The central female protagonists of Nella Larsen's short story Quicksand and Tennessee Williams' play, A Streetcar Named Desire, embrace material culture for a multitude of reasons. Helga Crane's love of color is both aesthetic in the clothing she adores and serves as a metonym to criticize racial prejudice. There is also a duality of meaning in the way Blanche DuBois approaches material culture. Her penchant for pretty clothes and decorating her room is a source of fantasy and a means that allows her to seduce men. However, dominant men and powerful institutions attempt to appease Helga and Blanche's statements with their bodies on display. As Helga becomes disillusioned with the way others reject and appropriate her colorful and ornate body, Blanche is temporarily able to fight for space only because she masks the true age of her body from the masculine through the dress. This sense of confusion and deception, coupled with age-related temporal limitations and diminished reproductive power, renders the female body an illusory source of power. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an original essay. Dominant men like Stanley Kowalski view a woman's attempt to decorate her room and dress her body as a passive, non-threatening act. It's easy to dismiss Blanche as materialistic and vain as she wanders around the Kowalski household in floral-print dresses and hangs frilly decorations like the paper lantern. When Blanche arrives, Stella asks her husband to admire his sister's dress and tell him that it is beautiful, insisting: "It's important with Blanche." His little weakness! According to Stella, these physical displays of beauty are harmless. They appeal to a male viewer and a woman eagerly accepts this validation from the male gaze because Blanche must be told that she does indeed look good. The very name “Blanche” has connotations of something lacking in substance or bland, like a white canvas that can serve as the basis for a colorful work but on its own remains an empty space. When Blanche mentions where she's from, Stanley retorts, "Yeah, Laurel, that's true." Not on my territory.” During this first meeting with Blanche, Stanley is determined to emphasize that the apartment is not only his space but his "territory", as if he were salivating at the idea of ​​having the opportunity to mark it and to defend it. Based on the reader's first encounter with Blanche, it is doubtful whether her insignificant body poses a serious threat to the power imbalances within the Kowalski household. Helga is treated the same way by her colleagues on Naxos. Her attempt to assert control over her body and adorn it attractively is dismissed as superficial, materialistic, and vain rather than an assertive action reinforcing the female body. The reader first encounters Helga through the objects in her room, such as the reading lamp and rug painted in deep tones of black, red, and blue. On Naxos, it is revealed that "most of his income was spent on clothes, books, and bedroom furnishings." As she spends much time sheltered in her room with these possessions, Helga's celebration of color and beauty is seen by her colleagues as an excuse to revel in her own appearance and justify the collection of objects materials. Helga's room and the extremely negative side The response to her vibrant outfits actually helps to reinforce thepower of the institution. Her room is described as an oasis of color in a uniformed and highly regimented school system. The furniture in Helga's room was "holding her back", implying that this personal space, decorated with flashes of color like the gold and green negligee, acts as a sanctuary against the policies of Naxos rather than as a direct attack against the system. Helga's frustration is infantilized by her colleagues. She becomes the upset girl who runs to her room and behaves in this isolated space. Despite what her colleagues think, Helga doesn't just throw a tantrum or dress up. She uses color as part of a feminine aesthetic towards beauty to criticize a society that flattens differences and forces people to fit into categories based on ridiculous notions such as racial purity. The words of a white politician reinforce how color can be manipulated into a tool of repression rather than a means of personal expression like Helga believes it should be. When this politician visits Naxos, he refers to the crowd of schoolchildren and black staff as "niggers." This description is not commented on directly in the story, giving it the power to be tacit, or even factual, racism. Calling his audience black elevates the white politician above the crowd and lumps them together as poor, inferior blacks. Helga looks at the same crowd and sees a sea of ​​diversely colored faces with shades of ebony, bronze, and gold. Helga's vibrant descriptions of color expand to include black people, mixed-race people, and even white people. This sense of diversity was developed in a Harlem nightclub where she observed: "There was soot black, shiny black, taupe, mahogany, bronze, copper, gold, orange, yellow, peach, ivory, pinkish white, pastry white.” Helga does not explicitly comment on the racial issue. She attempts to look beyond racial divides to find simple colors and celebrate a range of unique nuances and experiences instead of dividing people into binary groups of black versus white. It is important to note that Helga's uplifting and passionate rhetoric about skin color is part of an inner monologue. Its discussions and celebrations share a quality of distance and estrangement. They take place either in his mind or through the observations of the narrator who is removed from the world of the story and its characters. When Helga has had enough of Naxos, she decides to escape to Denmark. She repeatedly flees repressive societies, and it is difficult to see these escapes as anything other than passive acts of resistance that fail to challenge the societies that have created the social inequalities she despises. Helga ultimately loses control of the statements she makes with her. body. In Denmark, her uncle and aunt decide what she wears and her image is appropriated by artist Axel Olson. When Helga goes shopping with her uncle and aunt, she "consents" to a pair of shoes they have chosen. On the one hand, Helga gets what she wants in Denmark. She admits that the shoes are beautiful and fit her feet very well. Although in this new society she is encouraged to wear pretty things that would never have been seen in Naxos, like bright orange dresses, what is missing is her personal choice in the matter. As the day wears on and the clothes pile up, Fru Dahl insists, “you should have higher heels – and buckles.” Both of these objects are uncomfortable and distort Helga's body. The loops are strangely reminiscent of the chains of slavery and the loss of control overhis body that results from it. Artist Axel Olson also physically rapes Helga by taking control of her female body. When Helga sees his finished portrait, she is outraged. It doesn't look like him at all. Axel transformed her into an exotic, wild-eyed animal. Helga is only able to grasp isolated words of his description: "superb eyes... the color... the column of the neck... yellow... the hair... alive... wonderful." Axel dissects the female body. This fragmented description demonstrates the power of the male gaze to assert control and reorganize elements of the female body according to male values ​​of physical beauty, which in this case reduces Helga to an exotic, objectified black body. While Helga struggles to understand how to publicly confront dominant institutions, her colleagues, and men in general through material culture, Blanche is able to use her clothed body to convey the message she desires. She is a seductress who uses flirting to counteract Stanley's crude behavior. Where Helga is sometimes passive, Blanche is passive-aggressive. When Stanley questions her about Belle Rêve, Blanche sprinkles herself with perfume and then playfully sprays him, retorting: "My God, but you look impressive in the judicial system!" (Williams 2200). Stanley marks his territory with empty beer bottles and trash from last night's poker game. Blanche let her own distinctly feminine scent linger in the air and fight for space in the apartment. By examining material culture, it becomes clear that the female body is not a source of power in itself. Blanche's flirtatious behavior demonstrates how the female body must be presented carefully, even deceptively. Many times, Blanche is behind a curtain or uses some sort of disguise to hide her aging body. She masks her face with powder, constantly bathes or dabs on perfume, and she insists on only meeting Mitch at night, in the dark. A curtained partition keeps Blanche away from the overexcited masculine world of Stanley's poker games. Behind this curtain, men are putty in his hands. When she turns on the radio and starts waltzing to music, Mitch is delighted. He moves, “in clumsy imitation like a dancing bear” (Williams 2207). Blanche has temporarily emasculated him and she keeps him in her space in the Kowalski house while Stanley yells at him to get back to their game. Unlike Helga, Blanche is able to control and manipulate space. In another instance, Blanche undresses behind the curtain, "she takes off her blouse and stands in her pink silk bra and white shirt in the light of the doors." Stella calls out to her as soon as she stands in the light, to which Blanche responds dryly, “Oh, it’s me.” Blanche basically strips naked in front of the poker players with one small caveat, her body is mostly hidden behind the curtain. It is interesting to note the contradictions between Helga and Blanche in relation to age, and how this problematizes the notion of agency over the body. . While a young female body like Helga's is on display and the subject of paintings by Axel Olson, Blanche's older body is hidden beneath layers of clothing, perfume, and shadow. When Blanche dresses her female body and parades in public, she is seen as manipulative and deceptive. At the beginning of the play, when we do not know exactly how old Blanche is, her body is valued and desirable. Stanley, in an act that demonstrates how he views the entire space of his house as a male domain, violently rummages through his trunk. He yells, “What’s here?” A solid gold dress, I believe... Real pieces of.