A Streetcar Named Desire–Zhuoya Li
I watched a play named A Streetcar Named Desire. At the beginning of the play, Blanche takes the Desire streetcar to her sister’s home, foreshadowing the central theme of play — desire.
The first problem comes out when Stanley discovers how many luxurious costumes and jewelries Blanche possesses. Stanley doubt Blanche sold the her real estate and thus get this amount of money to buy those things, but Stella couldn’t believe this story and choose to ignore this suspicion raised by her husband. From this we can see that for many times men are more sensitive and vigilant than women. Part of the reason is that women tend to be more kind and gullible than men. Stella obviously believes more in her sister than in her husband, because she has faith in her sister and believe in the bright side of the human nature. It is because of her gullibility that she is cheated by her own sister several times before she finally believes that Blanche is not what she claims herself to be. Even after that does Stella still avoids facing the truth and pretends to okay with Blanche when facing her. This is a conflict is deliberately written to attract viewers, for if everyone likes and trusts Blanche at first, then there will be no story to tell.
Then Mitch comes out and finds himself addicted to Blanche, who uses ogle and ambiguity to allure Mitch. Mitch is a gentleman, always wears suits and looks exactly the opposite as Stanley and other men who play poker together. He wants companionship and he wants his mother to see him gets married before she dies. He listens to her melancholy stories and comfort her that they can take care of each other. He wants to go deeper with Blanche but she rejects him with the excuse of being “traditional”. Only when Mitch listens to Stanley’s investigation does he realized Blanche is not as pure as she claims. One ironic plot is that Blanche actively seduces a handsome young man and end up kissing him, just a few seconds before Mitch appears with a red rose for her. When Blanche asks him to marry her, Mitch says she is not clean enough for him to bring her to his mother. Mitch turns completely from admiring her to despising her, even though he still wants to complete the wish of making love with her.
Then there is the protagonist, Mrs.Blanche. From the beginning of the play she gives people the impression that she is good at affectation. She is exaggerating the good things and belittling the defect at the same time. She has desires that forces her to tell the lies and do all kinds of “unreasonable” things. She cares about her appearance so much that every time she needs to make up every time before she sees a man. Stella also knows that and kindly tells people to praise Blanche’s beauty when they see her. Blanche uses men as tools to test how attractive she is, and she can get satisfaction out of men’s reactions. Her vanity makes her deeply afraid of getting old and losing her beauty, so she constantly lures men and buys expensive furs. She is lost after she loses her lover. The blank space in her heart, her fear of loneliness and her desire for protection together makes her a self-indulgent woman. She lies about her past even though Mitch has already investigated her whole past. It is her own flaw that causes her downfall. She is despicable for sure, but her inability to walk away from her shadow and control her desire is also lamentable.