How Does Williams Present Blanche’s Downfall Throu

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How does Williams present Blanche’s downfall through the presence of male influences in her life? In the tragedy, the play ‘A Streetcar named Desire’ Blanche acts as a tragic heroine through downfall, throughout the play we see Blanche deteriorate. There are several suggestions to her downfall, some may favour that Blanche’s desire for alcohol, as represented in the title, leads to her downfall. In the first scene Blanche hides from even her sister that she drinks; ‘no, one’s my limit’. Dramatic irony is used as the audience know that this is already her second drink therefore contradicting herself. As Blanche also uses the word ‘limit’ this suggests that Blanche has been told in the past to keep to a ‘limit’ , as she even lies to her sister suggesting she cannot control the alcohol problem as she has to lie to those closest to her. However in my opinion it is more than an alcohol problem that has led to her overall downfall. Blanche’s life has always been involved with male influences and in the 1940’s when the play was written men had a huge influence on woman. It’s only in today’s society where woman have finally started to become equal in comparison to the 1940’s play. When Blanche was young she was married, we can tell she was young as every time her late husband is talked about she refers to him as a ‘boy’; ‘Poems a dead boy wrote’ . As Blanche describes the letters as poems this also suggests their typical romance as rather then letters they sent ‘poems’ to one another. We see that Blanche was very much in love, however we discover that her late husband was homosexual ‘suddenly into a room that I thought was empty- which wasn’t empty, but had two people in…’ . In the 1940’s homosexuality was an insult to all and looked on as repulsive compared to an modern days society. In some states of America Homosexuality was made illegal and was seen as a

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