A Streetcar Named Desire Character Analysis Essay

The loss of traditional values can be seen at the beginning of the play by the portrayal of the fading Southern beauty, Blanche, in Laurel, Mississippi. Her home, Belle Reve, and family fortune were gone. It reveals that she is having a financial difficulty. Since she lost her young husband to suicide years earlier, she has a strong need for human affection. Later, she was fired from her job as an English teacher because she had an affair with a teenage student. Finally, she has no choice but to move to New Orleans at the Kowalski apartment. It triggers the conflicts and forces between traditional values and modern beliefs.
Blanche is an upper-class woman whose social status is higher than that of Stanley who is a lower-class working man. Blanche's superiority can be seen from her appearances and attitudes. She is dressed in a fine white suit when she arrives at the Kowalski apartment and is carrying a suitcase with a look of disbelief at a piece of paper in her hand and then at the building. She does not feel comfortable living in the shabby and crowded Kowalski's two-room apartment and she is annoyed
Stanley is impolite and brutal, "He sizes women up at a glance, with sexual classifications" even at his wife's sister. He offends Blanche by changing his sweaty T-shirt in front of her and rudely asks what happened to Blanche's marriage. During the card game, Stanley, storming into Blanche's bedroom, throws the radio out of the window and beats his pregnant wife. He pulls all of Blanche's belongings out of her trunk and looks for anything valuable for sale. Stanley snatches up Blanche's papers, which are old letters and love poems from her young husband, from her trunk and begins to read them. His cruelty can also be seen in his investigation of Blanche's past, the one-way bus ticket back to Laurel for her birthday present and his disclosure of Blanche's secrets to