A Streetcar Named Desire Gender Roles Essay

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A Streetcar Named Desire written in 1947 by Tennessee Williams is a play about a southern belle, Blanche from Laurel, Mississippi. After losing her family home, Belle Reve, and her job, Blanche has nothing left and goes to live with her younger sister Stella and brother-in-law Stanley in the New Orleans French Quarter. In this time, there were very specific gender roles that men and women were expected to conform to within relationships. The men would take on the role of the provider, making the money, and owning all of the possessions. They were also drinkers, physically built, and tough. On the other hand, the women were more submissive, obedient, did the housework, and did not have ownership over anything. This created an inequality between men and women, by establishing men as the more dominant figure in the relationship. The presence of gender roles created by society and the expectation to conform to them, leads to destructive and unhealthy relationships. This essay will prove that when people in relationships conform to their assigned gender roles, the relationship becomes unhealthy due to the inequality of the gender roles and that when one person in …show more content…
In the 1950’s, the relationship between Stella and Stanley would be viewed as an ideal one, as they both conform exactly to their assigned gender roles in their relationship; however, this is not the case. The gender roles that have been set by society creates an inequality that gives the man dominance and power over the woman in the relationship which ultimately leads to an unhealthy one. Given that both Stella and Stanley both conform to their gender roles, they are experiencing the inequality that is embedded in the gender roles. The play opens with a scene between Stella and Stanley, the ‘ideal’ married couple, although, it would not prove this way by the nature of the dialogue in this
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