Traditionalism versus Defiance in a Streetcar Named passion by Jonathan Rick May 28, 2000 The themes of Tennes show Williamss Streetcar Named lust follow Marg art Mitchells at peace(p) with the Wind: the emotional splutter for supremacy between both characters who sym - bolize historical forces, between dream and truth, between the Old southwestern and a raw(a) South, between polite restraint and blunt desire, between traditionalism and defiance. If Blanche DuBois represents defunct grey values, Stanley Kowalski represents the wise, urban moder - nity, and pays bitty heed to the past. If Stanley cannot inherit the DuBoiss plantation, he is no longer kindle in it. Williamss stage directions indicate that Stanleys virile, pugnacious brand of masculinity is to be admired. His cruel intolerance of Blanche is a honestifiable reaction to her lies, hypocrisy, and mockery, but his nasty streak of fierceness against his wife appalls rase his friends. His rape of B lanche is a horrifying and noxious act, as sanitary as a cruel betrayal of Stella. Ultimately, however, this survivor disposes of the study moon (99) Blanche, and, as we see in the closing lines of the play, he is able to comfort, with crude tumescence, Stellas weeping, as the approximation returns to normality. Blanche and Stella are the belong in a line of arrive Southern gentry. obsolescent age of epic forni - cations (43), as Blanche puts it, swallowed up the material resources of the family; all that re - main are the address and pre tautnesss. Yet Blanche, with all her possessions in a valise, clings to her gilded, gaudy enclothe and imagines a world in which the values of the Old Guard, e.g., delight, wit, chivalry, and expression‹indeed, she‹are still relevant. Stanley, in sharp contrast, is born of gleam immigrants; a sweat - shirted bowler hat and lothario, he is, as genius critic has remarked, a red-hot breed, without breeding‹and not the type that goes for jasmine perfume (44). Stella, meanw! hile, has renounced the worn dictates of trend propriety to draw this uncouth sweetheart; she plays the placating intercessor between the poles of her save and sister. Since her husband, understandably, shot himself many years ago, Blanche has been avoiding reality in one way or an separate. In New Orleans, reality catches up to her in Stanley, who greets her brusquely. When he mentions her dead husband, Blanche becomes firstborn confused and shaken, thence ill. Later, while Blanche, as is her wont, is bathing, Stanley, imagining himself cheated of the Belle Reve plantation property, separate open Blanches eubstance looking for sale papers. Blanche demonstrates a bewildering mix of moods in this aspect (two), first flirting with Stanley, then discussing the statutory transactions with quiet down irony, and finally becoming abruptly hysteric when Stanley picks up old love letters written by her dead husband. As the play proceeds, Blanche copes by dissimulating the proble m - integral Elysian field for a moonlight swim at the old carry quarry (122). Her feelings against Stanley galvanize when she sees him strike his large(predicate) wife in a fit of drunken insaneness; Stanleys feelings for her similarly harden when he everyplacehears her belittle him as neolithic and brutish. Blanches imposition, her pose, and her distortions of reality infuriate Stanley, and he begins to chip away at her veneer of armor. Williams, who was an overt homosexual in a age unreceptive to such concepts, implies that Blanche, dread himself, is societys scapegoat; hitherto in spite of her neuroses, she is not a bad per - son‹perhaps no crazier than the average buns out walkin around on the streets, as McMurphy of One Flew over the Cuckoos Nest proclaims. Alas, her doomed, dandy personality is no match for the destructive, disruptive Stanley, who represents the raw animal, the prevailing domestic dog in a dog - eat - dog world, the one atomic number 6 perc ent American (110). As Blanche admits to Stanley and! later to her fiancé Mitch, a womans enamour is fifty percent illusion (41), and this woman has old - dash bringing close togetherls (91): she doesnt tell the truth, [she] tell[s] what ought to be truth (117), and prefers fantasy and shadows to the light of reality.
Stanley, as her foil, is a no - nonsense, cut - to - the - chase kind of true cat wire; he expects persons to [l]ay . . . [their] cards on the table (40), as if liveliness itself was a game of seven - card stud. He is unamused by Hollywood glamour stuff (41), that is, the genteel good philosophyn culture of French chitchat, social compliments, an d humoring a loll around and fraud like Blanche. and then, in one sense Blanche and her companion - in - law are trying to do outflank each other in competing for Stella; each would like to crook her beyond the come home of the other. But on that point is something more than elemental in their opposition. They are incompatible forces, and harmony is no more than an evanescent go steady for family. And yet there is a precarious sexual tension‹they sleep degage by but portieres‹and the mutual scholarship of the others weakness: just as Stanley recognizes the dependence (on the beneficence of strangers [142]) in Blanche, Blanche ha[s] an idea [Stella] doesnt understand you [Stanley] as well as I [Blanche] do. Thus culmi - nates, amid hot trumpets and drums, the date (130) (rape) to which Blanches ostentation and cir - cumstance ineluctably bring in rise. Indeed, in both origin and occupation, Stanley is new blood to Blanche and Stellas profane blood. He stands on no watching; it is nothing for him to break up the ou! tmoded sense of entitle - ment and superiority that Blanche personifies. That Williams has him trounce a lonely and wid - owed gadfly - gadabout, illustrates the new rules of unmercifulness and perhaps soullessness. And yet Blanche, having watched her family estate slip through her fingers, fails to see the decadence of her soft Belle Reve existence; Social Darwinism has replaced gentility, and this old maiden schoolteacher (55) is sincerely an alcoholic, nymphomaniac, parasitical casualty of the changeover. She puts on the airs of a belle who has neer known indignity, but Stanley sees through her. As Eunice says, Life has got to go on. No matter what happens, youve got to keep on going (133). If you privation to get a full essay, vow it on our website:
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