Blanche Dubois - The Vicious Woman Caught between Death and Desire
Blanche Dubois - The Vicious Woman Caught between Death and Desire

Summary/Abstract: Tennessee Williams’s play A Streetcar Named Desire, published in 1947, was amongst the ones that renewed the old definition of theatre through its theme, motifs, structure, setting and mostly through the complex feminine character it manages to create – Blanche DuBois. As the frail, confused protagonist tries to start her life all over again in New Orleans, she soon finds herself in contradiction and, thus, in conflict with the new emerging post-war American identity, trapping her self in a decaying struggle between Eros and Thanatos. The present essay focuses on the symbols of death and desire, but also on the representations of despair, insanity and spiritual decay starting from Tennessee Williams’s play and moving on to Elia Kazan’s film adaptation in 1951, Otto Dix’s painting The Seven Deadly Sins (1933), the adaptation directed by Neil Arsenty in 2003, Moulin Rouge - A Streetcar Named Roxanne, Willem de Kooning’s expressionist painting Woman and Bicycle (1952-1953), and the ballet adaptation directed by John Neumeier in 2004.

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