Write a 4-6 page paper on “A Midsummer Night’s Dream or The Streetcar Named Desire”, you will need to find and use 3 good, credible outside sources such magazines, journals, or library databases. You will need to develop a literary argument (a claim and your own thesis).
Prompts to choose from:
1. Consider the argument from Krieger that A Midsummer Night’s Dream represents violence in forms of artful spectacle, with lovers who dramatize the power of literary and aristocratic modes of authority (over passion/desire). And Louis Montrose, as stated by McEvoy, finds the play’s comedy about “the containment of challenges to the symbolic and actual power of men over women.” How do such claims affect your understanding and response, or to Shakespeare’s comedies in general?
2. Does Puck’s epilogue, where he claims that the audience may consider the play but a dream, resolve the problematic relations between dreams and waking reality? How does it respond to Theseus’s perspective on theatrical representations? Explain.
3. Hippolyta was an Amazon, women warriors famous in Elizabethan literature for subduing male heroes, practicing infanticide on male offspring, and even murdering husbands to maintain their power. Queen Elizabeth was popularly known as the “Virgin Queen,” a powerful monarch who remained unmarried despite pressure from subjects early in her reign who wanted to see her wedded (perhaps subject to at least one man) and bedded (to produce an heir). Consider the play’s treatment of women, their power, their chastity or sexual behavior etc. Theseus, for example, tells Hermia she may either wed Demetrius, die, or “live a barren sister” (1.1.72) among other chaste women.
4. Tennessee Williams wrote that he originally intended for Blanche to be the most sympathetic character in A Streetcar Named Desire. In a well-reasoned and well-developed essay, argue whether or not he succeeded. Be certain to include a discussion of how Williams manages to create audience sympathy for her or why she ultimately loses that sympathy.
5. In a well-developed essay, explore interactions of the three central characters–Stella, Stanley, and Blanche–in terms of the functioning of the id, ego, and superego. Do the three combine to form a psychologically healthy individual? Why or why not? Be certain to support all of your arguments with direct references to the text.
6. Support, refute, or qualify the thesis that the plot structure and events and the development of the character of Blanche DuBois all support an interpretation of A Streetcar Named Desire as a tragedy.
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