Comp Essay Street Car Named Desire Essay

Comp. Essay Street Car Named Desire Essay, Research Paper

Struggles Within:

A

Comparison of Amanad Wingfield

And

Blanche Dubois

In today’s rough and tough world, there seems to be no room for failure. The pressure to succeed in life sometimes seems unreasonable. Others often set expectations for people too high. This forces that person to develop ways to take the stress and tension out of their lives in their own individual ways. In the plays “The Glass Menagerie” and “ A Streetcar Named Desire” written by Tennessee Williams, none of the characters are capable of living in the present and facing reality. Two of the characters are Amanda Wingfield and Blache Dubios. In order for these characters to deal with the problems and hardships in their lives they retreat into their own separate worlds of illusion and lies where all their pains are gone away.

Amanda Wingfield is mother of Tom and Laura. She is a middle-aged southern belle whose husband has abandoned her. She spends her time reminiscing about the past and nagging her children. Amanda is completely dependent on her son Tom for finical security and holds him fully responsible for her daughter Laura’s future. Amanda is obsessed with her past as she constantly reminds Tom and Laura of that “ one Sunday afternoon in Blue Mountain when she once received seventeen gentlemen callers” (pg.32). The reader cannot even be sure that this actually happened. However, it is clear that despite its possible falsity, Amanda has come to believe it. Amanda also refuses to acknowledge that her daughter Laura is crippled and refers to her handicap as ” a little defect—hardly noticeable” (pg.45). Only for brief moments does she ever admit that her daughter is crippled and then she resorts back into to her world of denial and delusion. Amanda puts the weight of Laura’s success in life on her son Tom’s shoulders. When Tom finally finds a man to come over to the house for diner and meet Laura, Amanda blows the situation way out of proportion. She believes that this gentlemen caller, Jim, is going to be the man to rescue Laura. When in fact neither herself nor Laura has even met this man Jim yet. She tries to explain to Laura how to entertain a gentleman caller; she says-talking about her past “ They knew how to entertain their gentlemen callers. It wasn’t enough for a girl to be possessed of a pretty face and a graceful figure although I wasn’t slighted in either respect. She also needed to have a nimble wit and a tongue to meet all occasions.” (pg.33) By Amanda saying that she did not have a pretty face and a graceful figure she was waiting for a compliment from her children to feed her narcissistic and vainglorious ego. She tells Laura when Laura is nervous about the gentleman, “You can’t be satisfied with just sitting at home….” (pg.85) When in fact, Laura was quite happy and content sitting at home. Amanda cannot distinguish reality from illusion. When Jim arrives, Amanda is dressed in the same girlish gown she wore on the day that she met her husband and she regresses to her childish, giddy days of entertaining gentlemen callers. These actions made her life even more miserable because she realizes she chose the wrong man, a man that left her and her children to struggle through life while he went and chased his dreams. Amanda’s children’s fate is her own fault, her constant living in the past generates devastating consequences for her children, crippling them psychologically and seriously inhabiting their own quests for maturity and self-realization. Because Amanda lives in a fantasy world of dreamy recollections, her children cannot escape from this illusionary world either. The bottom line is that rather than deal with her distresses in life, Amanda chooses to live her life in a fabricated life of the past.

Blanche Dubios the main character of the play a A Streetcar Named Desire is a neurasthenic, hypersensitive, faded southern belle who after some rough times back in her home town of Laurel moves to New Orleans to live with her sister Blanche and brother-in-law Stanley. To fully understand Blanche’s character you must understand her reason for moving to New Orleans and the heart of her problems. She left her home because her life there was a miserable wreck. After the death of her husband, she had huge void in her life to fill. She escaped the death of her husband with sexual desire. She admitsto this, at one point in the story, “that after the death of Allen (her husband) intimacies was the only thing that seemed to be able to fill her empty heart” (pg.178). She had sexual relations with anyone who agreed to it. Blanche was a very friendly and flirtatious woman; those very characteristics got Blanche into even more problems. At one juncture while a high school teacher, she had intimacies with one of her students a seventeen-year-old boy. The superintendent found out about this from the boy’s father and Blache was immediately fired. Her image was totally destroyed and reputation gone down the tubes. She was called the town slut for sleeping around. Like Amanda from The Glass Menagerie, Blanche often went fishing for compliments an example of this is when she says to Stella, “ You’re all I’ve got in the world, and you’re not glad to see me.” (pg.20) Blanche says this knowing what Stelle’s response will be, “ Why Blanche, you know that’s not true.” (pg.20) Blanche seemed to be inse