'Right from the start of the play, Williams draws the audience in by his presentation of tension and potential conflict between the sisters.' Do you agree?

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‘Right from the start of the play, Williams draws the audience in by his presentation of tension and potential conflict between the sisters.’

Do you agree?

Use as a starting point the opening of the play up to the stage directions ‘They stare at each other across the yellow-checked linoleum of the table.’

In the opening scene Williams presents the potential for conflict and tension between characters; most evidently between Stella and Blanche.  However he also presents tension within Blanche and the potential of conflict within herself.

        

Williams presents Blanche as a very unstable, overwrought and on edge character. She sits in the chair and she’s stiff, she ‘presses her legs close together’, she’s uncomfortable and vulnerable to what is around her. William shows us the moth without its protective disguise ‘I’ve got to keep hold of myself!’. The audience sees a fragile paper doll, an alcoholic.  Just before Blanche is about to tell Stella about the loss of Belle Reve, she ‘begins to shake again with intensity’, she is a wreck, and she is losing control of herself, and at the mention of Allan’s death she is sick. Her speech in the opening scene is full of hints of potential conflict within herself. She is defending herself when there is no need to, Stella has not accused her of anything and yet she persists in defending herself. She has run over these ‘conflicts’ in her mind, and all these pent up emotions are let loose in this speech. ‘As if you were able to stop them’ or ‘Where were you? In bed with your – Polack!’ show us how much she has been thinking over this moment, and accusing Stella of not being around to share the blows to save Belle Reve.

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The tension between the sisters is all too evident from the opening scene. When they first greet each other Blanche already insults Stella about her home ‘I thought you would never come back to this horrible place.’ Throughout this scene Blanche continually offends Stella ‘Only Poe!... could do it justice!’ Not only is she rude about Stella’s house she also insults her husband, Stanley. ‘Something like Irish… Only not so – Highbrow?’, ‘civilian background’.  She is calling him common – the man that Stella loves. Blanche, even after being complemented on her own looks, tells Stella that she’s ‘plump ...

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