Abstract
The paper aims to analyze the symbolic meaning of Blanche in Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire.William has consistently employed symbolism to universalize the significance of the realistic action he posits, not only because he thinks of symbolism as essential of art, but because it seems to be characteristic of his personal reactions to life in general. Blanche DuBois, the very name, her appearance and dressing, her illusionary vision of the world, and her lantern together with her desire all contribute to William’s symbolic portrait of a southern belle. Displaced in an unfavorable environment, Blanche finally collapses mentally and excluded out of the new industrial world.
Highlights
Of all Williams’s plays, A Streetcar Named Desire is the most controversial one
While Harold Bloom in his introduction of Modern Critical Interpretation of A Streetcar stresses the fall of Blanche is a parable of the failure of American literary imagination to rise above its recent myths of recurrent defeat and he regards Blanch as a failed Whitmanian, and eccentrically a failed aesthetic identity
Blanche, a south belle who clings to her delicate taste and refinement, experienced clan downfall, relatives’ death and failure of romantic marriage, driven by poverty to seek shelter from sister, only found herself caged in the past, failing to seek desirable love and security, settled only in her own illusion and regarded insane from the around world
Summary
Of all Williams’s plays, A Streetcar Named Desire is the most controversial one That is why it is the focus of so many critics from different schools. Some others explore the play from a cultural respect to find out the forces that destroyed the southern culture Still another group is psychologically oriented and views Stanley and Blanche as unique individuals and the Streetcar as Williams’s display of unconscious warfare between two opposing forces. William once said that whenever he stayed in New Orlands, he lived “near the main street of the Quarter which is named Royal. Down this street, running on the same tracks, are two street cars, one named DESIRE and the other CEMETERY. “symbolism” may refer to the use of abstract concepts, as a way to obfuscate any literal interpretation, or to allow for the broader www.ccsenet.org/ells
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