Illusions Of The Main Characters In Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire

Tennessee Williams(1911-1983)is an outstanding playwright in the United States after World War II.He produced many successful plays with his life experience as his motivation for artistic resources,including The Glass Menagerie(1945),A Streetcar Named Desire(1947),Summer and Smoke(1948),and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof(1955)etc.This thesis takes A Streetcar Named Desire as the sample and uses Freud's interpretation of dream,defense mechanism,and daydream theory to analyze the illusions of Blanche and Stanley,the main characters in the play,and explores the relationship with Tennessee Williams' s personal experience and writing motivation.Firstly,the thesis explores specific performance of the illusions of Blanche and Stanley through the textual and contextual analyses.Blanche exposes her mindful dependence on the southern culture and believes that her gentility would automatically bring happiness to her.However,she ignores her and her husband's natural instincts and desires.Her so-called elegant life is nothing but her illusion.Stanley is realistic,competent,and full of aggressiveness.He is a representative of a generation of vulgarity and vitality after the Second World War.His instinctive resistance to the affectation of the South is a signal of his complete acceptance of the vulgar social reality of his life.Although viewed as a survivor and winner,he survived from the expense of others' pain with his illusionary victory.Secondly,the thesis illustrates the actual effects of their illusions�for Blanche and Stanley,illusions can offer confidence to compensate for psychological imbalance.From this point of view,Blanche and Stanley's retreat into their own illusions is not a negative attitude to life,but another way to survive.Thirdly,this thesis uncovers the relationship between Williams' s experience and the illusions of the main characters.A Streetcar Named Desire is considered as a literary medium by Williams to express his unrealisticdaydream.Additionally,from the perspective of emotional resonance,A Streetcar Named Desire provides the audience with an opportunity to indulge in the daydream hidden in their own spiritual world without fear of external or self-blame.The study acquires that the illusions of main characters in A Streetcar Named Desire result both from subjective and objective reasons,and it is conducive to discovering the psychological depth of people in the drama,and understanding the complexity and diversity of human beings.In addition,it reminds people to pay attention to the coordinated development of people and society.Meanwhile,material pursuit and spiritual enrichment are of equal significance.