Blanche is a character conditioned by the society in which she grew up, her past influencing her personality. Dissatisfied with her life, she cannot or does not want to change it for the better. She prefers to retreat from reality into illusions and fantasies, constructing multiple facades of her identity, which she presents to the characters she interacts with. She was raised to emulate the ideal Southern womanhood – the beautiful, sometimes shy, sometimes flirtatious but always chaste woman. But the harsh reality of 20th-century urban America is at odds with this ideal, and Blanche is disillusioned, forced to make her way in a world that doesn't understand her and that she doesn't understand. Her promiscuity and her alcoholism are means of escaping these ordeals, because she tries and fails to reconcile reality and illusion, to reconcile the woman she is with the woman she wants to be and wants people to believe that she is. Say no to plagiarism. Get a custom essay on "Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned"? Get an original essay The key to her life's downward slide was the discovery that her beloved young husband was gay and the shock of her subsequent suicide. Blanche tells Mitch about this traumatic experience, her disgust and revulsion: “It's because, on the dance floor – unable to stop – I suddenly said – I saw! I know! You make me sick ! She turned away from him and instead of offering him love and the possibility of a heterosexual life, she offered him hatred and contempt. Gripped by a mixture of regret and self-pity, Blanche has no way of accepting the disaster, her shock turns to illness, and the illness ultimately triumphs, as Blanche is sent to a mental institution in the end of the piece. his destruction is Stanley. By becoming her destroyer, he also becomes the avenger of her homosexual husband. Nevertheless, he is as guilty of destroying Blanche as she is of destroying her husband. However compassionate the reader may be towards her (she has, after all, lost everything: her plantation, her love, her dream of a life of gracious nobility), she remains a woman who, in fact, killed her husband through her. cruelty. In the last scene, when she is helpless and defeated, Stanley acts with the same kind of cruelty that Blanche was guilty of when she told her husband that he disgusted her. Blanche and Stanley are presented as complete opposites. In terms of their attitude towards the world, Blanche does not have the stamina to handle the stress that her experience in New Orleans brings and she ends up in a sanitarium. Stanley faces the world with vigor and his own path seems headed toward triumph. Endowed with sexual virility and a keen sense of the world, he is ready to overcome all obstacles. In Blanche, sexuality is combined with sentimentality, a gentility in decline but not devoid of attraction, in a word the collapse of a tradition. At Stanley's, with a new order that is crude, vigorous but crude and rough. There is therefore a dualism between victims and victors, protagonist and antagonist. However, this opposition is not absolute: Blanche is cruel towards her husband, condescending towards her sister, arrogant towards Stanley. Although he is cruel to Blanche, Stanley is humanized by being a loyal friend to Mitch and a satisfactory husband to Stella. Blanche's identity is divided between who she really is and who she pretends to be in front of others. Her true personality is determined by the environment in which she grew up. In her essay “Tennessee Williams and the Predicament of Women,” Louise Blackwell includes Blanche in the category of women “who learned tomaladaptive by adapting to abnormal family relationships and who strive to break their bondage in order to find a partner.” While her sister Stella left home to set up on her own throughout the world, Blanche remained with her elderly parents well beyond the marriageable age for most women. A devoted child, she stayed behind fighting to save the family estate, Belle Reve, although the plantation was lost to "grandfathers, father, uncles and brothers, who traded the land for their fornications epic.” Having adapted to an abnormal family life, she was unable to adapt to her sister's so-called normal world when circumstances forced her to do so. Her sister, for her part, belongs to the group of women who “submitted to a dominating power”. and often inferior in an effort to achieve reality and meaning through communication with another person.” Although Stella is superior to Stanley in terms of background and personal endowments, she submits to his lifestyle because they have a satisfying sexual relationship. When Blanche is revolted by her boorish husband, Stella explains that "there are things that happen between a man and a woman in the dark - that somehow make everything else seem - unimportant". When faced with a crucial choice at the end of the play, Stella agrees to send her sister to a mental institution rather than believe that Stanley raped Blanche, proving how far she will go to defend her sexual partner. Blanche constructs a world of fantasy in which she takes refuge from reality. During most of the eleven scenes, she displays different shades of her role as a true Southern lady. At first, she plays the “grand lady” to her own sister, blaming her for the conditions in which she currently lives. In the second scene, she plays the "sex kitten" to Stanley, while in the third, she plays the facade of a "refined lady" for Mitch, claiming that she "can't stand a bare light bulb any more than a remark gross or vulgar action.” She then plays the role of an "indignant aristocrat", complaining to Stella about her brutal husband and begging her not to "stay with the brutes". She continues to behave like a refined lady in front of Mitch (even though, just before their meeting, she had flirted with the young man while collecting money), but the memory of her tragic marriage destroys this role. In the eighth scene, Stanley destroys her aristocratic image when he gives her a bus ticket to Laurel, alluding to her humiliating past. She then attempts to resume her role as a refined lady with Mitch, but ends up confessing her promiscuities, explaining that she tried to turn away from death towards its opposite, desire, but ultimately failed. At the climax of scene ten, she calls Stanley an animal, but he turns the animal accusation against her, calling her a tiger. In the last scene, Blanche becomes a victim of her own Southern belle illusion. She confuses the role she played with reality, as she does not seem to recognize poker players. Her famous sentence addressed to the doctor who came to take her away underlines her suffering: “Whoever you are, I have always depended on the kindness of strangers” – it is precisely this strong dependence on others that brought her at this point. The play is full of symbolism, with certain lines, characters and objects acquiring another layer of meaning. For example, the famous paper lantern that Blanche uses to cover the light bulb symbolizes her desire to "hide the light of truth to make it more acceptable to her eyes." When Mitch asks her why, she states that she hates being in strong light, which is also symbolic of her.