In Tennessee Williams' play, A Streetcar Named Desire, the nature of theatricality, "magic" and "realism" all derive from the tragic character by Blanche DuBois. Blanche is at the same time a theatricalized and self-theatricalizing woman. She lies to herself and others to recreate the world as it should be, in line with her high sensitivity. In this sense, much of his creations arise from a longing for the past, from nostalgia for his lost love, his dignity and his purpose in life. She is haunted by the ghosts of what she has lost and the genteel society of her Belle Reve, her beautiful dream. Blanche arrives at Stella's door with, essentially, a trunk full of costumes from her past. She is intensely self-aware and an artist in the fullest sense of the word. We meet Blanche at a time in her life when few, if any, of her actions do not seem contrived or executed to some degree. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay In Act I scene 3, she produces a small performance for her suitor, Mitch, in her efforts to seduce him. He turns on the radio to listen to the soundtrack, orders Mitch to "...turn on the light up there now!" and exclaims: “Oh, look! We created the spell (39)!” while dancing like the self-proclaimed star of the improvisational performance. Stella claps from the sidelines as her audience, and Mitch sings and sways to the music. This caricature of a production is repeated in scene 1 of Act II, where Blanche also assigns roles to others. With her somewhat reluctant newspaper collector, she attempts to set the mood as a sort of storyteller. While he promptly responds to her time request, Blanche chooses to digress into a dreamy digression: “This late? Don't you like these long rainy afternoons in New Orleans, when an hour is not just an hour, but a little bit of eternity falls into your hands, and who knows what to do with it (59)?" After wrapping herself in a scarf wafer-thin from her costume-like trunk, she directs the boy across the stage of her room to receive a kiss before his exit. Mitch's immediately subsequent entrance with an "absurd bouquet of flowers" further emphasizes the surreal and parodic quality of. this exaggerated production. “Bow to me first!” he adamantly orders: “And now present them!” Blanche's deep reverence and melodramatic effect: “Ahhh! they give this scene a deeply conscious theatrical sense. Stanley himself indulges in theatricality at the end, when he puts on his silk pajamas from his wedding night to celebrate with Blanche, who is dressed in her tiara and “precious feathers”. Commenting on their mutual costume, Stanley agrees: “I guess we both have the right to wear the dog! You've got an oil millionaire and I've got a baby (90)!” However, Stanley's motif of celebration is grounded in reality (Stella is giving birth in a nearby hospital), while Blanche's motif is pure fantasy. Streetcar is full of instances where audience and artist are one been seen by many as postmodernist in this deconstruction of the self. There is no real self: only performances projected into the world in an infinite recursion. In her final confrontation with Mitch, Blanche comes to terms with her deception ... magic! ...I try to give it to people. I tell them the truth, I say what should be the truth. !”Many of Blanche's inventions stem from an acute awareness of the sexual double standards she seeks tocompensate, disadvantages with which Williams himself was very attuned as a homosexual writer. Blanche lies primarily to manipulate her circumstances to better fit her feminine agenda, explaining to Mitch that she refuses to accept the hand fate has dealt her. Streetcar is, after all, a work of social realism. Blanche's need to alter reality through fantasy is in part an indictment of the failure of modernity for women, a critique of the social institutions and postwar attitudes of America that have limited their lives so much. Blanche lies about her age because she sees it as another obstacle to reality. . She also enacts an act of fairness for Mitch, to better fit the role of a desirable and acceptable woman. As he confesses to Stella, “I want [Mitch's] respect. But… men lose interest quickly. Especially when the girl is over thirty… obviously he… he doesn't know… I mean, I didn't inform him… of my real age (57)!” When Stella asks her why she is so sensitive about her age, Blanche replies: “Because of the hard blows my vanity has received. What I mean is that he thinks I'm a bit prim and proper, you know! I want to deceive him just enough to convince him to want me...". Blanche's creation of magic comes from the need to face and survive reality. Her total dependence on men blurs her distinction between survival and marriage, and instead she associates Mitch with precious respite. When Stella asks Blanche if she wants Mitch (after Blanche's ramblings about wanting Mitch to want her), Blanche's response is very telling: “I want to rest! I want to breathe easy again! Yes, I want Mitch... Think about it! If it happens! I can get out of here and not be a problem to anyone...” Her desperate obsession with fulfilling Mitch's desires glosses over the fact that she probably doesn't want Mitch for who he is, but only for what he represents. Their differences are stark, and his awkward, uncouth nature is far from her romantic ideals. This is sadly reminiscent of her impossible love for her professed husband, Allan Gray, that is, love for an image she created. The role he created for his first love ultimately proved unreal and irreconcilable with his true identity. In her current desperation, Mitch represents a kind of emancipation for Blanche, who is unable to see around her dependence on men for financial and social sustenance. This limiting vision deprives her of any realistic conception of how to save herself, further deludes the logic of her world and ensures her downfall. Her obsession with her own sense of mortality stems from her inability to see life outside of marriage: a life of solitude for her is synonymous with misery, social death and, essentially, the end of life as she knows it. We get an image of Blanche drowning, struggling to stay afloat, and her growing weariness in maintaining pretenses is unsettling, marking a looming deadline for the tragic heroine. “It's not enough to be soft, you have to be soft and attractive, and now I'm fading. I don't know how much longer I can turn the makeup around (56).” Throughout the play, Blanche also avoids appearing in a direct, bright light as part of maintaining her scrupulously constructed image. She especially avoids light in front of Mitch so that he doesn't see the reality of her fading beauty, refusing to go out with him during the day or in well-lit places. When he arrives, he also covers the light in the Kowalski apartment with a Chinese paper lantern. The light also symbolizes the reality of Blanche's past, and her inability to tolerate it foreshadows her own as wellgrowing inability to tolerate reality. Blanche describes being in love with Allan Gray as if the world were suddenly revealed by a bright, blinding light. After his suicide, the bright light disappeared: "And then the beacon that had been shone upon the world was put out again and never for a moment since has there been a brighter light than this kitchen candle (68).. ." The bright light reflects Blanche's greater acceptance of reality at the time, as well as her youthful sexual innocence. After Allan's death, she experienced only a penumbra through unremarkable sexual relationships with other men, representing her sexual maturity and disillusionment. These sexual experiences have made Blanche an increasingly hysterical womanwoman, and her frequent need to wash is another form of fantasy employment, as they symbolically cleanse Blanche of her illicit past. Just as she can never completely erase or recreate the past, Blanche's bath never ends. This use of water to undo a misdeed also appeals to Stanley, whose violent temper is calmed by the shower after beating Stella, making him full of remorse and longing for his wife. However, Stanley's use of water does not serve to alter reality to the same extent. This disparity in use is also seen in their alcohol use. Stanley and Blanche both drink excessively in the show, even though Stanley's drinking is social and Blanche's is antisocial. Blanche secretly drinks to distance herself from reality, and her drunken stupor allows her imagination to take flight, such as inventing fantasies of elopement with Shep Huntleigh. While Stanley manages to recover from his drunken escapades, Blanche deludes herself further and sinks into a drift from sanity. Williams dramatizes the inability of fantasy to overcome reality through the antagonistic relationship between Stanley and Blanche, which is symbolic of the overall struggle between appearances and reality. This struggle drives the plot and establishes a tension that is ultimately resolved with Blanche's inability to recreate her own and Stella's existence. Stanley's contempt for Blanche's inventions comes from being a practical man firmly rooted in the physical world, and he does everything he can to expose her lies. However, we soon realize that Blanche and her fantasies are the same thing: the more Stanley manages to reveal his invented world, the more he reveals Blanche herself, to the point of madness. As Blanche gradually fails to rejuvenate her life and save Stella from a life with Stanley, her nerves make her increasingly hysterical over the smallest upsets, and the smallest of setbacks seems insurmountable. Interestingly, her final fight with Stanley is also a physical one in which he rapes her, forcing Blanche to retreat completely into her world. While she originally colors her perception of reality according to her desires, at this point in the play Blanche completely ignores reality. The work also explores the boundary between the outside and the inside through the use of the set. The flexible ensemble allows you to see the surrounding street at the same time as you are inside the Kowalski apartment, expressing the idea that the house is not a domestic sanctuary. Blanche cannot escape her past in Stella and Stanley's house because it is not a self-defined world, impervious to a greater reality. The characters often bring issues and problems encountered in the wider environment into the apartment, such as Blanche bringing her prejudices against the working class. The back wall of the apartment also becomes transparent at various points in the show to show what's happening on the street. A notable example of this is just before Stanley rapes Blanche, and.”