Sunday 21 November 2010

How do Blanche's costumes demonstrate a different persona that effects her own tragedy? A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams

Soon after the opening of Scene One of , written byand first
performed on Broadway in New York City in December 1947, Blanche du Bois enters the stage
looking for the house where her sister, Stella, lives with her husband, Stanley Kowalksi.
Blanche is carrying a valise, and she's searching for a house number that matches the address on
the slip of paper in her hand.

In the stage directions, Williams describes
Blanche's appearance as "incongruous" with the poor, working-class neighborhood in
which she finds herself. She's dressed in a white suite with a fluffy bodice, and she's wearing
a pearl necklace and earrings and a white hat and white gloves, "looking as if she were
arriving at a summer tea or cocktail party in the garden district."


Williams makes an important remark in the stage directions that foretells Blanche's
tragic fate:

There is something about her uncertain
manner, as well as her white clothes, that suggests a moth.


In scene 2, after...

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