A Portrait of Moral Conflict in Tennessee Williams Streetcar Named Desire - Essay Example

?Ester Salas English Literature 2303-90L Dr. Miles August 16, Blanche DuBois: A Portrait of Moral Conflict in Tennessee Williams’ Streetcar d Desire Introduction Blanche DuBois’s disgrace is discovering herself driven by her desires toward reality just to relapse to her immoral character from which, through reality, she tries to break away from. Because again, just like in her lewd moments, she is not being rejected anymore from ‘morality’, in the commonplace meaning of the term; however, just as she expected, it is the sexual act itself which strips her of morality from then on. This essay demonstrates the moral irony of Blanche’s character. Such immorality is more simply accepted in the big, complex urban area. Blanche discovered liberty in relocating from the small city, with its obvious bonds and intense moral standards, to the big city, with its freethinking environment. Within the point of view of Blanche, who has began a plunge into insanity, losing everyone who loved her and who could provide her support, this new situation triggers the fall into eternal sin. The Desire for Morality and the Tragic Fall to Immorality The first irony is Blanche’s consistent deceiving the people who love her that she is a decent and moral woman. She has to show them that she is an elegant lady with aristocratic traditions. When her dedication to her status entails that she forces respect deserving of a lady instead of allowing unspoken recognition by people she meets, she immediately turns out to be an ugly mixture of morality and immorality. Blanche’s noble birthright is collapsing in her own immoralities. The second irony is Blanche’s family culture, where the moral status of belonging to the aristocracy causes immoral use of wealth and power. This is shown in the below excerpt (Williams 2008, 22): There are thousands of papers, stretching back over hundreds of years, affecting Belle Reve, as piece by piece, our improvident grandfathers and father and uncles and brothers exchanged the land for their epic fornications—to put it plainly! The third irony is Blanche’s relationship with Stanley who becomes moral in the eyes of Stella and Mitch by forcing them to believe that his immoral activities, like gambling, and later on his raping of Blanche, are nothing compared to the immoral background of Blanche. Whether or not readers can completely acknowledge Stella’s decision not to live with Stanley anymore if there is some truth to Blanche’s charge of sexual harassment, it is apparent that Stanley is not capable of revealing the truth to his partner, and that his deception pushes him to boost his wickedness by forcing Blanche into a mental facility. Thus, Blanche’s efforts to regain her moral self are dampened by the immoral act of a person considered by the society as a moral person, Stanley. The fourth irony is the relationship of Stella and Stanley, and later on, Mitch and Blanche, where in sex perfectly built the morality of forgiveness needed for them to resolve their problems. Nowhere in the narrative is there a highly vibrant depiction of the immoral use of sexual act to cleanse the conscience than in the climactic parts of the story. The major irony here is the fact that what is vital to the twists and turns of episodes in the life of Blanche would have to be narrated for Blanche and for the reader to think that there is still hope that, sooner or later, after Blanche has endured too much immoralities in her life, appear a moral Mitch who would recognize and embrace Blanche in all her immoralities. The fifth irony is Mitch’s mockery of Blanche’s immoralities revealed by Stanley. Mitch, by denigrating the immoral life Blanche has lived, rejects precisely the immoral life that Blanche respects him for resisting. Blanche cannot be precisely viewed as a weak charlatan in any way; the morality she holds in living is not her deception. The intentional attempt toward decorum and elegance that her surroundings and upbringing have implanted within her are deeply valued by her. But Blanche sacrifices this moral disposition to gratify her dependency on male sexual admiration, which eventually she uses to earn Mitch’s respect. The fifth and final irony is the presence of Shep Huntleigh, the physician, in Blanche’s life. Blanche can forget her fantasies of Shep Huntleigh that has finally approached her in the end. Blanche is determined to build her immoral image to the card players, especially to Stanley, who would never give her the respect or courtesy she has long been aiming for, whereas she is determined to resist this immoral nature until she has obtained from Shep the insightful compassion and courage she has constantly turned to when she fails to resist her sexual desires. Blanche may well have persevered in charging Stanley of sexual harassment against her, and she may also have withdrew her accusation in order to try evading arrest or detention. It is recognition of the broader immorality of her life that she performed neither. Blanche’s acceptance of the physician, her comparing him with the guys she has momentarily got acquainted with and to the ship physician of her death reverie, her demand for simple compassion, is her way of declaring what she at the time realizes: fated by the immoral life she has lived, her fight for morality has reached its finale. The future she glimpses has merely unfamiliar people, at best compassionate outsiders, in it, at worst a life of eternal sin. The heartbreaking fate of Blanche is shown in her rejection of the absolute recognition of that future she has strived for quite agonizingly and nearly triumphantly with Mitch. Blanche achieves this recognition with sad pride, abandoning her misery but not abandoning, as the echoes of her last statement convey, her image of the intimacy, her morality, of spiritual decency, in which she could not own. Conclusions A moral woman, in the traditional meaning of the phrase, is one who is innocent in mind and in practice; Blanche is neither. Her lewd or vulgar nature is vividly shown in her venture in France with Mitch, when she seduces him, while acting as if she is virginal in her intentions. Blanche’s immorality clearly stems from her sexual prowess and desires. She tries to be decent but in the end she falls into the trap of lewdness. Stanley exposes Blanche’s immoral activities. In the ultimate sexual struggle, she wrestles with Stanley and he commits the greatest immoral act of his life by raping Blanche. Blanche’s sexual immorality, as narrated by Stanley to Stella, is at this point strengthened. However, even after this absolute revelation and mortification, Blanche plays the part of a decent woman. She performs her habitual purification bath, dresses herself appropriately, and turned her back to the one thing she would definitely regret later on. The immoral acts are extremely vital to her survival to dispose of. It is more probable that even though her desires to become finally moral have been defeated, and even though she is regressing to a cordon of fear, she stays liberated, up until her final appearances in the play, to show the readers that the morality she painfully tries to attain has been immorally frustrated by the person trusted by her own sister. Even the worldly culture of the contemporary period preserves a great deal of the traditional morality. The themes of morality and immorality were very much present in the character of Blanche. As she went farther from her home, she became more blatant in her intimate affairs and sexual interactions. In the end, Blanche becomes the epitome of a moral woman in her own fantasies, a personification of immorality and sin for the people who knew her, and an archetype of a sexually immoral, aristocratic woman for the audiences. Reference Williams, Tennessee. A Streetcar Named Desire. The Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey, 2008. Read More