Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams Book Report

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Streetcar Named Desire

Blanche is a person of imaginative and false illusions, whereas Stanley is a creature of bestial reality. Although the binary holds firm throughout A Streetcar Named Desire, Blanche and Stanley are multifaceted and complex characters that preclude oversimplification. For example, Blanche's imaginative and false illusions are exacerbated and enhanced by her devotion to the drink. Her compulsive and excessive drinking prove to be expressions or symptoms of her imaginative and false illusions. Drinking also causes Blanche DuBois to intensify any imaginative or false illusions she might have had already. Because Blanche was once young and attractive, she still sees herself in that light. It is as if she has a false mirror before her like the stepmother in "Snow White." Blanche harbors false self-images, because those illusory self-concepts are more pleasant and comforting than the reality. Blanche can trick herself into believing her false illusions because she has been attractive; she has had relationships with men significantly younger than her. She has also been wealthy, and lives on a plantation that in many ways reflects and bolsters her sense of grandiosity, social status, and self-importance.

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However deluded Blanche might seem throughout the play, her sense of self is at least in part grounded in reality. That reality is sometimes as bestial, raw, and primal as Stanley's. Blanche has experienced the type of hardship and pain that can be difficult to digest, but she knows the pain is there -- or else she would not need to drink or develop other dysfunctional coping mechanisms.

Stanley is very much a creature of bestial reality in the play, and he never actually proves himself otherwise. He only appears more sensible and logical than Blanche briefly, before it becomes apparent that he is actually out of touch with reality on a scale equal to that of Blanch. He remains, for example, unaware of Stella's suffering. However, it can be implied that his baser nature may at least….....

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