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