Question- Write a note on character analysis of Blanche Dubois in "A Streetcar Named Desire" by Tennessee Williams.

Answer -

Tennessee Williams himself claimed that his purpose in writing plays was to examine and probe deeply such men and women whose desires have remained unfulfilled and feel the external factors responsible for it. Blanche Dubois also appears to live a dual life the source of which is in her own split personality. Essentially an uprooted person, she is in search of a stable life where she can be assured of love, protection and comfort. She comes to her married sister's home to live but is unable to find all that her heart desired. This is mainly because she tries to project herself as someone who is a cut above the level at which others live, behaving and speaking and generally giving impression of belonging to upper class.

This not just a girlish playful act, it is a deliberate creation of another world of illusions far removed and often contrary to harsh realities in which she not only wants others to believe but begins herself to live. Out of the bright landscape of her fanciful imagination keep the brutal facts of life her intense emotional suffering when one by one the family elders at her native Belle Reve died, rendering her lonely. Belle Reve glimmers in the distance like an inaccessible past, where she suffered her lonely, something she can not share with anyone else. This also that unsuccessful marriage of hers with the young man Allan who turned out to be homosexuals, caught in the act by her and felt such humiliation that he killed himself on the spot. She was totally exposed to the inner devastation and wanted to be saved. Here at her sister's place, she finds living conditions "unbearable".

"It is really a frightful situation you see, there's no privacy here. There's just these portieres between the two rooms at night...... A teacher's salary is barely sufficient for her living expenses. I didn't save a penny last year and so I had to come here for the summer. And he has to put up with me, apparently so much against his wishes."

Her problems are compounded by the fact that she lost her job as a teacher and her frayed nerves are not much Stanley's obdurate attitude making him stand dead against determined to expose her to the world. So we see that at one level Blanche's life presents a picture of devastation, desolation, loneliness and hunger for emotional attachment. Her coming to this placed "Elysian Fields" where she hoped to find happiness and stability only percipitates her troubles.

In Typical Tennessee Williams formula Blanche's succour lies in creating illusions about herself by hiding the truth and living on imagined things. She puts on expensive clothes to give a false impression that she lives comfortably and has money. While the fact is that she has lost the family property, has been rendered penniless and has come to her sister's because she can not go anywhere else. She serves two purposes: concealing reality, thus temporarily finding a safely measure to save herself and then creating a world of illusions which she thinks will not only elevate her image in other's eyes, but provide a source of wish fulfilling wherein she can live according to her own desire. This is the second level of existence. But these two levels don't remain neatly separated, tragically they overlap and create greater bewilderment in her mind.

The frightful mix-up which occurs insanely in her as the play progresses and even Mitch spurns her, drives her to greater. terror of desperation at the end of which stands Stanley cruel and unrelenting as fate. One such imaginary character she fabricates for herself is Mr. Shep Huntligh of Dallas, multi-millionaire celeberity. She herself falls vitim to these illusions to the extent that she believes them to be real. So in scene 10 when she is practically cornered by stan before he criminally assaults her, Blanche rushes to phone to this imaginary man. This scene, and prior to it the one in which Mitch refuses to marry her, shows his desire to posses her physically and reveals in full measure to what extent has Blanche's mind become disorinted as a result of repeated assaults on her inner world of dreams and ambitions.

This denial of the real, or inability to cope up with the diverse, kinds of reality in life leads her to create in her a compulsive habit of living in imaginary, fanciful world. In this sense, she can be said to possess a "split personality", a character who simultaneously exists on two opposite planes, and faces the more harrowing challenges from a clash between these sides. What Tennessee Williams wanted to portray is this battleground that a person turns into in which hidden urges and motives surface in confused hordes to get locked into bitter fight for dominance. That precisely is Blanche's problem at bottom.

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