Jim's appearance as a gentleman caller apparently affects Laura's behavior positively. She is now able to talk and dance with him. She acquires self-confidence when he clarifies that he has never noticed her defect. She even trusts him with the unicorn of her glass collection, a symbol of herself. Now she asks him to handle it with care because, "if you breathe it breaks! ". But he breaks it and Laura as well. When she discovers that Jim, her old love who gives her a hope for a new life, is engaged to another girl, she is totally destroyed. She cannot withstand the shock of what the past has become in the present, so she retreats within herself forever.
Blanche DuBois, in A Streetcar Named Desire, is one of Williams's heroines who live under a cover of illusion. She refuses to accept the reality of her life and attempts to live totally in illusion. The crisis that leads to her disappointment and so to her illusion is her responsibility for her husband's death. Before action started, she was married to a young man, Allan, who turned to be a homosexual. At a moment of disgust, she drives him to suicide by revealing that she knows the truth about him. In Theatre Arts Magazine, Rosamond Gilda describes Blanche's discovery that Allan preferred sex with men as a "chattering experience when her most intimate happiness was destroyed at its source" (Jones 174). Being unable to accept her harsh reality drives her into illusion.
Blanche has lost everything; her husband and even herself. She has also lost Belle Reve, the place she used to live in with her aristocratic family. Losing Belle Reve stands for losing her aristocratic past. It stands in contrast with Vieux Carre, the apartment she is now living in.
Belle Reve the plantation, symbolizes the past, both personal and collective, that is now onlya beautiful illusion; likewise, Vieux Carre, the cramped apartment of the present, stands for the threatening reality in which Blanche feels cornered.(Debusscher 173)
The loss of Belle Reve is a significant step towards Blanche's creation of illusion.
Blanche tries to compensate the loss of Allan through her intimacies with strangers. she searches for protection through love making. "Her failure to help Allan sexually and her guilt because of his death...explain her promiscuity, as if she were trying to succeed with strangers where she had failed with him" (Griffin 49). Blanche is no more herself. She spends nights with young soldiers. She is ordered to leave the town because of her bad reputation. She is also dismissed from the high school where she works because of a relationship with one of her students, a seventeen years old boy. She even tries to seduce a young man at her sister's apartment. Her sexual relations are basically with young men as a reminder of Allan.
Blanche chooses many ways to escape from the harsh reality that surrounds her. Bathing, dressing and drinking alchol are her means out. Her recurring bathing suggests a way of purification and new creation. The bathroom is the place of her retreat throughout the course of the play. Her usual bathing stands as a purification ritual. It is her renewal place.
Blanche's constant bathing suggests the traditional asso- ciation of water with purification there is also the implica- tion of Lethe and forgetfulness.(68)
Although Blanche has lost everything and is rich no more, her appearance suggests the opposite. She is always dressed as a rich aristocratic person as a cover for her reality. All over the play she is drinking heavily, which is considered as another means of escape.
In his ignorance and insensitivity, Stanely -Blanche's brother in law- reveals her past to destroy her. He hates her because she reminds him of a class to which he couldn't belong. She makes him fell inferior. "The conflict between Blanche and Stanley is an externalization of the conflict that goes within Blanche between illusion and reality" (Corrigan 391). By telling Mitch, Blanche's new lover, about her past, Stanley destroys her hope and illusion. He tears off the paper lantern that has been put on the light bulb, a symbol of Blanche. The light bulb shows a contrast between the reality which Blanche is unable to face and the magic she hopes to create. She tries to cover her aging face from the "truth" represented by bright lights.
At the end, Stanley who "acts like an animal" and "has animal habits" tries to rape Blanche, an action which destroys her sanity. This action "...depicts the total defeat of a woman whose existence depends on her maintaining illusions about herself and the world..."(391). His revenge is physical as well as emotional. The play ends with Blanche becoming insane, driven to a mental hospital. Blanche's response to the doctor, whose single gesture of removing his hat and calling her "Miss DuBois" indicates that he is a gentleman and evokes her final line which summarizes her life "whoever you are- I have always depended on the kindness of strangers."
