Explore Williams presentation of illusion and reality of a Streetcar Named Desire PDF

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Explore Williams’ presentation of illusion and reality in A Streetcar Named Desire. You must relate your discussion to relevant contextual factors. Williams explores illusion and reality in a Streetcar Named Desire, particularly through Blanche, a woman sculpted by her turbulent experiences with love and life. She perceives love as a distant impossibility, emphasised by her experiences (or lack thereof) with her husband and their relationship. Blanche’s endlessly flirtatious nature is challenged by Stanley’s authoritarian personality, and as the play moves forward, the audience sees their facades begin to falter. Blanche’s fragile mental state is highlighted throughout the play, beginning with her fabrication of Shep Huntleigh, a man who Blanche ‘went out with at college’. Shep acts as a metaphor for Blanche’s hope and material desire; by the end of the play, she truly believes that ‘the gentleman I was expecting from Dallas’ will come and rescue her. Yet this oldfashioned dependency on men does not fit into the New Orleans way of life. Blanche’s manifestation of a wealthy man who will safe her from not only her current troubles, but indeed her past as well emphasises the unstable state she falls more and more heavily into. Blanche’s utter dependency on the idea of Shep becomes deepened the further her mental state deteriorates, and she uses the thought of him ‘inviting me on a cruise of the Caribbean’ to rectify her lost sense of self. There is a certain irony in the way she laughs at ‘being such a liar’ when ‘writing a letter to Shep’ as she makes up elaborate lies about her current lifestyle since she fails to look at the entire picture. Blanche lacks understanding of her fundamental fault in materialising Shep in the first place and attempting to make him an actuality in her elaborate, apocryphal world. So, Blanche’s fragile mental state emphasises the idea of illusion and reality throughout the play. The use of music stresses her mental deterioration, particularly as the line between what the audience hears and what Blanche hears blurs. At the beginning of the play, the Polka tune is music that only the audience can hear, yet soon enough one gets an idea of just how chaotic Blanche’s mind is. She mutters about ‘that – music again’ to which Mitch replies ‘what music?’. This develops into a cataclysmic exposé of just how faded Blanche’s reality has become; she herself can no longer tell the difference between what is real and what is not. ‘The varsouviana is filtered into weird distortion, accompanied by the cries and noises of the jungle’ as Blanche is about to be taken to the mental institution, creating catharsis in the audience and adding to the play as a tragedy. The scene displays once again just how tumultuous Blanche’s mental state is, stressed by the ‘weird distortion’ of the tune, which mimics the distortion of her mind. The verb ‘cries’ echoes the way ‘she cries out’ in the scene where Stanley ‘carries her to the bed’, as she faces the reality that she is being taken away. Since her mind is described as a ‘jungle’, one conjures an image of beautiful danger; a jungle tends to be secretive and intense once night falls. The way Blanche hears the ‘noises of the jungle’ emphasises the way Williams utilises ‘an almost desperately morbid turn of mind and emotion’ (Richard Watts) to create an animalistic yet emotion-filled scene as the play’s drama heightens. As Blanche lies in the bath, she begins to sing ‘it’s only a paper moon, just as phony as it can be – But it wouldn’t be make believe, if you believed in me’, contrasting the idea of a real moon with this ‘paper moon’. Here, Williams is using expressionist features to allow the audience to access the psychic condition of Blanche. The noun ‘paper’ creates an image of breakability, which accentuates the idea of Blanche’s fragility. Due to the way the moon used to be seen as the same entity to the sun, the song stresses the way Blanche needs men to believe in her for her to feel real, different and emulate her feelings, emphasising reality in the play.

Blanche’s consciousness of her image is emphasised by her dislike for light and tendency towards alcohol. Williams uses Blanche’s shying away from light to mirror her desire to hide from reality. She tells Stella to ‘turn that off! I won’t be looked at in this merciless glare!’, displaying her insecurity, which leads to the creation of a portico of virtue. This emphasises that after ‘she pours herself a half tumbler of whiskey’ and then has another drink once Stella arrives, Blanche still insists to Stella that ‘one is my limit’. This exhibits to the audience that the denial of her evident alcoholism is due to her deep-set insecurity of how she is perceived by others. She sees it safer to lie to those around her than face the reality of her inevitable desolation. Along with this, it soon becomes evident that Blanche’s hamartia is her ceaseless lying about not only her alcoholism, but her life in totality, which leads to her downfall as a tragic heroine. Williams describes there being ‘something about her [Blanche’s] uncertain manner, as well as her white clothes, that suggests a moth’ in the exposition. This instantaneously presents Blanche as the epitome of purity through the ‘white clothes’, highlighting that women in the Old South were expected to be chaste and virginal. Yet she is also presented as self-destructive through the metaphor of ‘a moth’, since moths are pulled towards something that destroys them. Therefore, the single line embodies the illusion Blanche has created; there is great truth in this preliminary description of Blanche. In the same fashion, Blanche boundlessly adds more silk to her web of lies, proclaiming that ‘The Hotel Flamingo is not the sort of establishment I would dare to be seen in!’. However, the audience get a sense that Blanche’s reputation has been doomed from the start. Since a ‘Flamingo’ stands only on one leg, perhaps the idea that Blanche is unsteady and doomed to fall is emphasised, displaying the inescapable heightening of her delusions. Illusion and reality are also shown through the presentation of Stanley and Stella’s marriage. Stella tells Eunice ‘I couldn't believe her [Blanche’s] story and go on living with Stanley’ which displays the way that, right up until the end of the play, Stella refuses to believe the possibility of the reality of abuse in their marriage. It also exhibits Williams’ idea that ‘we are all savages at heart’ as Stella is willing to give up her sister for her husband. So, the two of them devise an artificially beatific marriage, and although it is plausible that Stella truly believes her marriage is indeed happy and she’s not ‘married to a madman’, it is also conceivable that she is simply telling herself that for ease. As well as this, the way Stanley is described as a ‘madman’ echoes the darkness that embodied many men after the America Civil War. Yet the contrast between the way that Stanley is portrayed at the beginning of the play to the end of the play emphasises how intoxicated Stella is with him; she lacks perception of his true personality. Stella proclaims that ‘when he is away for a week, I nearly go wild’, conjuring an image of a strong bond of love between the two. Yet this exclusivity and utter adoration completely contrasts the ‘crude images’ that flash in Stanley’s mind, ‘determining how he smiles’ at women. However, Stella does not see this objectification; although she realises Stanley is imperfect, she thinks of their relationship as ‘not something I want to get out of’. Her normalisation of the prevalent physical abuse that constantly ensues is, in itself, Stella creating an idealism of her life and subconsciously ignoring any negativity or wrongdoing on Stanley’s part. Therefore, her utter enchantment with Stanley emphasises the use of illusion in the play. The way Blanche perceives love throughout the play emphasises her idea of reality. She tells Mitch that she doesn’t ‘want realism. I want magic!’, displaying instantaneously that she does not want truth or verisimilitude. Instead, Blanche wants something unobtainable to counteract the tragic ending to her relationship with Allan, and she since she grips to the antebellum chivalry codes, she believes Mitch’s gallantry may fit with her Old South ideals. Linking to

this, not only was her love with Allan an illusion but Allan was an illusion himself. He was pretending to be heterosexual when he was not, although New Orleans was indeed one of the first states to accept homosexuality. Blanche declares ‘he was in the quicksands and clutching at me - but I wasn't holding him out, I was slipping in with him!’, with the noun ‘quicksand’ conjuring pathos in the audience as they imagine an image of ceaseless and inevitable sinking; one simply cannot be saved. It also emphasises the idea that both Allan and Blanche were utterly caught up in their believed adoration but for different reasons. Blanche felt she truly was in love with Allan, yet Allan feared the repercussions of revealing his true sexuality; Blanche realised the ‘help he needed but couldn’t speak of’. Yet she covers her guilt with a façade of purity, telling Stanley simply that ‘the boy died’. This stresses the way she has buried her youth so deep, she is disinclined to allow her guilt and despondency to show, exhibiting her reluctancy to face reality. In conclusion, Williams presents illusion and reality in A Streetcar Named Desire by displaying Blanche’s distorted view of the world; she is constantly trying to act angelic and pure. Yet, her true and turbulent nature soon becomes evident, and the more she unravels, the more unstable she appears to the audience. Her experiences in love have morphed her expectation of relationships into something either utterly unobtainable or predominantly sexual. On top of this, Stella’s strong belief that her relationship with Stanley is not sadistic or abusive exhibits the way one can become lost in love and lose sight of reality and normality....