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Essay / The character of Blanche DuBois in Tennessee Williams...
The character of Blanche on a streetcar Named DesireBlanche, Stella's older sister, until recently a high school English teacher in Laurel, Mississippi. She arrives in New Orleans in a talkative, witty, arrogant, fragile, and ultimately ruined form. Blanche was married and passionately in love with a tortured young man. He committed suicide after she discovered he was gay, and she has suffered from guilt and regret ever since. Blanche saw her parents and loved ones die, all the old guard, then had to endure the seizure of the family estate. Cracking under the strain, or perhaps giving in to urges so long repressed that they could no longer be contained, Blanche embarks on a series of sexual escapades that trigger her expulsion from her community. In New Orleans, she takes on the air of a woman who has never known indignity, but Stanley sees through her. Her past catches up with her and destroys her relationship with Mitch. Stanley, as she fears, destroys what's left of her. At the end of the play, she is taken to an insane asylum. It is indeed the story of what happened to Blanche in the play, but what flaws in her own character were the cause of her later tragedy. Blanche is by far the most complex character in the play. An intelligent and sensitive woman who values literature and the creativity of the human imagination, she is also emotionally traumatized and repressed. This gives free rein to one's own imagination to become a refuge for one's pain. We sense that Blanche's vision of her real self as opposed to her ideal self has become increasingly blurred over the years until it is sometimes difficult for her to tell the difference. It's a challenge to find the key to Blanche's melancholy, but perhaps the roots of her trauma lie in her early marriage. She was haunted by her inability to help or understand her troubled young husband and has tortured herself ever since. Her tendency to lose herself in the "kindness of strangers" could also be understood from this period in the sense that her sense of confidence in her own feminine attractiveness was shaken by the knowledge of her husband's homosexuality and she is driven to use her sexual charms to attract men again and again. Yet, behind all this, there is the desire to find a companion, to flourish in love..