Blanche's Illusion (PUB #2)

            In the play known as “A Streetcar Named Desire” made by the famous playwright Tennessee Williams there is a quote that can be related to both the real world as well as many different parts of the play as a whole. That quote says “I couldn’t go on believing her story and live with Stanley” (Stella, 1232). This quote can be seen as Blanche making an illusion with her stories to conceal the truth form people. This illusion becomes a big part of the story and can be related to some different types of people and societies that we have in current times.

             To start, the quote can be seen to relate to the play in that Blanche makes up a number of stories in attempts to protect herself and keep people seeing things the way that she wants people to see the world. One example of Blanche attempting to make people see the world the way that she wants is never actually telling Mitch how old she was. Blanche does this so that she can protect herself and so that Mitch would stay with her because she feared that if he knew her actual age that he would not be willing to marry her. To show this, during the birthday set up scene Stella asks Blanche how many candles she wants on her cake and she responds with “Well stop at twenty-five” (Blanche, 1216). The number of candles represents her age and she is lying about how old she is because Mitch is supposed to be coming to her birthday and she doesn’t want to give away her actual age to him. Another example of this is how from the start Blanche didn’t tell the truth to her sister on why she had to be staying at her house and why she couldn’t go back to the place that she was originally staying at. Originally she tells them that she was told to take some time away from the job by saying “So Mr. Graves--Mr. Graves is the high school Superintendent--he suggested I take a leave of absence. couldn't put all of those details into the wire ...” (Blanche, 1170). Blanche makes this lie because she doesn’t want her sister to know what had actually happened and that she was actually fired from her job for having a relation with a seventeen-year-old boy.

            Next, How Blanche tries to make people think the way that she thinks can be related to a totalitarian dictator in some ways. In totalitarianism you are only allowed to believe the world that you are told to live in and you are not allowed to believe anything else. This political point of view creates an imaginary world for the people to live in and requires them to stay in that world or else there will be severe punishments, mainly death. In totalitarianism dictators use authoritarian control to make sure that they have an iron grip on their society and that everyone is living in the world that they have set out for them with a lot of censoring and lies. A definition given for totalitarianism is “A totalitarian government is one in which a single political party maintains absolute control over the state” (Issitt, Micah). If someone thinks of Blanche as someone trying to take over in the minds of the people around her and get them to believe her they can relate her to a totalitarian dictator.

              There are many more ways to relate this quote form Williams play a Streetcar Named Desire to real life as well as many different ways to scenes in the play. This quote alone can have a number of different deeper meaning and interpretations for everyone that comes across it.

Works Cited

Issitt, Micah. “Totalitarian Rule.” Salem Press Encyclopedia, 2019. EBSCOhost, hs1.farmingdale.edu:2443/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ers&AN=88390996&site=eds-live.

Williams, Tennessee. A Streetcar Named Desire. Norton Introduction to Literature. Louisiana, 1947