Character Study Of Blance Dubois Term paper

While the free essays can give you inspiration for writing, they cannot be used 'as is' because they will not meet your assignment's requirements. If you are in a time crunch, then you need a custom written term paper on your subject (character study of blance dubois)
Here you can hire an independent writer/researcher to custom write you an authentic essay to your specifications that will pass any plagiarism test (e.g. Turnitin). Waste no more time!

Tennessee Williams was once quoted as saying that "symbols are nothing but the natural speech of drama...the purest language of plays" (Adler 30). This is clearly evident in Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire. As with any of his major characters, any analysis of Blanche DuBois much consist of a dissection of the play’s dialogue, supplemented by an understanding of the “language” of symbols in which Williams often speaks.

Before one can understand Blanche's character one must understand the reason why she moves to New Orleans and joins her sister, Stella, and brother-in-law, Stanley. By analyzing the symbolism in the first scene, one can understand what prompted Blanche to move. Her appearance in the first scene "suggests a moth" (Williams 96). In literature a moth represents the soul. So it is possible to see her entire voyage as the journey of her soul (Quirino 63). Later in the same scene she describes her voyage: "They told me to take a streetcar named Desire, and then transfer to one called Cemeteries and ride six blocks and get off at Elysian Fields" (Quirino 63). Taken literally this does not seem to add much to the story. However, if one investigates Blanche's past one can truly understand what this quotation symbolizes. Blanche left her home to join her sister, because her life was a wreck. She admits, at one point in the story, that "after the death of Allan [her husband] intimacies with strangers was all I seemed able to fill my empty heart with" (Williams 178).

This “desire” is the driving force, the vehicle of her voyage. It was this desire that caused her to lose her high school teaching position, and it is this desire that brings her to the next stop of her symbolic journey, “Cemeteries,” and finally to "Elysian Fields". The inhabitants of this place are described in Book six of the Aenied:

“‘They are the souls,’ answered his [Aeneas'] father Anchises, ‘whose destiny it is a second time to live in the flesh and there by the waters of Lethe they drink the draught that sets them free from care and blots out their memory.’"(Quirino 61)

This is the place of the living dead. Blanche came to Elysian Fields to forget her horrible past, and to have a fresh start (Quirino 63). In fact Blanche admits in the fourth scene that she wants to "make (herself) a new life" (Williams 135).

By understanding the circumstances that brought Blanche to Elysian Fields it is easy to understand the motives behind many of her actions. One such action is Blanche’s obsessive bathing. This represents her need to purify herself from her past (Corrigan 53). However, it is important to note that Blanche's description of her traveling came before she actually settles into Elysian Fields. The description therefore represents the new life Blanche hoped to find, not what she actually did find.

From the beginning we see that Blanche fits in neither with her new neighbors,...

Adler, Thomas. A Streetcar Named Desire: The Moth and the Lantern. Boston: Twayne, 1990.
Corrigan, Mary Ann. “Memory, Dream, and Myth in the Plays of Tennessee Williams.” Dialogue in American Drama. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1971.
Quirino, Leonard. “The Cards Indicate a Voyage on A Streetcar Named Desire.” Modern Critical Interpretations: A Streetcar Named Desire. Ed. Harold Bloom. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 1988.
Williams, Tennessee. A Streetcar Named Desire. New York: Viking Penguin, 1976. You should cite this paper as follows:

MLA Style
. EssayMania.com. Retrieved on 25 May, 2012 from
    <http://essaymania.com/80001/character-study-of-blance-dubois>

More College Papers

Character Analysis: The Fall Of The House Of Usher essay
In Edgar Allan Poe’s, “The Fall of the House of Usher,” the three characters are the unknown narrator, the narrators old time friend Roderick Usher, and Roderick’s sister Madeline Usher. The three characters are unique people with distinct characteristics,but they are tied together by the same t

Censoring Huckleberry Finn essay
Censoring Huckleberry Finn Fellow staff, teachers and students, as we all know high school is a time to grow, find yourself and experience different personalities of different people. It is also meant to help you get ready for a world where dealing with different people and situations comes quickly

Celebrated Cases Of Judge Dee essay
Sung Yon Kim Asian Civilization Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee In by reading the Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee, I gained a perspective of the people and culture of China. This book showed the analysis of Chinese saw and the background of Chinese history. Judge Dee, during the Tang Dynasty, was a