A Street Car Named Desire by Tennessee Williams - Essay Example

 A Street Car Named Desire by Tennessee Williams Every one lives with a body and a mind. The body is one’s limitation. Mind is the limitless and the timeless. The body’s limitation is that it has to confront the physical realities, and can not go beyond the present. The mind can go beyond all realities and the present too. Human beings try to over come the limitation of the body through the limitless, timeless fantasies of the mind. But fantasies are only temporary escape routes. They just cannot totally overcome the present day realities. A Street Car Named Desire, by Tennessee Williams is a play that deals with this power play between sweet fantasies and crude realities in every human’s life. The fantasies finally fail to win over the realities. The play revolves around two major characters Blanche DuBoris and Stanly Kowalski, who represent the fantasy and the reality. Blanche DuBois was a school teacher in Laurel Mississippi. As a shattered woman she arrives at her pregnant sister Stella Kowalski’s apartment at New Orleans. She tells her sister that she has lost their ancestral home due to the death of their relatives and that she is on leave from her job due to bad nerves. For her brother-in- law, Stanley Kowalski, Blanche is not fully welcome. He believes that Blanche has cheated her sister Stella of her share of the ancestral inheritance. Her heavy drinking also makes her life in the apartment more difficult. The tension between Blanche and Stanley Kowalski comes to the open during a drunken poker game with his friends in his apartment. Blanche gets closer to one of Stanley’s friends, Mr. Harold “Mitch” Mitchell. This irritates Stanley who gets violent with anger and throws the radio out of the bed room window and slaps his wife Stella when she defends Blanche. Stanley how ever gets remorseful soon and begs pardon from Stella, while Mitch meets Blanche outside the flat and comforts her. Next day as Blanche tries to convince the pregnant Stella to leave Stanley for a millionaire called Shep Huntleigh, Stanley enters and overhears her. Knowing that Blanche is getting under his skin more Stanley declares that he had heard enough scandals about Blanche’s disrespectful past. The fear of revelations about her past disturbs Blanche. Next day during a date with Mitch, Blanche comes to know that Stanley had revealed everything about her past to Mitch too. To cover up all those rumors, Blanche tells Mitch that she lost her husband, who committed suicide because she was against his homosexuality. She presents this incident as the greatest tragedy of her past life and gains sympathy from Mitch. But one month later as Stella is preparing dinner for the birth day of Blanche, Stanley enters and tells her that after losing the ancestral home Blanche had been living a lose sexual life and hence she got terminated from her job. He makes it clear that he had told all these to Mitch too. Mitch refuses to turn up for the birthday dinner. Hours later a drunk Blanche meets an equally drunk Mitch in the apartment .They two are alone there as Stanley had taken Stella to the hospital for her labor. Blanche confesses to him that all that he had heard was true. But her reason was that she wanted love and was looking for it in different men, but got it from none. Mitch tells her that he is no more ready for a marriage with her , but will like to have sex with her. Blanche refuses. When Stanley returns from the hospital, Blanche is drunk and tells him that she is going to leave the apartment to join her former suitor the millionaire Shep Huntleigh. Stanley knows that all these are her fantasies and invites her to celebrate the coming of a new born into the family by having sex with him .She refuses. But he takes her forcefully into the bed and rapes her. In the last Scene Blanche is so mentally broken down that the house hold is getting ready to take her to a mental asylum. They pack her bags and wait for the doctor to come . Blanche believes that it is Shep Hunt Leigh who is going to come to take her away. Blanche had told Stella that she was raped by Stanley. But Stella prefers not to believe it and continue to live with Stanley. When the doctor comes finally Blanche rebels and refuses to go. Others try to force her out ; still she refuses to leave. Finally the doctor convinces her to succumb to her reality and she leaves, with out even looking back at her crying sister. Trying to look at Blanche as a tortured heroine and Stanley as the villain in the traditional sense of drama analysis is futile. The classical Aristotelian definition of heroes and villains are no more applicable to the modern plays because they deal with the conflicts in the lives of lesser mortals. The old Epic tragic heroes have left the scene of life .Blanche and Stanley represent two extremes of human existence; one of realities and the other of fantasies. Stanley is so down to earth that he is not interested in fantasies. He looks brute and crude like the realities around. So he goes after the realities of the past life of Blanche. He is the character that unveils her character . When so unveiled, Blanche seems to be a character who escapes the grimness of her realities through fantasies. She wanted real love, searched for it and failed. But instead of facing this reality she indulges in her fantasies which include Mitch and even the unknown millionaire Shep Hunt Leigh. Overdrinking is one of her escape routes . Sensual desires and sex also are her vehicles of fantasies. In the beginning of Scene One when she arrives at Stella’s apartment, Blanche says that she rode a street car named desire. But this street car has taken her not to happiness but to grimmer realities. She never reaches. Her search for love fills her mind with more sense of sin. She takes bath often during the play, as if to wash her off this sense of guilt. After being raped by Staley too she takes a bath. She reminds the great Shakespearean epic character of Lady Macbeth. (“What hands are here! Ha, they pluck out mine eyes. /will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood / Clean from my hand?” –Macbeth, Act two, scene two, 57-59) Like Lady Macbeth, Blanche also has to succumb to her realities. Fantasies finally take her to the asylum of loneliness. --------------------------------- Sources Quoted: 1) Shakespeare William, Macbeth, Longman Study Edition, Penguin Books 1980. Read More