The central female protagonists in Nella Larsen's novella Quicksand and Tennessee Williams's play A Streetcar Named Desire embrace material culture for a multitude of reasons. Helga Crane's love of color is both aesthetic in the clothes she adores and serves as a metonym to critique racial prejudice. There is also a duality of meaning in the way Blanche DuBois approaches material culture. Her passion for beautiful clothes and the decorations of her room is a source of fantasy and the means that allows her to seduce men. However, dominant males and powerful institutions attempt to pacify Helga and Blanche's statements with their exhibited bodies. While Helga becomes disillusioned with how others reject and appropriate her colorful and adorned body, Blanche is temporarily able to fight for space only because she masks the true age of her masculine body through dress. This sense of confusion and deception, combined with the temporal limitations of age and declining reproductive capacity, characterize the female body as an illusory source of power. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay Dominant males like Stanley Kowalski see 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 house in floral-print dresses and hangs frilly decorations like the paper lantern. Upon Blanche's arrival, Stella asks her husband to admire her sister's dress and tell her she is beautiful, insisting, “This is important with Blanche. His little weakness!”. According to Stella, these physical displays of beauty are harmless. They appreciate a male viewer and a woman eagerly accepts this validation of the male gaze as Blanche needs to be told that she actually looks good. The name "Blanche" itself has connotations of something that lacks substance or is bland, such as a blank canvas that may be the basis for a colorful work but which alone remains an empty space. When Blanche mentions her origins, Stanley retorts: “Yes, in Laurel, that's true. Not in my territory." Stanley is quite determined in this first meeting with Blanche to point out that the apartment is not just his space but his "territory", as if he is salivating at the chance to mark and defend it. Based on the reader's first encounter with Blanche, it is doubtful that her flimsy body will pose a serious threat to the power imbalances in the Kowalski household. Helga is treated similarly 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 that empowers the female body. The reader first meets Helga through the objects in her room, such as the reading lamp and the carpet painted in deep shades of black, red, and blue. While in Naxos it turns out that "most of his earnings had gone into clothes, books and room furnishings". Because she spends so much time sheltered in her room with these possessions, Helga's celebration of color and beauty is seen by her peers as an excuse to enjoy her appearance and to justify collecting material things. Helga's room and the predominantly negative response to her bright outfits actually helps reinforce the power of the institution. His room is described as an oasis of color in a uniform and highly school systemregimented. The decor of Helga's room “held her back,” implying that this personal space, decorated with flashes of color like the gold and green robe, serves as a refuge from the politics of Naxos rather than a direct attack on the system. Helga's frustration is infantilized by her colleagues. She becomes the distraught daughter who runs into her room and acts out in this secluded space. Despite what her colleagues may think, Helga isn't simply throwing tantrums or playing dress-up. She uses color as part of a feminine aesthetic towards beauty to criticize a society that flattens differences and forces people 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 an outlet for personal expression that Helga thinks it should be. When this politician visits Naxos he refers to the crowds of schoolchildren and black staff as niggers. This description is not directly commented on in the story, which gives it the power of being unspoken racism, a given. Labeling his audience as Negro elevates the white politician above the mob and lumps them together as poor inferior blacks. Helga looks out over the same crowd and sees a sea of ​​faces of different colors with shades of ebony, bronze, and gold. Helga's vivid color descriptions extend to include blacks, mixed-race people, and even whites. This sense of otherness is expanded in a Harlem nightclub where he observes, "There was sooty black, shiny black, dove gray, mahogany, bronze, copper, gold, orange, yellow, peach, ivory, rosé white, paste white". Helga does not explicitly comment on the issue of race. It attempts to look beyond racial divides to find a simple color and celebrate a range of unique nuances and experiences instead of dividing people into binary groups that pit black against white. It is important to note that Helga's uplifting and passionate rhetoric regarding skin color is part of an internal monologue. Its discussions and celebrations share a quality of distance and remoteness. They either take place in his mind or through the narrator's observations, away from the world of the story and its characters. When Helga is fed up with Naxos she decides to escape to Denmark. He repeatedly flees repressive societies, and it is difficult to see these flights as anything more than simple passive acts of resistance that fail to challenge the societies that have created the social inequalities he despises. Helga eventually loses control over what statements she is making to her parents. body. In Denmark his uncles decide what to wear and his image is taken by the artist Axel Olson. When Helga goes shopping with her aunt and uncle, she "agrees" to a pair of shoes they chose. On the one hand, Helga gets what she wants in Denmark. She admits that the shoes are cute and fit her feet quite well. Although in this new society she is encouraged to wear beautiful things that would have been unheard of on Naxos, such as bright orange dresses, what is missing is her personal choice in the matter. As the day progresses and the clothes pile up, Fru Dahl insists, "you should have higher heels and buckles." These two objects are uncomfortable and distort Helga's body. The buckles are strangely reminiscent of the chains of slavery and the resulting loss of control over one's body. Artist Axel Olson also physically violates Helga by taking control over her female body. When Helga sees her finished portrait she is outraged. It doesn't look like her at all. Axel transformed her into an exotic, wild-eyed animal. Helga can only catch isolated words of his description:“beautiful eyes… color… neck column… yellow… hair… alive… wonderful.” Axel dissects the female body. This fragmentary description demonstrates the power of the male gaze to assert control and rearrange elements of the female body according to male values ​​of physical beauty, which in this case reduce Helga to an exotic, objectified black body. As Helga struggles with 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 flirtation to counteract Stanley's boorish behavior. Where Helga is sometimes passive, Blanche is passive aggressive. When Stanley questions her about Belle Reve, Blanche sprays herself with perfume and then playfully sprays it, retorting, "My God, you look impressively judicial!" (Williams 2200). Stanley marks his territory with empty beer bottles and trash from last night's poker game. Blanche left her distinctly feminine scent to linger in the air and challenge the space in the apartment. Through the examination of material culture it becomes evident that the female body is not in itself a source of power. 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 herself with squirts of perfume, and insists on only meeting Mitch at night, in the dark. A dividing curtain separates Blanche from the exalted masculine world of Stanley's poker games. Behind this curtain men are putty in his hands. When he turns on the radio and starts waltzing to the music, Mitch is happy. He moves “in awkward imitation like a dancing bear” (Williams 2207). Blanche has temporarily emasculated him and keeps him in her space at 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, “takes off her blouse and stands in her pink silk bra and white shirt, in the light of the doors.” Stella promptly yells at her that she is standing in the light, to which Blanche responds dryly, "Oh, it's me." Blanche is essentially stripping in front of the poker players with little warning, 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 problematises the notion of agency on the body. While a young female body like Helga's is put on display and is the subject of the paintings of one Axel Olson, Blanche's older body is hidden beneath layers of clothing, perfume, and shadows. When Blanche dresses up her female body and parades in public, she is seen as manipulative and deceitful. At the beginning of the show, when it is unclear exactly how old Blanche is, her body is valued and desired. Stanley, in an act that demonstrates how he sees the entire space of his house as a male domain, violently rummages through his trunk. He shouts: “What is here? A dress of solid gold, I think… Pieces of real fox fur, half a mile long” (Williams 2198). These images of wealth and luxury fit the image of the Southern belle that Blanche enters the Kowalski home trying to maintain. At this point in the play she is in control of the statement her body is making. Once Stanley discovers Blanche's true age and delves into her past, the trunk of clothes itself is deemed worthless. He scolds her: "Look at you, in that dress.