Blanche Dubois Compared to Amanda Wingfield

In today’s socioeconomic world, there is no longer room for slacking off and failure. People are seen as individuals who earn their social status and there is much pressure to succeed.   In the plays, “The Glass Menagerie” and “A Streetcar Named Desire” both written by Tennessee Williams, there are two main characters who are not capable of living in the present and have a difficult time facing reality. Amanda Wingfield, the mother from “The Glass Menagerie” and Blanche DuBois, Stella’s sister in “A Streetcar Named Desire” have many similar characteristics and life styles that are discovered throughout each play. Each woman played an important role in her life, affecting everybody she come encounter with, starting with the earlier years when they women were “southern belles”. In order for these two characters to deal with the complications in their lives they resort to living in their own fantasy worlds of deception and lies.
The mother of Tom and Laura, Amanda Wingfield is a middle-aged southern belle whose husband has abandoned her in her earlier year. Amanda constantly reminisces about the past years with her husband and is always nagging her children. She depends completely on her son Tom for financial support and also blames him for her daughter Laura’s disability. Amanda often thinks back to a specific day in the past where she states that she received sixteen gentlemen callers. In the play, there is no evidence that this is actually true, but it is however evident that Amanda has come to believe it in her fantasy world. Amanda’s relationship with Laura is also a lie, Amanda refuses to come to the realization that her daughter is crippled, she instead says that she is handicap and only has a hardly noticeable defect. Amanda is constantly worrying about Laura’s future and pushing her to find a man of her own to have a future with. Amanda puts the pressure on Tom to find a man for Laura and when he finally does, Amanda expects way too much out of the first...