Character Sketch On Four Main Characters Of The Play

“A Streetcar Named Desire” is a tragic play wrote by Tennessee Williams. The play takes place at New Orleans, Louisiana, in late 1940s. It uses the ironic and sympathetic realism tones to deal with a culture clash between two of the main characters, Blanche DuBois and Stanley Kowalski. In this essay, I will analyze the characteristics of four main characters of the play, Blanche DuBois, Stanley Kowalski, Mitch, and Stella Kowalski.

Blanche Dubois is a symbolic character in the play. She appears as a pretentious, fading relic of the Old South. When the play begins, Blanche is already a fallen woman in the society’s eyes. She has lost all of her family fortune and estate, and her husband had died by suicide years earlier. She also has a bad drinking problem. Behind her veneer of social snobbery and sexual propriety, Blanche is an insecure and dislocated person. In her sister-Stella’s household, Blanche pretends to be a woman who has never known indignity. However, her false propriety constitutes a calculated attempt to make herself appear attractive to new male suitors. She depends on male sexual admiration for her sense of self-esteem, which means that she has often succumbed to passion. She wants to escape poverty and the bad reputation by marrying. And Mitch is her only chance for contentment, even though he is far from her ideal. But Stanley’s relentless persecution of Blanche foils her pursuit of Mitch as well as her attempts to shield herself from the harsh truth of her situation. “Whoever you areвЂ"I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.” In the end, Blanche blindly allows herself to be led away by a kind doctor, ignoring her sister’s cries. Her ending is a sad culmination of her vanity and total dependence upon men for happiness.

Stanley Kowalski is another symbolic character in the play. He acts as a rising member of the industrial, urban immigrant class. He is loyal to his friends and passionate to his wife. He possesses an animalistic physical vigor that is evident in his love of work, fighting, and sex. He hates himself being called “Polack.” “I am not a Polack. People from Poland are Poles, not Polacks. But what I am is a one hundred percent American, born and raised in the greatest country on earth and proud as hell of it, so don’t ever call me a Polack.” This is when he hears Blanche called him a “Polack,” he makes her look old-fashioned and ignorant by asserting that he was born in America, is an American, and can only be called “Polish.” He sees Blanche as untrustworthy and does not