Published Paper Details:

This article aims to trace the articulation of resistance in terms of gender and psychological breakdown suffered by the central protagonist of Tennessee Williams play ' A Street Car Named Desire'. Blanch du Bois is the anti hero in the play. Williams described her as a woman with narcissistic personality disorder who uses alcohol as a coping mechanism to forget the guilt she is carrying from the past. The extract begins with her long monologue at the end of scene1 and ends with her fainting on armchair after hearing the polka music 'faint in the distance'. The play aptly conveys the conflict between old and new values. Blanche's last remarks in the play seem to echo pathetically her plight and predicament in life.As she leaves, she says, "I have always depended on the kindness of strangers." Thus, Blanche's life ends in the hands of the strange doctor. She was too delicate, too sensitive, too refined, and too beautiful to live in the realistic world. Her illusions had no place in the Kowalski world and when the illusions were destroyed, Blanche was also destroyed.