《欲望号街车》中幻想与现实的对立.doc

河北工业大学2009届毕业论文河北工业大学毕 业 论 文作 者： 苏丽丽 学 号： 084363 系 ： 外语系 专 业： 商务英语 题 目： 欲望号街车中幻想与现实的对立 Illusion versus Reality in A Streetcar Named Desire 指导者： 杨海丽 副教授 评阅者： 陆 洋 讲 师 2011年6月12日1毕业论文中文摘要欲望号街车中幻想与现实的对立摘要：田纳西威廉斯是美国当代最著名的剧作家之一，被公认为是第二次世界大战以来美国最优秀的戏剧大师。欲望号街车是他的最著名的剧作之一。在该剧作中，女主人公布兰奇出身贵族，有很好的教养。在爱人艾伦自杀后，她将艾伦的死归因于自己，深感愧疚。同时，家道中落，她的亲人相继去世。布兰奇开始变得颓废，和许多陌生男子交往，名声败坏。为了重新生活她投奔妹妹斯黛拉。但是妹夫斯坦利却非常粗暴。斯坦利的朋友米奇在追求布兰奇，但是斯坦利揭露了她的过去。布兰奇被米奇抛弃。而在酒精作用下的斯坦利乘机强暴了布兰奇。最终，布兰奇被逼疯并送至精神病院。本文从现实条件的塑造与毁灭这方面，来探讨布兰奇无法逃避幻想及其带来的人生痛苦，指出布兰奇是没落的南方文明的陪葬品，认为只有强大内心才能获得人生愉悦。关键词：布兰奇 现实 幻想 强大内心毕业论文外文摘要Title Illusion versus Reality in A Streetcar Named DesireAbstractTennessee Williams is one of the most famous contemporary playwrights in the United States, which is recognized as the best playwright since the World War II. A Streetcar Named Desire is one of his most famous plays.In the play, the heroine Blanch has been nobly born. After her lover Alans suicide, she attributes Alans death to her, and feels deeply sorry and ashamed. Meanwhile，her family members pass away with her family in decline. She becomes decadent, and has relations with many strange men getting a lustful reputation. She wants to take refuge in her sister Stella. But her brother-in-law named Stanley is very rough. Stanleys friend Mickey is after Blanche, but Stanley reveals her past. Then Blanche is abandoned. Under the action of alcohol Stanley has raped Blanche. Finally Blanch becomes mad and has been sent to a mental hospital.This paper will discuss why Branch can not escape from the illusion which produces the pain in life, and point out that Branch can be regarded as the victim of the sorehead southern plantations culture from the shaping and destruction of the reality, and believe that only a strong mind can get the pleasure of life. Keywords：Branch reality illusion the strong heartContents1 Introduction12 The Shaping and Destruction of Reality32.1 Blanches Family Background32.2 Blancches Missing in the Illusion43 Blanches Personality43.1 A Brave Coward43.2 A Yield Rebel53.3 A Desperate Fighter64 Venting the Pain of Life74.1 The Destructive Power84.2 The Shelter of Illusion85 Solutions to the Painful Opposition95.1 The CharactersSolutions95.2 The Ture Pleasure of Life13Conclusion14Bibliography15Acknowledgements17河北工业大学2011届专科毕业论文1 IntroductionTennessee Williams (19111983) is one of the most famous contemporary playwrights in the United States, which is recognized as the best playwright since the World War II. His plays are not only extremely productive but also excellent. His dramatic career has been over fifty years from the mid 1930s until his death in 1983, and saw the creation of many plays that are regarded as classics of the American stage. His works are warmly praised, as well as hotly disputed in the critics several times.Tennessee Williams is born in a chaotic family. He doesnt like to play with the boys, and they joke he like a sissy. His grandfather was a pastor who has a study which becomes Tennessee Williams shelter. His father is a shoe salesman, shuttling everywhere. When his children grow older, he gets more hurled insults at them; His mother is a southern high family seed, but she has a kind of a choking for Williams. Williams has a sister Rose, and they have a good relation. They both have a similar character: sensitive, neurotic, easy injury, and the same hobby- art. Rose let Williams to truly feel the love and the compassion and the care. But Roses destiny is very miserable that she suffers from schizophrenia in her after twenty years old and Williams mother unexpectedly sends her to go to the hospital for the resection of the lobes of the brain. Rose never recovers to a normal but lives in a convalescent hospital over the long life. The failure of Roses operation to Williams is a great blow. He never forgives his parents agreed to the surgery. Many of the paranoid female characters appear in the plays of Williams, may be influenced by the Rose.A Streetcar Named Desire, one of his most famous plays, has awarded the Pulitzer Prize for drama. In this piece of work, the heroine Blanch has been nobly born as an educated young lady. She has married Allen at her age of 16, and they love each other. But shortly after the marriage Blanche finds that Alan is a gay. Since Blanche shouts out at a ball, Alan is so ashamed that he runs outside and kills himself. Blanche feels deeply guilty. After Alans suicide, she attributes Alans death to her, and feels deeply sorry and ashamed. Meanwhile，her family members pass away with her family in decline. She becomes decadent, and has relations with many strange men getting a lustful reputation. To restart her life, she wants to take refuge in her sister Stella. But her brother-in-law named Stanley is very rough. Stanleys friend Mickey is after Blanche, but Stanley reveals her past. Then Blanche is abandoned. Under the action of alcohol Stanley has raped Blanche. Finally Blanch becomes mad and has been sent to a mental hospital.This piece of work creates complex characters. It not only tells a story, but also expresses a state of mind and an inner with suppressed roar like the crazy cries with pain and suffers. Blanch is a fragile woman. She escapes from her reality and indulges in fantasy. She constructs the fantasy world with an expensive cost. She endured all the pain to resist reality. How can you say such a traitor is not brave enough? Blanche are dressed up even if her heart. All her lies are in order to prove the existence of her fantasy world. In other words, she sincerely builds a mirage. But the flood of the reality washes it away eventually. Branch is a poor woman resisting the reality and flattering the reality and destroyed by the reality. This delicate and moving work makes people feel characters heart. The collision between delicate feelings and brutal reality means Blanches tragic fate.This paper believes that each persons heart is lonely and fragile. Only turns to ourselves, builds a strong heart, and graces to others, can we get the true pleasure of life.2 The Shaping and Destruction of Reality The author thinks that the shaping and destruction from reality is important. Blanche should be placed in her living environment to cognize and to judge. 2.1 Blanches Family BackgroundBranch is born in a declining noble family in South America. The Civil war unfortunately engulfs south land failure and shatters the old manor mode of life. Slave owners lost their heaven, and falls into a profound loneliness, only leaves a dignity and fragile. Also an effete feeling hangs over the southerners soul. But the slavery plantation economy system that their plantations of lands rely on is like the collapse of the ice gradually melted. Big industrial mountains of incomparable strength get the victory. The culture of old southern plantations and the “progress” industrial culture conflict between the overpowering. Blanche is an elegant noble lady, who accepts aristocratic education since her childhood. She has a success with the proud manner as a noble lady. That should be some missing glory. She regards it as a belief with never doubt, also she is unable to doubt. When the background suddenly goes down, she becomes devastating. As an idealist, she never gives up her faith, but she has to compromise in order to survive. “I have no way to support myself”, she confided to Stella. The reality shapes her defiance to the life of the bottom class, but the reality pushes her into a terrible world of the bottom class as throwing a lamb into the wolves. When Blanche first meets Stanley, she is jittered and careful. Behind of Blanches tragedy is the change of the reality, and Blanche is the funeral objects of the sorehead southern plantations culture.2.2 Blanches Missing in the IllusionIn A Streetcar Named Desire, there are many examples where the characters are using illusions in an attempt to escape reality. The best example is found by looking to the main character. Blanche Dubois was a troubled woman who throughout the play lives her life in illusions. What initially leads to her illusions is love. She met Allan Grey, as her sister says that she loves him completely. They get married and Blanche are falling more and more in love. Until the day she finds that Allan Grey is gay, but Allan believes that if there is anyone who would help him makes it through this whole ordeal, it would be Blanche. However Blanche couldnt really believe that he was with her and was for real. Blanche let it slip while they were dancing that “I saw! I know! You disgust me.”With this, Allan runs outside and kills himself. Because of all this, Blanche fell into another illusion. She figures that if she were loved again, then she could be happy again. She escapes from reality and resists the reality. She has been looking for her lost dream again and again. Her fantasy is her tool and refuge both for escaping and resisting the reality. However, the fantasy cant redeem her, and she has been destroyed by the reality. 3 Blanches Personality We can learn from the above that we are shaped by our environment. When an environment changes, how can we do? Shall we insist on our own beliefs or should we change ourselves? When the times change, there are always those sacrificial objects for culture, and those ones usually are destined. They insist on their faith to struggle with pain as Blanche would be ultimately destroyed.3.1 A Brave CowardSo many desires run into our lives for no reason. In many cases, the desire is not an option, but the desire usually chooses us. Who makes the unfortunate dislocated in reality? We shall be tolerant and sympathy. Also, we should give more understandings, more warmth humanity and more flexible ethical standards to those seek self-salvation by evading. As for the desperation of Blanche, We should give the understanding and salvation, not destruction. Blanches illusions are from her desire. It is that the desire cant be satisfied extremely causes the opposite extremely between reality and illusion. There is nothing the opposition can produce but pain. Blanche cannot avoid suffering; she hugs her beliefs, sipping on the road in bitter life. She feels that the lonely is anywhere. She couldnt lose faith. When real society gave her up, she still loved life. To survive, she uses the fantasy to weave small shields again and again. God knows that she was innocent. She never hurt anyone .whats more, her cowardly is shaped by the social condition. She wants herself is elegant princess forever. She could not survive in reality, and she wants her dream, so she needs magic. She shouted, “I dont want realism. I want magic! Yes, yes, magic! I try to give that to people. I misrepresent things to them. I dont tell truth, I tell what ought to be truth and if that is sinful, then let me be damned for it!” The voice is so tragically heroic, but the reality is filled with taunt. But she doesnt care. What she believes has become the faith which is never betrayed.3.2 A Yield RebelShe has to be yield. Branchs world only has her own self, and she only loves her own. The existence of each person means to enjoy her. When she has lost the all that the world appreciates, she needs to cover, needs to lie, needs to fantasy. Finally, theres nothing with her but a fantasy. Most of the comments regarded Blanche as a heroine critically ill women. But the authors intention is not so. In the eyes of Tennessee Williams, the heroine Blanche is not sick, but pure and innocent. Branchs full name, Blanche Dubois, is a French word meaning white forest, while “white” is the symbol of purity in the West. William Clay Bo points that the hero and heroine works by defining the “same” and the “other” status, and then analyzes the works of gender relations from the post-modern thinker Michel Foucaults theory. Gassner and Kutch says that Branch represents the civilization and art, and Stanley represents the rough and violent, and Stanley is Branchs destroyer.3.3 A Desperate FighterIn the real world, she cant find where the God is. Real happiness is something doomed for her. Her desire and fantasy attaches in her life until died with the life together. Mickey says his love to her, as if the God lights the lamp of hope for her. She even tells him that “I thanked God for you, because you seemed to be gentle - a cleft in the rock of the world that I could hide in!” But Once again she fells into darkness. When Mickey says that he want her, but thinks she is “not clean” and refuses to marry her, she drives him, and shouts the hysterical roaring. She feels so painful but tries to hid pain. She burst it out at that time. She tries to release the pain and express the resistance through the fantasy as a weak person. Even standing for those hurt, she still wouldnt completely yields. She fantasies that Mickey should be like a gentleman back and apologize to her, but she would refuse elegantly and decently. Fantasy is her way to compromise the pain as a cowardly, but also the way to divulge her own fulfilled desires. She couldnt be Don Quixote who uses action to finish the ideal in their heart. She has to rely on fantasy. But the reality was detested fantasy that make herself ruined her. The opposition between reality and illusion make her nervous always in taut state. She just walked into the sister Stella home. It showed her mental tension, “she shrank by shoulder sitting on the chair, looking around,” .Finally, her nerve was eventually collapsed by Stanley. She always fantasies a shelter, and seeks shelters. She could not accept reality, and then deny the reality. But Fantasy things wont survive. In the opposition of the reality and illusion, Blanche cant find the balance. Her constant escape is order to find a place that can let her fantasy live. She believes strangers good will, because the familiar only abandon her. She fantasies new places to survive fantasy. She is always walking with a dream. Any a strange place or any a strange person, can be all lovely and good. Any place was her garden and anyone is her guest. But strange will also be filled with evil such as Stanley, as well as the asylum where she will spend the rest of her life. In patriarchal society, the Noble ladies have no survival ability, so they have to attach to the man. In such a reality, she refused to give up the faith and her fate would be doomed to tragedy.4 Venting the Pain of LifeThere is no conclusion that human nature is good or evil, but there is no doubt that the living environment has a great impact on humanity. Freud believes that the personality is made up of id, ego and superego. The id reflects humans primitive. And what the id asks to do show humans original desire. We human are always with Sociality, so we have to be limited by the rules of society. It means that the humans desire will never be fully satisfied. As a result, the humans depression exists everywhere. No matter the brave or the cowardly, they have to outbreak their own depression to release their anger which is from that they can not meet their desires. The outbreak of depression is various. Some will not harm others, while some may be despicable and shameless.4.1 The Destructive Power Sartre, an American writer, has said that Hell is other people. Egoism is the starting point of human nature. People tend to gloss over their own to achieve the purposes which are both satisfying their desire and escaping accountability of their bad social behavior. That is the so-called “Kill two birds with one stone”.Stanley is full of brutal and violent. As a representative of the emerging industrial power, he brutally put an end to all the sensitive and delicate. He was like a wild beast, full of worldly pleasures doctrine. He is full of primitive instincts of human nature, which people hate but also denied of the temptation. Gesner and Kutch says that Branch represents the civilization and art, and Stanley represents the rough and violent, and Stanley is Branchs destroyer. Each persons heart is lonely and fragile, so it is Stanley .He turns to the outside world to gain strength. His heart is weak and horror, so he would utterly destroys Branch. He completely expresses cruelty of humanity by putting his own happiness in the suffering of other people.4.2 The Shelter of Illusion Branch is a brave coward and a yield rebel and a desperate fighter. It is the cowardice of Blanches subjective that leads to her dependence on the fantasy. She goes to the complete collapse in the opposition of reality and illusion.She cant stand what the life brings to her, but the fate wont give anyone the choice to flee. She has been a lovely girl. When her love tells the truth beyond her tours, she is filled with fear. She doesnt know how to deal with it. As child she shouts out what she thinks .she is young at that time, but the change of life is too earlier to her. Her lovers killing himself makes her first harm. She had to turn to her family for help; however her family has became helpless. Death of her mother had happened before her eyes, and then the death of Margaret. She cant admit the falling of her social class, and cant give up her believe as a noblewoman. To pay for her instant, she has to get what she wants by urging others. She goes to the stringers for love .she looks for God, although there is no use to do so. The cost is expensive that she gets a lustful rep