Blanche Dubois Travels in Time: A Study of Blue Jasmine (2013)

Abstract

[eng] The present study examines the influence of Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) on the development of the main female protagonist’s personality in Woody Allen’s Blue Jasmine (2013). While Blue Jasmine loosely adapts the structural framework of Williams’s play, the character of Jasmine Francis emerges as a contemporary reconfiguration of Blanche DuBois, offering a complex portrayal that oscillates between assertions of autonomy and moments of fragility and failure. This conflictive depiction challenges a cohesive feminist interpretation, instead presenting a character whose agency is both advanced and undermined within the narrative. Whereas Williams’s work reinforces traditional gender paradigms, Allen’s adaptation interrogates and selectively subverts these conventions, creating a portrayal that is simultaneously progressive and ambivalent. By juxtaposing representations of femininity across two distinct historical and cultural moments, Blue Jasmine reflects the evolution of gender discourse while exposing the enduring complexities and paradoxes of feminist struggles in a patriarchal society. This intertextual analysis accentuates the continued necessity of engaging with gender dynamics to advance the pursuit of genuine equality.