Later, there is the constant proximity of Blanche to Stanley and Stella’s bed, which is more tension for all. When Stanley rifles through the personal things in Blanche’s trunk, it is as though he is violating her as well.
The scene when Stanley yells at Stella to come back to him and make love, Blanch notices Stanley’s wild part and how he uses his aggressive sexuality to get what he wants.
Blanche uses sex to seek refuge from destruction, unaware that she is simply causing more disaster in the process. She pursues Mitch and flirts with Stanley hoping to recapture the love she had with Allan when they were both young, and flirting with both of them makes her feel younger. In fact, she seems desperate to seek Stanley's sexual approval, and she is always fishing for compliments about her physical appearance. After their first argument in Scene 2, she tells Stella: “I called him a little boy and laughed and flirted. Yes, I was flirting with your husband!”. Blanche has no shame and she is jealous of the security and save heaven of her sister’s marriage while she was dealing with the loss of Belle Reve.
It is very possible that she resents the sexual freedom Stella enjoys as a married woman. By “freedom” we mean she can have sex any time she wants without reproach, albeit it with the same man. Blanche, by old Southern standards, should not be having sex at all since she is not married.
When Stanley was a stranger, she desired him or at least flirted with him. Nevertheless, Stanley was never able to understand the sensitivity behind Blanche’s pretense. Even when Stella refers to Blanche as delicate, Stanley cries out in disbelief: “Some delicate piece she is.” It is, then, Stanley has forced brutality that causes Blanche to crack up. The rape is Blanche’s destruction as an individual. In all previous sexual encounters, Blanche had freely given of herself. However, to be taken so cruelly and so brutally by a man who represents all qualities which Blanche found obnoxious caused her entire world to collapse and went deeper into her own world, detachment from reality and her decision to see life only as she wishes to perceive it. “Whoever you are—I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.”
The scene of when Stanley demands to see the papers about the loss of Belle Reve highlights a difference between himself and Blanche as well as their similarity.
He thinks that by demanding the papers, he would force Blanche to admit wrongdoing, but she turned over the papers without a fight and now he has to figure out what to do with them.
Stanley is convinced that Blanche is perpetuating a swindle – Blanche cannot even conceive of such a thing. She comes from a social class that does not know how to make money, only how to spend it. She cannot conceive of turning a profit on the loss of Belle Reve – Stanley is projecting his own values and interests on to a woman from a very different background.
Calling upon the Napoleonic code enables Stanley to justify his feelings of entitlement toward Stella's inheritance. In doing so, he shows that he is ignorant of legal technicalities, because Belle Reve, located in Laurel, Mississippi, would not fall under New Orleans jurisdiction. However, Stanley's repeated references to the Napoleonic code highlight the fact that his conflict with Blanche is also a gender showdown. Stanley's greed reveals his misogyny or woman-hating tendencies. As a man, Stanley feels that what Stella has belongs to him. He also hates Blanche as a woman and as a person with a more prestigious family name, and therefore suspects that Blanche's business dealings have been dishonest.
The interclass bond between Stanley and Stella, on the other hand, is animal and spiritual rather than intellectual or practical. Blanche cannot understand why her sister would enter into such a rough-and-tumble union, because Blanche has never reconciled her genteel identity with her own profound desire. The divide between her aristocratic sense of self and the “animal” urges that have at times controlled her is too great. Instead, Blanche invents a reality that conveniently ignores her own sexuality, her own vitality. She knows that a streetcar named Desire brought her to her present predicament, but intellectually she separates that desire from herself.
Stanley is one of social background. Whereas Blanche comes from an old Southern family and was raised to see herself as socially elite, Stanley comes from an immigrant family and is a proud member of the working class. They meet one another in the socially turbulent post-war period in New Orleans, one of America's most diverse cities. Each represents values that are antagonistic to the other's chance at success in the modern world.
Williams advocates a moderate approach to the indulgence of desires. Desire is a fact of life and a driving force in the lives of Williams’ characters. Though Stanley, a rapist and wife beater, is no one's prototype for the perfect man, Blanche's denial of her desire, which leads her to hit on young boys, is equally dangerous.
A tension between a romantic and a realistic world-view is present throughout the entire play, embodied in the contrast between Stanley and Blanche. Clearly, Blanche is the romantic – where she sees "the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir," Stella sees simply the L&N tracks – and Stanley "no wool over this boy's eyes" Kowalski is the realist. But Williams isn't setting up a simple dichotomy, because neither Blanche nor Stanley is exactly what they think they are. Blanche's romantic worldview is as much a desire as anything else – she has seen the truth, and she choose to ignore it.
“The Kowalskis and the DuBois have different notions”
“Indeed they have, thank heavens! ”