Illusion and Fantasy in A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams

Illusion and Fantasy in A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams An illusion is fake belief whereas fantasy is imagining fanciful visions. Both these themes are important in the play because they show how they can be mistaken for reality by each character in the play. The themes illusion and fantasy are involved from the start of the play. We learn from when Stanley throws the package of meat down to Stella that he is a dominant character and that his relationship with Stella isn’t as happy as it may seem to be. Even in scene 2, Stanley’s aggressiveness is shown towards Stella, ‘since when do you give me orders?’. However, the most significant example of his brutality is during the Poker Game in scene 3. This is where the themes illusion and fantasy are brought in, because Stella lives in a fantasy world with Stanley. We learn how Stanley keeps Stella under the thumb. However violent Stanley might be, she won’t reveal that her relationship has problems to Blanche or anyone, ‘it wasn’t anything as serious as you seem to take it. In the first place, when men are drinking and playing poker anything can happen.’ Stella has psychologically made herself get used to this behaviour from Stanley, ‘why, on our wedding – soon as we came in here – he snatched off one of my slippers and rushed about the place, smashing the light bulbs with it.’ She has made it seem normal because she is illusioned by the thought that what they have is too strong to let go. Stanley is like an addictive drug to her, for example, in scene 4, Stella is in ‘narcotised tranquillity’. However rough he may be, Stella needs Stanley as a fix. It is as though she is brainwashed by him. When Blanche comments on the previous nights even... ...he becomes desperate and unhinged. She sees marriage as her only means of escaping her demons, so Mitch’s rejection amounts to a sentence of living in her internal world. Once Mitch crushes the make-believe identity Blanche has constructed for herself, Blanche begins to descend into madness. With no audience for her lies, which Blanche admits are necessary when she tells Mitch that she hates reality and prefers â€Å"magic,† Blanche begins performing for herself. Yet Blanche’s escapist tendencies no longer show her need to live in a world full of pleasant bourgeois ease. Instead of fancy and desire, her new alternate reality reflects regret and death. She is alone, afraid of both the dark and the light; her own mind provides her with a last support of escape. Her fantasies control her, not the other way around, but still she shrinks from the horror of reality.