A Streetcar Named Desire
...purest language of plays" (Adler 30).
This is clearly evident in A Streetcar Named Desire, one of Williams's many
plays. I n analyzing the main character of the story, Blanche DuBois, it is
crucial to use both the literal text as well as the symbols of the story to
get a complete and thorough understanding of her.
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 seam to add much to the story. However, if
one investigate Blanche's past one can truly understand what this quotation
symbolizes. Blanche left her home to join her sister, because her life was
a miserable wreck in her former place of residence. She admits, at one
point in the story, that "after the death of Allan (her h usband)
intimacies with strangers was all I seemed able to fill my empty heart
with" (Williams, 178). She had sexual relations with anyone who would agree
to it. This is the first step in her voyage-"Desire". She said that she was
forced into this situation because death was immanent and "The opposite (of
death) is desire" (Williams, 179). She escaped death in her use of desire.
However, she could not escape "death" for long. She was a teacher at a high
school, and at one point she had intimacies with a seventeen year old...
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