A Comparative Study Of Amanda In The Glass Menagerie And Blanche In Streetcar Named Desire

As a distinguished literary giant of the twentieth century, Tennessee Williams’ dramatic creation reaches to an unprecedented height. A Streetcar Named Desire earned him three theater awards:Pulitzer Prize, Donaldson Award and the New York Drama Awards.Williams is the most important Southern playwright in American literature. Based on his own experience and understanding about the Southern culture and Southern tradition, he portrays vivid pictures of Southern women, especial Southern gentlewomen, all his Southern gentlewomen are delicate and sensitive, who best represent the culture and gentility of the Old South. The two gentle women to be analyzed in this thesis in fact represent the same tragic fate but different identities.Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire, is a dreamer and a loser although she searches desperately for love and happiness in life. The key to the tragedy of Blanche is that she cannot accept the ugly reality as it is.Her tragedy is unavoidable because, struggling through life, she is absolutely lonely and helpless.Amanda in The Glass Menagerie maintains her awareness of the reality, makes effort to save herself and her family from the indignities of poverty and devotes herself to the two children. Although she never gives up struggling, she ends up with failure, there seems to be more obstacles in her life.The aim of this thesis is to compare the two characters, Amanda and Blanche, in The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire. Detailed analysis of the play will be carried out in the attempt to summarize the causes of their tragic fates:the social environment and their own defects.