A Vulnerable Multi-color Rose

When A Streetcar Named Desire premiered at the Ethel Barrymore Theater in New York, it shocked its audience and there exists lots of disputation in the critics in terms of controversial themes:sexuality, homosexuality, rape, loneliness, insanity and so on. It is probably the one mostly identified with the dramatists and certainly the one that has elicited the most critical commentary. It fulfilled the promise of the early work and catapulted Williams to the front rank of the American dramatists.A Streetcar Named Desire introduced such theme by describing the tragic life of Blanche:In order to pursue the ideal love and realize the life value in the cruel and declining world, she prefers illusion to cruel reality. Meanwhile, the play shows sympathy for Southern women's tragic experiences during the transition period of society.This thesis mainly consists of five parts. Chapter one will give a brief introduction on Williams and his work A Streetcar Named Desire, as well as the literature review about the A Streetcar Named Desire. In chapter two, Blanche's traumatic experience will be discussed. We will see the cause of her trauma neurosis, her split personality. Although she experiences the loss of home and family members, and the suicide of her husband gives her a great combat and left trauma and shadow in her heart, she still has the desire to find the new life and afraid of death. In the chapter three, we will analyze the reason that why Blanche's choices on her rebirthing road are wrong. Actually, it is her fatal wrong choices and her own character shortcomings lead to the disillusion of her revival dreaming. Finally, we will talk about the inevitable tragic ending of Blanche. And the fifth part is conclusion.The whole thesis analyzes Blanche's tragedy on Freud's theory of psychoneurosis. The feature of the thesis is that we analyze Blanche's tragedy from her symptoms, such as trauma neurosis, split personality, coexistence of consciousness and unconsciousness, obsessive-reproaches and so on. And we talked about the process that how these symptoms, these local traumas combines together and constitute a series precipitating factors and the Blanche couldn't afford that just and agent provocateur could cause her a real neuropathy.