Explore the ways in which Williams makes use of confrontation in A Streetcar Named Desire.

Within Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire, Williams uses confrontation, whether it be gross physical acts of violation committed by Stanley, or that of psychological confrontation of Blanche's realities, to portray the ‘brutal desire’ that categorised the American South in 1947. By using the mode of confrontation throughout his play, Williams is able to trace the decline of the ‘Old South’ to that of a ‘New American’ familial structure typified by brutality, as Williams draws upon the social upheaval in post-World War II America.It is the confrontations against Blanche which takes upon the key strand of the play, first seen in the repeated psychological confrontations about her past. This psychological confrontation of Blanche is repeatedly symbolised in the removal of the paper lantern, exposing and confronting her realities. This is first achieved by Mitch whose repetition of ‘turn[ing] the light on’ accompanies his own revelations of her past, as the stage becomes progressively lit more harshly for the audience to mirror her cruel exposure. This psychological confrontation of Blanche is highly destructive to her mental state: Blanche is so concerned with maintaining her illusion, her ‘magic’, yet after the disillusionment of Mitch she is left ‘fall[en] to her knees’, a physical tableau to the audience of her tragic ‘fall’ into reality, and the subsequent loss of power, and sanity, that accompanies it. Moreover, Mitch’s harsh diatribe against Blanche would perhaps been seen as conventional in Williams’ modern era where promiscuity among women was deemed truly ‘[un]clean’. This allows Mitch, and later Stanley, to physically reduce the figure of Blanche in through a successive series of confrontational acts. Ultimately, it is Stanley who strikes the last confrontational blow, exposing her fully and irrevocably in how he ‘seizes the paper lantern, tearing it’ in the final scene.