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Blanche: The Outsider

Examines Blanche's role in A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams.


The fifty year old screenplay A Streetcar Named Desire by the American playwright Tennessee Williams is just like many other stories based around a main character with easily distinguishable features and a different look on life. The story centres around Blanche, a snobbish, in many ways sad and unhappy character with many typical outsider qualities. The fact that she has her own very characteristic features makes the story more exciting and lets the reader or watcher of the play become closer to this woman that the play is centering around.

The definition of an outsider is hard to make, it is difficult to distinguish who is an outsider and who is not since it is such a diffuse expression. To define the outsider you firstly have to define the norm of society, which is highly questionable and controversial if it is even possible. But if you are trying to define the norm as the basic average person in society today, or fifty years ago when the play is taking place, the main character Blanche is no doubt different, and therefore an outsider. She has experienced things that are difficult for her to handle, her relationship to men is very unhealthy and she has several ?sins? from the past still bothering her. She acts like a child in many ways; she is spoiled and thinks that she can have anything that she wants. She is naive and lives in a dream world, making the real world hard for her to handle.

Initially, to describe the outsider in Blanche?s character, it is important to mention her relationship to men, which is very complex. She suffers from something many women are experiencing, even though it is not very often talked about in society. She is attracted to men almost obsessively and becomes an addict to their love, dependent on having someone by her side telling her they love her. She has a great need for the men?s love and approval to uphold her own self-esteem. The fact that they generally only want her body and physical features becomes invisible for her since she is deliberately ignoring it, imaging that they actually love her. As she is using her sexuality as a mean of recieving love, she is afraid of her own sexuality and wants to hide it under layers of dreams and fantasies. Because of the problem?s disguising character, it is still recognized as an outsider quality since the modern woman is supposed to be liberated and independent. If you show symptoms of being dependent on men or what they are giving you, and not succeeding in getting what you want or need, you are considered an outsider.

Likewise, this search for love and scare of her own sexuality is in many ways connected to her childish dream world that she lives in. Because of her fluctuating reality she needs substance in life and something to hold on to. She floats around and falls helplessly into different men?s arms, just to have something solid in her world of dreams. The reader does not know much about her family besides that her and Stella?s childhood was at Belle Reeve with what seems to be a happy family. In spite of this, many things are telling us that she now has a need for some kind of father figure, which she is trying to find through her desperate relationships with men. The fact that the male character Stanley, her sister Stella?s husband, does not seem to desire her as much as other men and he does not seem to be particularly attracted to her, makes her frustrated. This may also be one of the factors leading to her ?craziness? in the end of the book, which finally puts her in a mental hospital.

Further, the hot baths Blanche is taking several times during the play is a symbol of how she is trying to clean herself from the sins she has previously done. She desperately wants to wash away the past and soaks and scrubs her body for hours to become what she thinks is fresh and new, not stained with men?s hands full of desire. She wants to be pure and innocent, an example of this childish wish is in her relationship with Mitch where she is playing the role of the innocent countryside girl not willing to do anything else but kiss a man. In this, she is living in her fantasy world where she is the rich girl from Belle Reve, innocent as a newly sprung flower, without any black stories from the past. This makes her an outsider in that she is still on the level of a child, so in to her world of dreams that it becomes the truth. Among adults, this is mostly looked upon as something wrong and different. To be a mainstream adult you are supposed to live in the present, in the same reality as everyone else, not in your own imaginary world.

Finally, Blanche can be seen as suffering from manic depression. This is showing through several things. One of the apparent symptoms is her phobias, where the most obvious one is that she is afraid of the light. This is similar to her obsession with cleaning herself a way for her to preserve the old Blanche, who is young and innocent. Like a moth she is both attracting to and is afraid of the light. She believes that the light is making her look older and showing her real age, which she is obsessively scared of, and the underlying meaning is that she is afraid of the truth, shich the light is symbolizing. Described as a [q]"moth"[/q], the truth is attracting her in one sense, even though she is afraid of it. Like a moth she is attracted to the light even though she knows it is going to kill her. The light hinders her wish and fantasy picture that she is still twenty-five and blossoming. Her aging scares her in that she is afraid of becoming old and unhappy, she has lived all of her life attracting men with her beauty and she now thinks that her looks is all that she got to offer. If she looses her attractive looks, she will not only decay physically, but also mentally, and loose the only thing she can trust in life, her only connection to the real world that everyone else lives in. The reader gets told the story of how she fall in love with a seventeen-year old boy she was teaching. This is a scandalous event in the society?s point of view, but for Blanche it was only one of the ways for her to preserve her ability of attracting young men, and thus keeping the remembrances of the youth she once had and is now trying to keep.

By using Blanche?s outsider qualities, Williams is building up an interesting story, based on the conflict of the present and the past. The reason Blanche is considered to be an outsider, not fitting in anywhere, is in many ways rooted in that she lives in the past, refusing to accept what is reality for other people. The playwright is using her outsider qualities as means for her personality and the clash between her and the other main character, Stanley, who is a down-to-earth person living in the present and in what is considered to be the real world. By using these qualities Williams also conveys a realistic drama, with realistic characters and dramatic turns in the story. All of the play is building up to the moment in the end, when Blanche gets taken in to a mental hospital. By that point, the reader or watcher has built up a special relationship with her very distinguishable character gets the feeling that they know her well. This gives the audience a closer experience of the story, and lets them get a close look into the world of someone who has a different onlook upon life than the common person. They get the feeling of how the person considered to be different, an outsider like Williams himself, is going through life and what is important in it.






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