To what extent is the play "A Streetcar Named Desire" the tragedy of Blanche?

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To what extent is the play “A Streetcar Named Desire” the tragedy of Blanche?

 

In the 1945 Tennessee Williams play, the character of Blanche Dubois is by far the most complex persona. To explore whether the play can be regarded as her tragedy, we first need to examine the necessary criteria of the genre. To fulfil the standard, the play should be “a serious representation of the downfall of the protagonist, a person of admirable qualities, who makes a fatal error. These qualities are wasted in the final calamity, which has a disproportion in scale between the initial error, and the size of the punishment. The catharsis should arouse feelings of pity and terror.”

A Streetcar Named Desire can be seen as a modern domestic tragedy, with base elements of traditional tragedy. The central character, or protagonist, Blanche Dubois has the tragic flaw of hubris – with both pride of intellect and pride of sexual prowess.

Blanche has come to the home of her sister and brother in law Stella and Stanley Kowalski, because she has nowhere else to go, having lost the inheritance of their ancestral home, Belle Reve (Beautiful Dream), due to the mismanagement of hers and Stella’s forbears.  Stanley is an American of Polish extraction, a modern, rough, working class man who distrusts and dislikes Blanche from the outset. The admirable qualities Blanche displays of eloquence and education (Blanche is a teacher of literature) are to him an affectation and an annoyance. Blanche also tells of her admirable qualities herself, in scene ten, saying that she is “cultivated, and of intelligence and breeding”. Stella also points out more of them whilst talking to Stanley, telling him that Blanche as a child, was both tender and trusting. Blanche also dresses well, and is astonished at the standard to which Stella has married into, something that she persistently tells Stella on several occasions. First of all Stanley only suspects that Blanche considers him to be beneath her and

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her sister, he calls her “Dame Blanche” to his wife, but eventually he hears Blanche urging Stella to leave both him and the life she has married into. “Don’t hang back with the brutes!” Blanche tells Stella at the end of scene four. Williams delivers this scene to us making powerful use of both dramatic irony and off set sounds. Stanley hides behind a door, and the noises of a locomotive, trumpets and drums add to the sense of unease thus ensuring that the reader understands the strength of the danger that Blanche is in from this moment ...

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