams wrote A Streetcar Named Desire around the time this reversal was occurring in American society. In this play male dominance is clear. Women are represented as delicate, reserved, and silent, confined to a domestic world that isolated them from the harsh realities