Blanche's Destruction: Feminist Analysis on A Streetcar Named Desire/ la Destruction de Blanche: Analyse Feministe Sur un Tramway Nomme Desir (Report‪)‬

INTRODUCTION Tennessee Williams is widely considered the greatest southern playwright and one of the greatest playwrights in the history of American drama, whose masterpieces include Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Desire, The Rose Tattoo, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Night of the Iguana, etc.. In these plays, he creates many unforgettable characters, especially lonely, depressed, coward and mind-distorted southern female images. As one of the most recognizable characters in American drama and a fading but sexy Southern belle, Blanche DuBois suffers from the death of her husband who has turned out to be homosexual and committed suicide, the loss of her ancestral home and the passing away of her elder relatives. Guilty and grieve, she dates with a variety of men. Finally her reputation is ruined and she is dismissed due to having an affair with a young boy in her school. And then she turns to her sister Stella for help, who lives in the slum of New Orleans where she is acquainted with Mitch, the brother-in-law Stanley's fellow worker. Blanche dreams to start a new life with him, but the dream is broken due to her conflict with Stanley. In the end, their final, inevitable confrontation--a rape--results in Blanche's nervous breakdown, and she is sent to a madhouse. Like a delicate and fragile work of art handed down from American Old South, she cannot get rid of a set of hypocritical, strict and controversial moral standards and shows difficulty in adapting to modern culture. She is doomed to undergo misfortunes, lose self and finally go to destruction.