A Streetcar Named Desire Essay Research Paper

  • Просмотров 316
  • Скачиваний 10
  • Размер файла 18
    Кб

A Streetcar Named Desire Essay, Research Paper The Realistic View-Point of A Streetcar Named Desire Through out the twentieth century, many great writers have come along and altered the public?s thoughts of normality, and in many cases shocked their audiences by presenting them with the brutal truth. This is exactly what the drama A Streetcar Named Desire accomplished. Whether, intentionally or unintentionally, Tennessee Williams succeeded in illustrating the need to forget what was in the past and stressed the idea of looking ahead to the future. The use of realistic drama at the time were almost unheard of, and Williams succeeded in becoming an innovator by setting the foundation for the use of plays with themes of realism in modern dramatic theater. ?Williams synthesizes

depth characterization, typical of drama that strives to be an illusion of reality, with symbolic theatrics… In short, realism and the theatricalism, often viewed as stage rivals, complement each other in this play(Mary Ann Corrigan, 575).? Thomas (Tennessee) Lanier Williams was born on March 26 1911, in Columbus, Mississippi. His father, Cornelius Coffin Williams, was a shoe salesman who spent a good deal of his time out on the road away from his family. Williams had two siblings, one older sister and one younger brother. The children spent most of their childhood in the home of their maternal grand father who was an Episcopal minister. In 1927, Williams received his first taste of literary acclaim when he placed third in a national essay contest, for his essay entitled ?Can a

Good Wife Be a Good Sport?.? After high school Williams studied for several years at the University of Missouri, but dropped out before he received a degree. Williams then took a job in St. Louis at the International Shoe Company where his father worked. Williams did eventually return to college and received a degree from the University of Iowa in 1938. In 1939, Williams moved to New Orleans where he formally adopted the name ?Tennessee,? which was the state of his grandfather?s birth. In 1945 Williams had his first real big success as a writer, with his play ?The Glass Menagerie? making its introduction on Broadway. Williams went own to write twenty-five full lengthier plays, including A Streetcar Named Desire, he produced dozens of short plays and screen plays, two novels,

sixty short stories, over one hundred poems, and an auto biography. For these works Williams received many awards including two Pulitzer Prizes, one for A Streetcar Named Desire, and four New York Drama Critic Awards, one for A Streetcar Named Desire (Tom Sullivan, 1). When asked by a reporter why he began writing, Williams replied by stating ?Why did I write? Because I found life Unsatisfactory(Steven Daniels,1).? ?Williams has written some of the most moving dramas of the modern theater (John Whitty, 575).? The realistic concepts displayed in A Streetcar Named Desire are best exemplified through the conflicting characters of Blanche DuBois, and Stanley Kowalski. Blanch posses as an illusion established in an effort of sustaining her normality, portraying herself as a Southern

belle, a fine, cultured, radiant young woman. This false sense of identity is put up as a front to conceal the reality of her identity as a lonely, alcoholic, prostitutive hussy. This disillusionment is forced out of her by Stanley, the barbaric womanizer, who possesses animalistic values. Stanley succeeds in stripping away Blanche?s false egocentric illusions and forcing her to face his animalistic reality (Mary Ann Corrigan, 575). This incident is symbolically represented in the drama when Stanley forces Blanch into the direct light of the lamp, symbolically enlightening her on the absurdity of her disillusionment . These two character serve as contrasting figures representative of the everyday struggle of reality verses disillusionment, in which reality, as it did in the play,