In the play “A Streetcar Named Desire” and the novel “Mrs. Dalloway,” the protagonists are primarily isolated within society by the consequences of their pass. While Williams and Woolf use the past to evoke both nostalgia for a better time and regret for the tragic elements of the past for their characters, and these two interpretations of the past isolate the characters from the present, Woolf juxtaposes the fates of Clarissa and Septimus. (one taken from memories of a happy youth in Bourton, the other from war trauma) to criticize the divisions in post-war British society. For his part, Williams focuses on portraying Blanche as the bastion of upper-class Southern behavior, overcome by the violent new world order represented by Stanley Kowalksi. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an original essay Events from the past intrude into the present lives of the main characters of “A Streetcar Named Desire” and “Mrs. Dalloway” from various manners. , both metaphorical and literal, and in the case of “Streetcar,” Williams uses the literal elements of performance such as music and costume to convey this fact. The musical motif of the Varsouviana polka used by Williams is a link to the past that the audience and Blanche can hear, but no other characters can hear, showing how she has been transported into the past, away from the people who surround him, and how the past isolates him. This music is heard whenever Blanche feels remorse or panics over Allen's death, such as when Stanley asks about her husband in scene one or about her confession to Mitch in scene six. Williams invokes the motif more and more often towards the end, and the denouement in the eleventh scene of his complete isolation from society is accompanied by the Varsouviana, "filtered in a strange distortion, accompanied by the screams and noises of the jungle ". This association with jungle animals may portray one's memories as a source of danger rather than comfort, or as distorted by one's current situation (although this memory already contains danger, as it culminates with a gunshot). The costume Blanche wears in scene ten, a "somewhat dirty and rumpled white satin evening dress", is another literal example of her delusional retreat into the past, as in this scene she appears to completely lose connection with reality, speaking to “a group of spectral admirers.” The choice of a similar evening dress in her first appearance in the play expresses her reluctance to realize her poverty or to adapt (since the color white, often associated with virginity, also expresses the claim to purity that 'she maintains). The description of the costume as "dirty and wrinkled" instead serves as a visual metaphor for how its facade has been dismantled or marred at this point in the play. An evening dress would also have seemed quite antiquated for everyday wear in the 1940s, as the war had necessitated more practical fashions requiring less fabric, and it would have been particularly incongruous in a less wealthy region like New Orleans. Williams positions the characters of Stanley and Stella opposite Blanche in their relationship to time. Stanley seems to reject his own past in some way: Blanche calls him Polack throughout the play to remind him of his socially inferior position as an immigrant, and in scene eight he warns her not to call himself that and declares himself to be an immigrant. “one hundred percent American”, as if to deny any connection with his heritagefamily. Stella also seems to be more concerned about the future than the past; her marriage is described by Stanley as him pulling her "out of these columns", evoking the glamor of Antebellum grand mansions, while Williams implicitly juxtaposes this glamor with his colloquial use of "them" for "those" demonstrating his different origin , and she doesn't seem to miss that lifestyle (the description of "shot" might sound violent, but Williams describes the violence as an integral part of their relationship that Stella is sometimes excited about). As a result, Stella and Stanley finish the play together, if unhappy, and Blanche leaves alone. The contrast between Blanche, Stella, and Stanley reflects Williams' view of America's future in the 1940s, when class was becoming increasingly irrelevant as the GI Bill allowed working-class veterans like Stanley to have access to education or financial freedom. Blanche's identifiers—her Southern Belle persona, her position as a fired teacher, her marriage to a deceased husband—are all rooted in the past and so her entire persona must also become obsolete. Williams views Stanley and the uncivilized "animal joy" of his life as America's symbolic future because of his success in replacing Blanche in the end. The concept of time haunts the characters in "Mrs. Dalloway" and the chimes of Big Ben (described as "first a musical warning; then the hour, irrevocable" to emphasize the irremediable nature of time itself) act as a temporal motif to structure the novel. Woolf uses the phrase "The circles of lead dissolved in the air" to describe the chimes four times, and these heavy, tangible symbols often interrupt Clarissa's stream-of-consciousness narrative and serve to remind the reader of the passage of time in the novel. . At one point, while Clarissa is talking to her former lover, Peter, Woolf personifies Big Ben by writing that he “struck between them,” as if time itself separated them with its irreversible transformations. This appears even more dramatic in the structure of events unfolding over the course of a single day, as a microcosm of life in London for these characters: one of Woolf's frequent techniques was to focus on "moments of being” and elevating the everyday by writing about it, examining what she called “an ordinary mind on an ordinary day” in the essay “Modern Fiction.” This use of time could be a modernist literary technique in deliberate contrast to Victorian linear storytelling, attempting to find emotion or meaning in a day of mundane events. On the other hand, Woolf could have used this immediate, microcosmic approach to contrast the years of memory that the characters pass through in their minds, and this conflict of internal and external time (external time also being represented by Big Ben) would thus emphasize the power of memory in the novel. In "Streetcar", Blanche's fear of the passage of time is expressed through her attempts to appear younger than she really is, as demonstrated by her avoidance of harsh lights or "unforgiving glare" - l The anthropomorphism of "ruthless" implying a cruel reaction of society to his age. This also translates to her interest in younger men. She remembers her husband, her first love, as a "boy", so the fact that she almost sabotages her new relationship with Mitch by kissing the "young, young, young" boy from the Daily Star shows how his compulsion to cling to the past isolates him from the reality of his present. Alternatively, his vanity and self-sabotage may be inherent to his personality: his talk about "gentle people" in front of "courting favor with the tough” implies that she is in some way more vulnerable than Stella, and perhaps less able to cope with the harsh realities of the world, such as the death of her husband. Isolation, or association with younger, vulnerable men, may in this case become more of a necessity for protection - and Williams describes it as necessary in this context through Stanley's danger and immoral activity such as game or unrestrained violence. in New Orleans. The isolation of the characters in "Mrs. Dalloway" is represented both in the structure and in the descriptions of the characters themselves. The stream-of-consciousness form of "Mrs. Dalloway" is characteristic of the isolated society it represents (as well as an example of Woolf's modernism, a style of writing that challenged previous conventions in the same way that "Mrs. Dalloway" implies that post-war society was changing: the characters consider every aspect of their day in depth through their inner thoughts, but the actual dialogue between these characters covers only a fraction of it. Richard brings Clarissa flowers, for example, after reflecting inwardly on how he loved her, but "couldn't bring himself" to say it outwardly (Woolf's phrasing expressing his unchanging nature, however, might be criticizing the class). British superior specifically through this, and how what Clarissa calls a "chasm" in marriages also applies to their separation from the rest of society by structuring the novel primarily around Clarissa and Septimus, Woolf makes a comparison that Clarissa; sees in the last chapter (saying that she "felt somehow very similar to him - the young man who had committed suicide") but not before, because the social divisions imposed by class superiority of the 1920s would have prevented them from speaking. There are, however, moments in "Streetcar" and "Mrs. Dalloway" where the unspoken connections with strangers are more meaningful than the moments with the most important people in the characters' lives. The shared moments in "Mrs. Dalloway," where narratives overlap, are also emblematic of a changing world: Everyone in the crowd notices the sky writing of a plane or a car backfiring, and this new technology unites them all. This acts as a connecting device in this novel – Clarissa and Septimus both hear the car and their stories converge – and as a harbinger of changing times, to which Clarissa and Septimus react with fear (she thinks that the backfiring of the car is a “gun”). dejected” at first, and he freezes in the street thinking that the world has “raised its whip; where will it go down? " - her absurd image of the whip of the world reflecting both her instability and her paranoia about being punished). Woolf may have linked these characters through new technologies to demonstrate this common fear of modernism in society post-war British, or to describe how isolated they are from the people around them, while they connect more naturally in their thoughts to a stranger on the street. line from Blanche's play is "I have always relied on the kindness of strangers". On the surface, this may seem to celebrate human connection and empathy, because even a stranger can be kind, but in the context of the latter. scene of the play, this reminds the audience that she no longer has anyone to rely on, except strangers (or in fact, she already had someone; the use of "always" implies); that her isolation might stem from her inherently self-destructive personality.) Blanche's past experiences ».