Blanche’s desire not only deafens her, it blinds her and ruins her as well. She manages to destroy her previously good reputation when she stays at the Hotel Flamingo by bringing back men with her almost every night. As she admits to Mitch, ‘intimacies with strangers was all (she) was able to fill (her) empty heart with’. The ‘management of the Flamingo was impressed by Dame Blanche’ so much, in fact that they asked her to ‘turn in her room key’. After that, she moves on to have an affair with a seventeen year old student of hers, which leads to Mr Graves, the principal, firing her. Again there is a connection between death and desire. Eventually, the ‘jig was all up’ and a ‘town ordinance is passed against her’. Her desire manages to ruin her good name and she is ‘washed up like poison’ on her sister’s doorstep.
Blanche, however, is not the first in her family to be driven by desire. Her ancestors ‘exchanged the land for their epic fornications’, which eventually led to the ‘loss of Belle Reve’ and to their own demise. Blanche does not realise that it was sex and desire itself that led to ‘all of those deaths’, and in the end, she ends up ‘caught in (the) trap’. Desire and death is all one vicious cycle, so it comes as no surprise in the end that Blanche’s desire leads to the death of her sanity.
One of the main factors that lead to Blanche’s neurosis is the suicide of her husband. Wracked by guilt, she firmly believes that she drove her husband to become gay and eventually kill himself out of shame. So, in order to prove her femininity and sexuality to herself, she ‘had many intimacies with strangers’. As Blanche is ‘lost’, ‘without anyone to hold onto’, her desire drives her from man to man, ‘hunting for some protection’ or to ‘pay for one night’s shelter’.
Desire is a mixture of sex and alcohol, and Blanche uses both as an anaesthetic to dull the pain and her heartache. As Blanche is an ‘English instructor’ and a poetry teacher, it is perhaps understandable that she is dramatic and lives in a fantasy world of romance. Even though she lies to everyone else, ‘never inside, (she) didn’t lie in (her) heart’. She defends herself to Mitch by saying that she ‘tell(s) what ought to be the truth’ and ‘if that is sinful’ then she should be ‘damned for it’, which is ultimately what happens to her. Blanche spins her own imaginary world for her to live in, and what eventually happens is that she begins to believe her own lies, until she can no longer tell the difference between fantasy and reality. This may even be a relief to her as she ‘(doesn’t) want realism’, she ‘wants magic’. But unfortunately, the only ‘magic’ she receives is being sent to the mental asylum.
Blanche’s desire becomes so great that she resorts to flirting with Stanley. In the movie production, when Stanley and Blanche first meet, the sexual tension between the two is obvious and electrifying. Blanche even tells Stella that she ‘flirted with (her) husband’ and that ‘he’s not the sort that goes for jasmine perfume’. This is a metonymy; it represents how Blanche uses her sexuality to seduce men. It therefore, comes as no surprise that she and Stanley have ‘had this date with each other from the beginning’. Even when Stanley tries to ‘interfere with (her)’, instead of running away she ‘moves backwards…into the bedroom’ almost as if to lead Stanley to the bed. The rape and the fact that Stella ‘couldn’t believe her story’ both cause Blanche to lose whatever threads of insanity she has left.
Blanche feels betrayed by Stella, the only person she has left who actually cares about her and ‘is so good to (her)’. Stella left Blanche to ‘take the blows in (her) face and in (her) body’ by herself, so that she could get into ‘bed with her Polack’, as Blanche claims. Hence she feels abandoned by her ‘precious little sister’. But as Blanche is a tragic heroine, the audience can only expect her to end up ‘lost’ and ‘lonely’.
Desire is the main thread that runs throughout the play; it entangles its characters in it. Streetcar is ‘a cry of pain’ as Arthur Miller rightly said, and ‘forgetting that, is to forget the play’. The title, having originally been ‘The Poker Night’ was appropriately changed. For me, no play was evermore suitably titled than ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’.