Characterization / Analysis of major characters

Blanche DuBois:  Neurotic central character who lives in a fantasy world of Old South chivalry but cannot control her carnal desires.

Stella Kowalski: Blanche’s down-to-earth sister who seems satisfied with her life as the wife of a factory worker.

Stanley Kowalski: Stella’s churlish husband and the bane of Blanche’s existence.

Mitch: Stanley’s poker partner. Mitch, Stanley’s best friend, woos Blanche until he finds out about her seamy past.

Eunice: Stanley and Blanche’s upstairs neighbor Allen Grey: Deceased husband of Blanche. His homosexual affair and suicide deeply scarred Blanche. Young Man: Collector for The Evening Star newspaper.  Negro Woman Mexican Woman Shep Huntleigh: Imaginary beau of Blanche.Doctor, Matron Physician and nurse from a mental hospital 

*Blanche DuBois appears in the first scene dressed in white, the symbol of purity and innocence. She is seen as a moth-like creature.

*the character of Blanche is the most complex one in the drama.

*She is truly a tragic heroine .

*She is aristocratic and intelligent, and sensitive and fragile at the same time, also beautiful and this delicate beauty has a moth-like appearance.

*Elysian Fields symbolizes paradise beyond death from ancient lore,   Desire expresses Blanche's desire to be loved and Cemeteries represents her fear of death.

*Blanche represents a deep-seated attachment to the past.  Her life is a lesson how tragic events in the past can ruin a person's future. Her husband's death affects her the most .

*Blanche was only a young girl without any experience when she got married. She married Allan Grey, who was only sixteen. Their marriage started well, but later the young wife found out that Allan was homosexual .

*Her husband's death wasn't the only tragic in her life. Blanche watched her parents and her relatives die-off. She was forced to sell Belle Reve, the only place where she was happy, because she had to pay the funeral expenses.

*Then she lived in a second-rate hotel, where she made meaningless relationships with strangers. Actually, she was a prostitute .

*She was even dismissed from a school, where she was an English teacher, because of an incident with a seventeen years old student who reminded her of her late husband.

*She had to leave the old family mansion because it was mortgaged, she had to leave the hotel because of the strangers visiting her every night, and she lost her job because the love affair with the young boy. Blanche became homeless, lonely and

desperate, and she was out of money .

*All these things weakened her, turned her into an alcoholic, and lowered her mental stability bit-by-bit.

*When Stanley went on to rape her, he completely diminished her mental stability. It was not the actual rape that represents the causes for her following madness, but the fact that she was raped by a man who represented everything unacceptable to her.

*Blanche's tragedy is a tragedy of an individual caught between two worlds, the world of the past and the world of the present.

*She is unwilling to get rid of the past and unable to come to terms with the present .

*She cannot forget the death of Allan, therefore she seeks  substitute men (especially young boys) for her dead husband.

*She is enable to face reality in her circumstances and in herself because she still lives in the past. She thinks that she is still young and attractive, although she hates bright light because it  would reveal her .

*Blanche is an intelligent and sensitive woman who values literature and

creativity of human imagination, but emotionally repressed, addicted to

alcohol, succumbing to illusions, lies about her past, sexual aberrations, and madness. Her need to be special and

loved originates from her loneliness and her failure with her relationships .

*Stanley live with his wife Stella.

*He is a working class auto parts salesman.

*He take special pride in having lured Stella away from her rich family and he

shows her off to his friends like a trophy .

*He has a vicious temper and always have a fight with his wife.

*Stanley's life becomes more complicated when Stella's sister blanche shows up at their door.

*Blanche and Stanley hates each other , she looks down upon him.

*Blanche describe him as an” ape” and she often call him a Pollack and yet he get mad because its remind him that he is not good enough for Stella.

*We cannot deny the fact that Stanley Kowalski is a fascinating character. The usual reaction is to see him as a brute because of the way that he treats the delicate Blanche. Some will even go so far as to dislike this man intensely. But this dislike would stem from too much identification with Blanche.

* he is seen as common, crude, and vulgar. Certainly, his frankness will allow for no deviation from the straightforward truth .

*He is the man who likes to lay his cards on the table. He can understand no relationship between man and woman except a sexual one, where he sees the man's role as giving and taking pleasure from this relationship .

*To the over-sensitive person, such as Blanche, Stanley represents a holdover from the Stone Age .

*He is bestial and brutal and determined to destroy that which is not his .

*He is like the Stone Age savage bringing home the meat from the kill. He is animal-like and his actions are such. He eats like an animal and grunts his approval or disapproval .

*Even the symbols connected with Stanley support his brutal, animal-like approach

to life. In the first scene, he is seen bringing home the raw meat. His clothes

are loud and gaudy. His language is rough and crude. His outside pleasures

are bowling and poker. When he is losing at poker, he is unpleasant and

demanding. When he is winning, he is happy as a little boy.

* He is, then, "the gaudy seed-bearer," who takes pleasure in his masculinity. "Animal joy in his being is implicit," and he enjoys mainly those things that are his — his wife, his apartment, his liquor, "his car, his radio, everything that is his, that bears his emblem of the gaudy seed-

bearer".

*With the appearance of Blanche, Stanley feels an uncomfortable threat to those things that are his. Blanche becomes a threat to his way of life; she is a foreign element, a hostile force, a superior being whom he can't understand. She is a challenge and a threat. He feels most strongly that she is a threat to his marriage. Thus when the basic man, such as Stanley, feels threatened, he must strike back. It is a survival of the fittest.

*Stanley feels the first threat to his marriage after the big fight he has with Stella after the poker game. He knows that this would not have occurred if Blanche had not been present. It is her presence which is causing the dissension between him and his wife .

*Consequently, when we approach the rape scene, we must understand that Blanche has made Stanley endure quite a bit. She has never been sympathetic toward him. She has ridiculed him. Earlier she had even flirted with him but she has never been his.

*Thus, when Stanley finds out that she has slept so indiscriminately with so many people, he cannot understand why she

should object to one more. Thus, he rapes her partly out of revenge, partly because one more man shouldn't make any difference, and finally, so that she

will be his in the only way he fully understands.

*Stanley, then, is the hard, brutal man who does not understand the refinements of life. He is controlled by natural instincts

untouched by the advances of civilization. Thus, when something

threatens him, he must strike back in order to preserve his own threatened existence. If someone gets destroyed, that is the price that must be paid. It is the survival of the fittest, and Stanley is

the strongest .

*The glaring contrast and fierce struggle between the two worlds of Stanley Kowalski and Blanche DuBois are the main themes of Williams' play. These two worlds are so diametrically opposed that they can never meet. Thus, in order to bring these two together — to have these two encounter each other — Williams has

created Stella .

*By simply having her married to Stanley and by having her be Blanche's sister, Williams then creates the perfect opportunity of bringing these two opposing worlds together under one roof.

*Blanche’s younger sister, about twenty-five years old and of a mild disposition that visibly sets her apart from her more vulgar neighbors .

*Stella possesses the same timeworn aristocratic heritage as Blanche, but she jumped the sinking ship in her late teens and left Mississippi for New Orleans .

*There, Stella married lower-class Stanley, with whom she shares a robust sexual relationship. Stella’s union with Stanley is both animal and spiritual, violent but renewing .

* Stella seems to become the tangible symbol of victory between Stanley an Blanche warring parties.

*But Blanche is not alone in her hopes to win over Stella, for Stanley is also guilty of trying to mold his wife's mind. He is continually trying to convince Stella that they had a better life together before her

sister's arrival .

*Stella is reminded of the "colored lights" of their sex life together and of the happiness they once shared .

*But Stella's function is not just to be an object in this struggle, to be merely swayed from one side to the other. She also seems to be the only hope of a compromise between these two different backgrounds.

*As Blanche and Stanley represent two diametrically opposed worlds, so Stella represents a bridge between the two

poles .

*For Stella shows that a meeting point of coexistence is possible between Blanche's and Stanley's separate worlds.

* Stella still has many qualities of Belle Reve. She has not allowed a gentle and refined nature to completely disappear simply because she has accepted Stanley and all he stands for. Nor has she allowed her upbringing to stand in the way of enjoying life with her raw and lusty husband.

*She has, rather, combined both worlds into one and has shown that these two apparent opposites are, if not compatible, at least co-existable.

* The problem between the play's two main characters seems not to be the irreconcilable worlds which they represent, but the rigid inflexibility of Stanley and Blanche in their respective attitudes. Stella seems to indicate that such a reconciliation is possible. She is not a perfect blend; however, she does show that a mixture of the two viewpoints can be workable.

*After Blanche’s arrival, Stella is torn between her sister and her husband. Eventually, she stands by Stanley, perhaps in part because she gives birth to his child near the play’s end. While she loves and pities Blanche, she cannot bring herself to believe Blanche’s accusations that Stanley dislikes Blanche, and she eventually dismisses Blanche’s claim that Stanley raped her. Stella’s denial of reality at the play’s end shows that she has more in common with her sister than she thinks .

* Perhaps because he lives with his dying mother, Mitch is noticeably more sensitive than Stanley’s other poker friends. The other men pick on him for being a mama’s boy.

*The players speak coarsely, enjoying primitive, direct humor, mixing it with the cards, chips, and whiskey — that is, all except Mitch .

*He seems to be somewhat different. He is first distinguished from the other three when he is teased about his concern for his mother.

*He excuses this soft-heartedness by explaining that she is ill and unable to sleep until he comes in at night .

*a second aspect of Mitch is revealed as he meets Blanche DuBois .

*His awkward courtesy and embarrassment show a consciousness of manners seldom seen in that raffish section of New Orleans.

* Blanche is quick to notice the hint of sensitivity in him that makes him seem superior to the others.

*Although he carries a silver cigarette case engraved with a quote from a sonnet, his words describing the romance and sorrow that inspired it seem trite and inadequate .

* At this point, Blanche provides the imagination and sympathy, while Mitch answers with his characteristically sincere commonplaces .

*His sensitivity appears rather clumsy in comparison, but he does half-apologize, saying that Stanley and his friends must strike Blanche as a pretty rough bunch.

*The difference in Stanley’s and Mitch’s treatment of Blanche at the play’s end underscores Mitch’s fundamental gentlemanliness. Though he desires and makes clear that he wants to sleep with Blanche, Mitch does not rape her and leaves when she cries out. Also, the tears Mitch sheds after Blanche struggles to escape the fate Stanley has arranged for her show that he genuinely cares for her. In fact, Mitch is the only person other than Stella who seems to understand the tragedy of Blanche’s madness.

*Mitch's awkward imitation of the romantic gestures of Blanche is shown in the stage direction of this scene. He is a "dancing

bear" following the steps of her waltz. But this first appearance does characterize Mitch as the most sensitive member of

the Kowalski world.

 

*               A Streetcar Named Desire  is a psychological drama portraying neurotic

people who are victims of their own passions, frustrations and loneliness. In

the play Williams sympathizes depth characterization, he develops strong and interesting characters like Blanche and

Stanley, and he uses symbols which strengthen their features .

*With this drama Tennessee Williams has created such an impressive and salutary story with which he revolutionized the

American theatre,   and wrote his name into the book of history of literature .

Maha Bokhary

Nadya khanMalak HalwaniLujain Bogari

Wala’a Al-KahaliLayla Al-Solami