Brokenness

Question 1

What are the key points I want to make for this topic?

Answer 1

1. ) Brokenness of the setting
2. ) Blanche’s fragility and desire for protection
3. ) Brokenness and the past
4. ) Brokenness because of violence and cruelty
5. ) Brokenness and mental instability

Question 2

What are the key points and topic sentence for topic 1?

Answer 2

1.) Brokenness of the setting

‘raffish charm’ ‘atmosphere’
- coarse and unrefined quality presents the divergence of values in a post-Civil War south, urbanisation caused increasing social mobility and lack of social decorum

• ‘tinny piano’, ‘voices of streets overlapping’ - Williams spent time in New Orleans
• ’ don’t let them sell you a blue moon cocktail’

-‘ loud whack on the thigh’, ‘crashing is heard from upstairs’
Williams’ own parents - ‘broken world’ of moral ambiguity

Question 3

What are the key points and topic sentence for topic 2?

Answer 3

2.) Blanche’s fragility and desire for protection:

• ‘fluffy white bodice’ ‘moth’
  -‘flighty’ ‘desperate laughter’
  Context: Williams’ sister Rose was described by those who knew her to have a laughter that was ‘more nervous than natural’
• ‘how are my looks’ ‘looks’
  Blanche’s deteriorating beauty represents the fading of her youth and the loss and decay of the tradition of Southern graciousness in a post- Civil War South
• Blanche’s inability to adapt
• ‘shimmer and glow- put a-‘

Question 4

What are the key points and topic sentence for topic 3?

Answer 4

3.) Brokenness of the past:

-‘I took the blows to my face and to my body!… deaths’
Context: As with Poe and Hawthorne, Williams expressed an interest in the almost Gothic appeal of the deteriorating grandeur

• ‘blood stained pillow slips’ ‘gaudy tin flowers for lower class Mexican funerals’
• Context: putrefaction of Blanche’s ideals

Allan Grey : ‘I’d failed him in some mysterious way… all the lights had been turned off’
- ‘young man’ evokes sentiment of epigraph ‘to trace the fleeting visionary of love’

• exploration of effects of guilt- Williams and his sister’s lobotomy
• darkness image is poignant, Williams’ own mental turmoil

Question 5

What is the topic sentence and quotes for point 4?

Answer 5

Brokenness because of violence and cruelty:

• Blanche’s adverse reactions to any kind of violent noise ‘clasps her hands to her ears’

-‘ loud whack on the thigh’ = brokenness of relationship- cyclical and dysfunctional
Context: Williams draws on his personal experiences

• ’ people like you abused her and forced her to change’

-‘ picks up her inert figure’
Context: symbolic of the triumph of the industrialism of the New South over the graciousness of the old

Question 6

What

Answer 6

5. ) Brokenness and mental instability:
   - Blanche’s descent into insanity represents a tenet of the classical Greek tragedy

Plastic theatre and surrealism: ‘lurid reflections… grotesque and menacing… jungle noises’

• Context: Williams’ own sister suffered from schizophrenia, perhaps it can be seen as a personal exploration of her perspective of mental instability.
• ‘sewn up in a clean white sack and thrown overboard… (cathedral bell chimes)’
• envisioning of her own death finalisation of the decay and loss of the world to which Blanche adheres