Themes
The battle between dreams and reality is embodied by the tension between Blanche and Stanley. Upon losing Belle Reve, the love of her life, and her youthful glow, Blanche clings to her dreams and constructs a world of fantasy to protect herself. She keeps her face in the dark to hide her aging features, romanticizes her life, and bathes excessively to maintain the illusion of composure and control. On the other hand, Stanley represents the harsh reality. He lives in a working class neighborhood with a rough job. He aggressively exposes Blanche's true past, violently rapes her (remind her that chivalry is dead), and destroys her delicate illusions. Reality crashing down on her caused her to lose her sanity because she couldn't handle it.
However, I don't think that Tennessee Williams is trying to say that having hopes and dreams suck. In the novel, Blanche and Stanley represent the extremes of their beliefs. I think that the book is trying to say that the battle is constant and that we need to find a middle ground between the two. Stanley and Stella only believe in reality, and they live a barely stable life because of that. They don't think that they can get a better life that that, so they stick to their working class and stable life. Stella doesn't want to run away from Stanley because his abuse is a good trade off for stability. They don't believe that things will get better. On the other hand, Blanche needs hope and dreams to survive. She lives in her dreams to avoid facing her harsh reality because she knows that it will break her. However, her hope lets her move on in life. She may have lost her whole family and estate, but her hope that she will find a prince to rescue her keeps her in high spirits. I think that Williams is trying to say that both of these extremes are wrong. There's no right answer to this battle. We can't depend on our dreams to live but we also can't be cynical and hopeless.
This one's pretty straight forward. Blanche represents the old ideals of class superiority and ethnocentrism (french is better than polish kind of idea), since she's a white aristocrat with generations of wealth from running a plantation. Stanley and Stella represent the progressive and industrial working class. The conflict between a declining traditional, more Eurocentric society and the new diverse, equal opportunity, and brutal society shows how the collapse of rigid social classes create not only freedom but also instability. Although Stanley represents a new age of America, he also exposes how the struggle for progress can come with violence and loss of tradition (and therefore stability). Blanche represents how people rooted in old fashion social values can be left behind when society evolves. I think that the play is saying that when different social classes collide in pursuit of power, which in this case is Blanche and Stanley fighting over the house and Stella to fit their ideals, it can lead destruction and loss of empathy.
Each main character experiences the theme of desire differently.
For Blanche, desire is a coping mechanism and a response to loneliness. After the death of her husband (and the cheating before it), she fills the emotional void with sexual encounters at the Tarantula hotel. She's not just aroused by young men, she flirts with them because she's so desperate for validation, security, and the youth that she was promised. Blanche believes that she needs to be romantically wanted by someone to have value in the world. Her promiscuous past in Laurel isn't a reflection of how sinful and immoral she is. It's a reflection of her fear of abandonment. However, her desire is self-destructive. The one thing that she believes she needs to have a life worth living, intimacy, is used against her by society to shame and destroy her.
Stella's desire is a little different from Blanche. It's a mutual desire between her and Stanley that's more physical (😏 😏 😏). She is physically fulfilled by Stanley, which is why she forgives his violent behavior. Their desire for each other is so strong that they become heavily dependent on each other. When Stanley hits her at poker night, she is pulled back to him within minutes by her physical passion. She needs him financially, emotionally, and physically to live a fulfilling life. In her life, desire is a mechanism of manipulation, being used to bind her to a life that isn't necessarily safe nor happy.
Stanley's desire is the most frightening out of the three. His desire is a desire for dominance and control. He needs Stella to validate his masculinity and dominance. He wants to feel like he has control over her. He feels like he needs to have control over his home, the money in his family, and the people around him. This is why he hates Blanche so much. She is a threat to his desire for Stella, since she disrupts the mood and can influence her. Her values of class, dreams, and virtue clash with his ideas and she resists his control. Him raping Blanche was a violent fusion of fulfilling his sexual desire and destroying/controlling the 1 person who challenged him. To Stanley, desire isn't passion. It's a weapon of domination and control.
The play is saying that desire is both a primary motivation and a dangerous force that's capable of sustaining life but equally capable of ruining it. Desire isn't bad, but the society that offers the characters no healthy way to fulfill it is. In the play, desire becomes inescapable, consuming, and ultimately destructive, revealing that what people long for could also be what destroys them.
P.S. The streetcar called Desire is important because Desire sets the characters on the path towards destruction.
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