Contrasting Image of Scene 4

Learning objective: understand how Williams uses contrasting imagery in Scene 4 of the play.

Descriptions for the characters:
Reason and Truth: Stanley
Illusion & Lies: Blanche
Disordered & wild: Stanley
Ordered & Civilized: Stella

Other cluster of words in relation to each other which may later be used in the book, collectively suggesting a type of emotion, behavior or situation:

Reality & harshness: dependence, poor, weak, repressed, old
Civilization: educated, logic, independence, reason, truth, mannered
Falsity: Illusion, lies, desire, passion, independent
Barbarism: wild, savage, traditions.

*please feel free to add in your own cluster of words, hence the title for them*

How does Blanche try to persuade her sister to give up Stanley? (please refer to page 54)

- Using hyperbole
- imagery of animalistic behaviour
- prehistoric man
- punctuation: dashes, long continuous uninterrupted speech
- exclamation marks: reveal her shock and horror

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Together as a class, we created the first paragraph to answer:

In Blanche’s speech, how is language used to persuade her sister against Stanley? (AO2- language, form & structure)

At the end of scene four, Blanche sets about dismantling what she sees as the illusion of Stella and Stanley’s Marriage. She does this by enforcing the idea of Stanley’s disorder and animalism in contrast to what she sees as their civilised past. Initially she uses personal pronouns as a way of directly addressing her idea to her sister, ‘ you’ve given in. and that isn’t right, you’re not old!’ as a way of empowering her to break away. She continues to shatter this image by through the use of animalistic imagery, ‘he acts like an animal, has animal’s habits! Eat like one, talk like one’. Blanche here contrasted the difference between their two worlds and emphasizes Stanley’s comparative wilderness.

Kayin