Blanche is a fading Southern belle who clings to coquettish trappings preferring magic and the night to reality and the light of day.

Southern belle streetcar named desire. In scene seven of the play Stella Kowalski says the following. A Streetcar Named Desire first performed in 1947 can be contextualized in the era of Post-World War II America. There is also an avenue called Elysian Fields referring to where the souls of heroes and the virtuous went in Greek mythology.

Tennessee Williams representation of the Southern Belle is best embodied by the character of Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire a faded and fallen Southern Belle adrift in the modern world. A Streetcar Named Desire. She also has a bad drinking problem which she covers up poorly.

She is a faded Southern belle without a dime left to her name after generations of mismanagement led to the loss of the family fortune. A Streetcar Named Desire premiered three years later at the Barrymore Theater in New York City. Collapse of the Southern Belle A Streetcar Named Desire a play written by twentieth century award-winning playwright Tennessee Williams is set in New Orleans in the 1940s.

She has become sexually promiscuous since the suicide of her first husband and the forced selling of their plantation home Belle Reve. For example in The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire Williams uses the archetype of the southern belle but subverts this archetype by giving the women in his play grotesque or flawed qualities. Get an answer for In what ways is Blanche DuBois a classic southern belle and find homework help for other A Streetcar Named Desire questions at eNotes.

1 A Streetcar Named Desire. In his essentially Southern play A Streetcar Named Desire Tennessee Williams observes a uniquely Southern phenomenon. It certainly has elements of Gothic grotesque.

The Southern Gothic style often involves making archetypes of southern literature such as the chivalrous hero or the beautiful damsel flawed or grotesque in nature. The play set in contemporary times describes the decline and fall of a fading Southern belle named Blanche DuBois. Her family fortune and estate are gone she lost her young husband to suicide years earlier and she is a social pariah due to her indiscrete sexual behavior.