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 which happened in the South – people weren't able to run their farms anymore. So the loss of Belle Reve is a symbol of the economic change in the South.
As the airy and aristocratic Blanche, dressed in white, appears, you can immediately feel that she is in sharp contrast with her new surroundings, New Orleans, which is a noisy and dirty city. The extensive stage directions and her conversations with neighbours show this – firstly, Williams describes her as, “[looking as if she were arriving at a summer tea or cocktail party in the garden district.]” More than anything else, this immediately introduces Blanche’s character as a representative of the Old South, as much as Stanley’s introduction epitomizes him as the herald of the New. Everything that happens to these characters throughout the play is symbolic of this.
The death of the Old South is symbolized heavily in Blanche’s emotional and physical decline. Her over-dependence on illusion and fantasy establishes it as a myth – an ancient philosophy, an ideal, with little basis left in reality, indeed the ‘Beautiful Dream’. The constant references to her fragility & decay, and her neurotic awareness of aging and fading symbolizes the death of the regime which she idolizes. She, with her world, is slowly being conquered by the ravages of time. As Blanche herself says, “Daylight never exposed so total a ruin!” The recurring themes of desire and mortality strongly emphasize this – she tells Stella that to get there, she had to take two streetcars, named Desire and Cemeteries – as we read on we discover that this is directly describing the events in her life that actually did lead her to this point; her desire for her radical husband and his consequent death, the death of her family and her nymphomania, prompting her to be kicked out of town. We are reminded of her description to Stanley of how the family wealth dwindled – “… piece by piece, our improvident grandfathers and father and uncles and brothers exchanged the land for their epic fornications.” Again we have the idea of desire leading to death; the death of Belle Reve, the ultimate image of the Old South in the play. “Why, the Grim Reaper had put up his tent on our doorstep! … Stella. Belle Reve was his headquarters!” However much she increasingly tries to hide from the truth with her illusions, Blanche is painfully aware that what she cherishes most of all is dying, and she is powerless to stop it. The rape of Blanche and the subsequent death of her sanity, combined with the birth of Stanley’s child, firmly establishes the victory of the New South over the Old.