FEMALE VICTIMS IN TENNESSEE WILLIAM’S PLAY A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE (Pages 140-146) by Ms. J. Margaret in THE INTERNATIONAL RESEARCH SPECIALIST / ISSN: 2350-1499 (Online); 2350-0751 (Print)

Tennessee Williams is a “dramatist of lost souls”. A Street car named desire is one of the best plays of Tennessee Williams. In his ability to create striking feminine portraits however Williams really excels. The main source of inspiration for Williams’s heroines was his own family. In a 1975interview with the New York Times, he says: “In my early plays I created from my family – my sister, mother, my father’s sister. Blanche is really my aunt Belle. She was a Sunday-school teacher in the South. I have based Blanche on her personality -not on her life. She was the prototype of Blanche. She talked like Blanche – hysterically, with great eloquence” (Gussow). In A Streetcar Named Desire, Stella Kowalski and Blanche Dubois are portrayed as the weaker sex women who are overpowered by Stanley Kowalski, the self-aggrandizing macho Hero. Blanche Dubois and Stella Kowalski are victims in A Streetcar Named Desire. Blanche and Stella are portrayed as victims of traditional Southern society in which females had few choices in life. Both sisters were raised on the affluent plantation, Belle Reve in Laurel, Mississippi, and their primary goal in life, commensurate with Southern tradition, was to seek the security of marriage. However, both choose unsuitable husbands. Blanche, who is five years older than her sister, marries Allan Gray for love at a tender age only to find her dreams shattered by her husband’s infidelity with another man. Stella, who moves to New Orleans at a young age, chooses Stanley Kowalski, an aggressive, heterosexual man of the wrong social class, perhaps in reaction to her sister’s choice of a sexually ambiguous dreamy poet-type husband. Blanche also becomes a slave to male-dominated society’s perception of fading youth, Which is much more difficult for women than men to combat(myref.p.58) Stella becomes Stanley’s sex slave as a result of her codependent relationship with an abusive husband. Williams presents Blanche and Stella as helpless victims who cannot break from their traditional roles in a society that empowers males and victimizes females. Keywords: A Streetcar Named Desire, female victims, weaker sex, slave to the male dominated society, victims of traditional Southern society.