A Streetcar Named Desire

1948

Blanche DuBois

Blanche DuBois -- Blanche DuBois has "the misfortune of being an English teach", but she's one of a kind. You'd never forget her if you took her course. At first, she seems just high-strung, but refined. But as the play unfolds little by little her past is reavealed. By the end she is completely undone, fit only for the asylum. Nevertheless, she is never humbled by defeat. In this way she is a Hemingway hero. She maintains her lady like dignity even after her destruction at the hands of Stanley in much the same way that Santiago maintains his dignity after the sharks attack his fish in The Old Man and the Sea.

To compensate for her loneliness and despair, Blanche creates illusions. She clings to the past with the old rules of behavior and conduct. Blanche values her past with the Southern manners and maintains the speech of the dying South.  She comes to Elysian Fields seeking love and help, but instead finds hostility and rejection.  She has been scarred by her husband's sexuality and his suicide that she blames herself for.  She has also lost her ancestrial home and has reached the stage of her life when she can no longer depend on her good looks.  Is it any wonder she firts and prefers dimly lit places?  To escape the brutality of death and reality, Blanche drinks too much and is sexually promiscuous.  She also gives herself to men for other reasons.  She feels that she had failed her young husband in some way.  Blanche tries to alleviate her guilt by giving herself at random to strangers.  It may also fill the void lift by Allan's death. She is particularly drawn to young men who may remind her of her husband.  Her last line in the play echoes pathetically her plight and predicament.  She goes to the doctor because he behaves as a gentleman and he is a stranger.

One question to ask is: "Is Blanche a tragic victim or an immoral woman who deserves her fate?" Don't be too quick to answer this. On one side some would say that Blanche is to much of a degenerate to be taken seriously. She lies continuously and is a sexual deviate that becomes the town degenerate. She is an alcoholic and because of all this Blanche deserves what happens to her and it isn't so much a tragedy, but Williams saying this is what happens to people who don't face the truth and live in dream worlds.  On the other side, a reader of the play can use Blanche's past to explain and defend her present behavior.  If you appreciate what has happened to her in life, you can understand why she acts the way she does.   Further she can be seen as a symbol of a decaying way of Southern life engaged in a losing battle against modern commercialism.  This is part of what makes Blanche DuBois such an engaging and interesting character and a character that actresses the world over want the challenge to play.  She is very complicated and the audience can feel opposing emotions about her, from compassion to disapproval.

Blanche is also the only advocate in the play of the values of civilization.  She alone speaks up for the nobility of humanity, for man's achievements in the arts, for the progress made by civilization.  In saying this, however, it brings up irony.  It is ironic that the uplifting words in the play come from the mouth of an ex-prostitute.  But she often confuses truth and illusion.   Perhaps Williams may be implying that society's most illustriuos accomplishments are illusions, too, and that the brutish Stanley more accurately represents man's true nature.  Blanche may then represent not what is, but what ought to be.  

What do you think?

[Synopsis] [Setting & Characters] [Poetic References]

[Essay Topics] [Test] [Study Questions] [Stanley] [Stella] [Blanche] [Mitch]

[Structure & Themes] [Notes] [Letters to Jessica Tandy]

From Streetcar:"No, I have the misfortune of being an English teacher."

Got questions or comments? Contact Jay Edwards

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