How does Blanche DuBois represent the faded grandeur of the American past?

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How does Blanche DuBois represent the                    faded grandeur of the American past?

  The South, old and new, is an important theme of the play. Blanche and her sister come from a dying world. The life and pretensions of their world are becoming a thing of memory: to drive home the point, the family mansion is called "Belle Reve," or Beautiful Dream. The old life may have been something beautiful, but it is gone forever. The two sisters, symbolically, are the last living members of their family. Stella will mingle her blood with a man of blue-collar stock, and Blanche will enter the world of madness. Stanley represents the new order of the South: chivalry is dead, replaced by a "rat race," to which Stanley makes several proud illusions.

Blanche expects a certain level of behaviour from men; she wants them to be gentle, good-tempered and friendly. She also expects a certain prudery. Those were principles which were representative of the Old South (everyone has heard of the legendary southern gentlemen). Blanche wants men to know about decency, family and tradition, as men did during the old times. The traditional southerners were decent, prudent, religious, honest and gentle – attitudes that are no longer present in the society of the 20th century.

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Blanche has an agricultural background, and her family lived on a plantation in Mississippi. The Old South was an agricultural society, with over 80% of its population working in the farming sector. After the Civil War, almost the whole southern economy was destroyed and many farmers lost their plantations – not only big, slave-holding farmers, but also middle-class farmers working on their own. During the first two scenes, we learn that Blanche lost the plantation, Belle Reve, because she took out too many loans on this place and was unable to pay them back. Here we can see the change ...

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