Tennessee Williams play A Streetcar Named Desire is filled with many characters and each have many different sides to them. The main character Blanche is surrounded many supporting ones, the main ones being Stanley, Mitch and Stella.

Authors Avatar

Q: Explore how far you think Williams succeeds in developing other characters.

People aren’t one sided. We are all complex being and are each unique. So well developed characters should be complex and many sided as well. Tennessee William’s play “A Streetcar Named Desire” is filled with many characters and each have many different sides to them. The main character Blanche is surrounded many supporting ones, the main ones being Stanley, Mitch and Stella.

Stanley is introduced as a social man with a zest for life but the audiences sympathy towards him shift as the play goes on. He is portrayed as the symbol of new America, a polish immigrant who works hard and plays hard as well. Williams frequently uses animalistic language to show a character reliant on base instincts. His first action of “heaving” a package of meat to Stella conjures up the image of a caveman returning with fresh kill. However from scene two, Williams shows an unsavoury side of Stanley’s character, showing him to be insensitive, cruel and brutish. In that scene he is disrespectful to his wife and blindly hateful towards Blanche. He hates Blanch due to her upper class past and snobbish attitude and this leads to his investigation into her past as well as general unkindness towards her throughout the play. His animal instincts are further shown by Williams when he beats Stella after an argument. The uncontrollable rage he demonstrated lacking any human qualities. However, it is Blanche who takes the worse of Stanley’s actions. After finding out about her past, he tells Mitch, ruining Blanche’s last chance for salvation. He then presents her a birthday present of a one way ticket back to Laurel with mock kindness causing her to lose her breath with shock. But the ultimate cruelty is his rap of Blanche in scene ten, when he is at his most triumphant and she, her most vulnerable. Worse, he shows no remorse for any of his actions, with his sadistic “grin” before the rape showing his complete awareness of his actions. His contribution to Blanche’s downfall is noted by other characters when Mitch angrily says “You done all this” in the last scene. Williams though, also shows Stanley’s caring qualities in his relationship with Stella, from his passionate cry of “STTELLAHH” to his support of her when she is going to hospital. Stanley’s two sides, the caring and the brutal are all memorable and show the complex nature of his character.

Join now!

Mitch at first appears the chivalric soul mate to Blanche, but is shown to be incompatible and have his own shortcomings. He is seen as more sensitive than the rest of Stanley’s friends, and Blanche notes this when she first sees him, remarking “That one seems superior”. His worrying over his sick mother shows his caring nature and he is one of the only ones to realise the cruelty Stanley has done to Blanche when he angrily shouts “I’ll kill you” in the last scene. He shows resignation instead of anger when Blanche’s lies are uncovered, telling us that ...

This is a preview of the whole essay