Happiness in A Streetcar Named Desire Essay

People live their lives looking for and attempting to gain the things that make them truly happy. Some individuals take their struggle for happiness more seriously than others, and others tend to accept any form of feeling good to replace the happiness they cant obtain. Happiness is gained easily for some, more so than for others, but once happiness is obtained, all people feel special, while those who do not achieve end up distraught. In the play A Streetcar Named Desire, Tennessee Williams portrays that individuals, when it comes to happiness, either neglect their feelings and unsatisfied, or pursue happiness to an extent far beyond the average person. These ways of acquiring these feelings of joy, individuals will either succeed at making life enjoyable, ore fail miserably to lead ones mind to lunacy, many characters in this play attempt to achieve happiness in different ways, but in the end, characters either achieved, or did not, and found substitutions for the empty void the happiness was not filling.

Many characters within this play found happiness in different things, and in different ways. One character that is a prime example of different is Stanley Kowalski. This brutish, one-dimensioned character named Stanley was introduced first in the story as a man who already had all his happiness and was in full control of his life. When it came to what he desired, he acquired it with ease. His wife, his friends, they listen and obey mostly everything he says. Until his sister in-law arrived, Stanley seemed as if he didnt have a worry in the world. Blanche held Stanley from doing things he wanted to do, like have alone time with Stella, or have an uninterrupted poker night with his friends. Stanley manipulates people within the play. For example, when Stanley yells Stellas name after hitting her, she obediently comes back to him, thus showing that he has the influence of people throughout the play. Another example of this is when he convinces Mitch that Blanche is a girl who has lied to him and cannot be trusted. This leads to the romance building between Mitch and Blanche to suddenly fade away. This also shows the leadership that Stanley carries around with him as he manipulates the people of the complex, and has them think the way he wants them too. Even at the end of the play, when Stanley has already raped Blanche, he still convinces his wife that he didnt do it. She denies her sister when she is at her worst, and even though its in the back of her mind, believes her husband over her own sister. This is the kind of power Stanley has over people throughout the story, and in people following and listening to what he says, will cause him to be continuously happy.

Unlike Stanley, Blanche DuBois entered the play with her happiness revoked. With losses of a family, a plantation, and a lover, Blanche is looking for a new life and new love. Expecting to get some comfort from her sister, she heads over to Elysian Fields and to gain some support from the only family member she has left. When she arrives though, its completely different than what she was used to. Stella went from having money and success, to an apartment thats completely run down and small, living with an animalistic brute of a husband. Seeing this drains all the hope of a nice reunion with her sister and she begins drinking and covering up her reason for being here from Stanley. Throughout the play, Blanche begins to regain some composure of happiness, but every time Stanley sees this, he quickly revokes it, and puts Blanche in an even worse mood. Many examples of this happen in the play, for instance, when Blanche is becoming more comfortable in the Kowalski residence, Stanley quickly does some research on Blanche and finds out her secrets that she has been hiding from her sister. And after he does this, interrogates her with question after question multiple times in the story. As well as uses his manipulative personality to convince both Stella and Mitch that Blanche is trying to take advantage of them. Blanches happiness is really taken away when Stanley rapes her. Not only the instance it happens, but the affect that her sister doesnt believe her, and that Mitch wont even comfort her after Stanley does it. These events cause her to have fantasies but after piling up all together, she becomes mentally unstable, thus leading her to a happiness that isnt a reality.

Stella starts in the play as a happy, but later on her happiness is slowly decreased. Stella being the sister of a pampered, intelligent, and the wife of a brutish, unintelligent man, she is forced to love two people on the opposite sides of the scale of people. As things start off between the three of them, Stella is uneasy on how her sister would react to her new lifestyle, but as she grows accustom to it, Stella begins to become happier. The main reason Stella has to fight for her happiness is because of her will to fight between her husband and her sister, fighting between his abusive reality, and her demented fantasy. For example, Blanche sees the way Stanley treats Stella and contacts a questionable character named Shep Huntleigh to get herself and her sister back to living the luxurious life, but Stella does not want to leave her home and her husband. On the other hand, we have Stanley, obtaining facts and information about Blanche that states she has been swindling ever since she has lost everything dear to her, and he tells Stella that he thinks Blanche is trying to take from them, requesting that she leaves at once, but Stella also does not want Blanche to be forced to leave. Stella is forced to put up with her husband trying to rid her of Blanche, and her sister trying to rid her of Stanley. This struggling force will eventually cause someone to win and someone to lose, and when this happens, Stella is happy for one, but upset by the other. This mixed emotion of both joy and sadness will cancel out, causing Stella to feel nothing but emptiness within her. She can never be happy because her happiness depends on the happiness of the two people she loves most.

These main characters, plus these events, indicate the authors message that people will go to inhuman extents to obtain their happiness, whether it is to completely eradicate anyone or anything preventing them from reaching what they seek, chasing happiness to the extent of losing everything and going into a mode of senile, or never fighting for your own happiness, and just live off of someone elses, never allowing yourself to be truly happy.