Emotionally Ill Charaters in Drama

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An emotionally ill character in ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’ is Blanche DuBois. Blanches crippled emotional life reveals the theme of the play: the inability to accept reality. Blanche constantly lies, and her false personality shows Tennessee Williams’ theme pristinely. Blanche is by far the most complex character of the play. She is a bundle of contradictions, a blend of fact and fiction that the audience must decipher. Blanche at one time verges on hysterical with her incoherent speech, and at one point the way Stella glances at her is a little anxious (Scene One). She is presented as slightly eccentric, although the audience doesn’t realize the significance of this until later in the play. Blanche is an intelligent and sensitive woman who is also emotionally traumatized and repressed. This emotional repression stems from all her lies. She has spent so long lying to everyone else that she has believed these lie herself. She even told Mitch, “Never inside, I didn’t lie in my heart” (Scene Nine), speaking about the age and demeanor she had led Mitch to believe. She also wants to create fantasy for others, telling Mitch, “I don’t want realism, I want magic! […] Yes, yes, magic! I try to give that to people. I misrepresent things to them. I don’t tell the truth, I tell what ought to be the truth. And if that’s sinful, then let me be damned for it!”(Scene Nine).She seems enraged that her reality is unraveled, that everyone now sees her fantasy for what it is, fantasy. Her lies about her purity, her age, her background, everything is now out in the open to be judged and scrutinized by the public. Blanche DuBois is a tragic figure. She is out of place both geographically and temporally (Scene One). She appears to be trying to remain a ‘young women’ when in fact she is getting old, this results in an unappealing persona. She is living in a world that doesn’t exist

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