How Does Williams Present Stanley, Stella and Blanche in the Opening of the Play
By: Tommy • Essay • 1,262 Words • November 23, 2009 • 1,768 Views
Essay title: How Does Williams Present Stanley, Stella and Blanche in the Opening of the Play
How Does Williams Present Stanley, Stella and Blanche in the Opening of the Play
Tennessee Williams, the playwright of A Streetcar Named Desire is
renowned for his strong characterization. He uses many literary, as
well as dramatic, techniques in order to fully develop his characters,
including their pasts, their motives and also their mannerisms.
Moreover, Williams pays special attention to the way in which
characters interact with each other, and the effects that are created
as a result of the drama. Blanche is a major character in the play.
The playwright presents her through her outward appearance on stage,
her actions, the literary features of her language and what we find
out about her and her life. The dramatic techniques he uses are
designed to help the audience build-up an opinion of her, and these
include detailed stage directions that vividly describe exactly how he
wants to portray his character. When Blanche first appears in ‘Elysian Fields’, she is presented through her ‘incongruous’ appearance:
‘She is daintily dressed in a white suit with a fluffy bodice,
necklace and earrings of pearl, white gloves and hat’
The dramatic contrast between her and the New Orleans setting creates
tension in the scene. The audience is made immediately aware that
Blanche does not belong in such an environment, and an ambience of
awkwardness results. Her appearance ‘suggests a moth’ and this
adumbrates her tragic fate in the play.
Williams then exposes Blanche’s high standards as a result of growing
up in Belle Reve, a ‘great big place with white columns’. He does this
through her reaction to Stella’s apartment: ‘This-can this be-her
home?’ She cannot believe that the residence she has arrived at is
where Stella is living, and this shows the audience that she is from a
different class to the people of New Orleans, furthermore, the world
that she has been forced to enter.
A very interesting dramatic technique that Williams employs is to have
a period of time in the play where Blanche is alone on stage. This
occurs in scene one, after Blanche impolitely dismisses Eunice:
‘BLANCHE sits in a chair very stiffly with her shoulders slightly
hunched and her legs pressed close together…After a while the blind
look goes out of her eyes…A cat screeches. She catches her breath with
a startled gesture.’
The stage directions illustrate that Blanche is not of a normal
disposition- she seems to be nervous and is not in her right mind.
Seeing Blanche by herself is an effective way for the character to be
presented: we see her as an individual entity, what she is like
without the influence of other characters or the boundaries of her
social morals.
The way Blanche addresses Stanley and other characters in the play is
very indicative of Blanche as a character. The first person she
converses with is Eunice, a white woman who occupies ‘the upstairs
flat’ above Stella and Stanley’s. She clearly does not find it
necessary to refrain from rudeness when talking to someone she
believes to be of little importance to her:
‘BLANCHE: Yes…
EUNICE: A place