“A Streetcar Named Desire”

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Literary Assignment 2 Essay no. 1 “A Streetcar Named Desire” In “A Streetcar Named Desire”, Tennessee Williams gave totally different and unique personalities among the main characters, Blanche Dubois and Stanley Kowalski. In a macro sense, they are representations of two contrasting regions in the U.S.: Laurel in the Southern region, a traditional aristocratic region, and New Orleans, the world industrial centre and a cosmopolitan city (according to Tennessee Williams’s stage direction). Hence, they were affected by the social and cultural values in the two worlds at the same time. Although their backgrounds seem to be incompatible, when these two different people clashed, we can find a trend of changing of a local belief in a developing world. In the social aspect, we can find different social manners from Stanley and Blanche due to their different social beliefs. Traditional social hierarchy can be shown from the snobbish behaviors of Blanche. She despised the people from common class because she believed that she is more superior to those people in terms of her education, intelligence and her refined character. When Blanche first arrived in Stanley’s apartment, she was shocked that her sister lived in such a scanty apartment. Also, she played tricks on Mitch’s incapability on French to satisfy her vanity: ‘Voulez-vous couches avec moi ce soir? Vous ne comprenez pas? Ah, quelle dommage!’ (In English: Would you like to sleep with me this evening? You don’t understand? Ah, what a pity!) Besides, she strongly discouraged Stella to get along with this common man because of his primitiveness and rudeness. And she always used some offensive expressions like ‘vulgar’, ‘Polack’ and ‘animal’ to describe Stanley. Nevertheless, social hierarchy was not welcomed in the News Orleans anymore. Stanley hated the snobbery of Blanche and he was a ‘social leveler’ in his
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