Scene 3: The next day, Stella and Blanche return from a late night show to find Stanley playing poker with his rough friends. Blanche is attracted to Harold Mitchell, the mildest of the poker players; he appears to have some sensitivity, and he takes an interest in her as well. But the evening is not pleasant. Stanley has been losing heavily and cannot bear to do so. He becomes mean and sarcastic, with his temper steadily rising. He ends the evening by striking Stella, who is pregnant. To guarantee Stella's safety, Blanche takes her upstairs to the apartment of the landlord, but Stanley calls his wife downstairs, and they soon make up.
Scene Three underscores the primal nature of Stella and Stanley’s union, and it cements Stanley’s identity as a villain. After Stanley’s drunken radio-hurling episode, Stella yells at him and calls him an “animal thing,” inciting Stanley’s attack. Later that night, Stanley shouts “STELL-LAHHHHH!” into the night like a wounded beast calling for the return of his mate.Stanley’s cruel abuse of his wife convinces the audience that Blanche has her sister’s best interests in mind more than Stanley does. Yet Stella sides with Stanley and his base instincts, infusing the play with an sense of gloom.
Scene 4:The following morning, Blanche scolds Stella for giving in to such a boorish husband and suggests a solution. She will approach Shep Huntleigh about helping them; he is an old admirer and a Texas oil billionaire. Blanche then reveals that her funds have run down to a mere 65 cents, and she is desperate to change her situation. She cannot bear to be under Stanley's roof and criticizes him for his vulgar, animalistic ways. Reminding Stella of their old aristocratic life in Laurel, Blanche encourages Stella to strike out at her aristocratic husband. Stanley, who secretly overhears this conversation, realizes that Blanche is a threat to his marriage. He will never be able to forgive Blanche.It strengthens his dislike for her and is resolved to get rid of her.
The stage directions at the beginning of Scene Four, which liken Stella’s glowing face after a night spent with Stanley to that of an Eastern idol, suggest there is a mystical aspect to Stanley and Stella’s violent attraction. Scene Four reveals Blanche to be entirely calculating when it comes to her relations with men. As she rambles on about money, Shep Huntleigh, and other things, she rejects Stella’s imperative that she “Talk sense!” by insisting, “I’ve got to keep thinking.” This comment suggests that Blanche survives by scheming up ways to get money from men and by living in her make believed world. Blanche’s threat to “laugh in [Stella’s] face” if Stella tries to claim that her attraction to Stanley is “just one of those electric things” shows that Blanche does not truly believe in love.Although she has had many sexual relationships she has clearly never experienced desire.
Scene 5: While Blanche is alone in the apartment one evening, waiting for Mitch to pick her up for a date, a teenage boy comes by to collect money for the newspaper. Blanche doesn’t have any money for him, but she hits on him and gives him a lustful kiss. Soon after the boy departs, Mitch arrives, and they go on their date.
The scene with the newspaper boy prepares us to learn the truth about the circumstances surrounding Blanche’s departure from Mississippi. She is one of the “sexual volunteers” of her clan, the last in a line of people of privaleged class who secretly indulged in forbidden acts because they could not find a stable relationship for their desires.
Scene 6: Blanche tries to grow closer to Mitch. After a date, she reveals her tragic past to him. She married a very young boy named Allan whom she later discovered with another man. When she expressed her disgust to him, he committed suicide. She has been unable to overcome the trauma of his death and her accompanying guilt complex. Mitch, too, has had a tragic past.He loved a dying girl and cannot forget her; and now, still single, he looks after his ailing mother with dedication.
Blanche’s encounter with Mitch exposes her sexual double standard. In secret, she attempts to seduce the young man collecting for the newspaper, an interaction that happens outside the boundaries of acceptable or even reasonable behavior. Because the incident is so far removed from Blanche’s professed moral standards, she feels free to behave as she likes without fear. In contrast, since the Kowalskis and their neighbors know of Blanche’s outings with Mitch, she believes that they must take place within the bounds of what she sees as social standards of behavior.Blanche needs Mitch as a stabilizing force in her life, and if her relationship with him fails, she faces a world that offers few prospects for a financially challenged, unmarried woman who is approaching middle age.
Scene 7: After their first date, Blanche speaks to Stella of her growing hopes for marrying Mitch and how she would now like to settle down and make him happy. Blanche, however, seems to have trouble with faithfulness. She flirts with Stanley and kisses the young newspaper boy who comes to the door. She blames her promiscuity on her feeling lonely and fearful after the death of her husband. To help her forget her trauma and guilt, she had brief affairs with several soldiers at an army camp in Laurel. Her behavior was so sad that she was turned out of the Flamingo Hotel, where she stayed after Belle Reve was lost. She lost her job as a schoolteacher because of a fling with a seventeen-year old student. In fact, she has been permanently exiled from Laurel.
Blanche brought her fate upon herself by leading a indulging casual, careful relationship and almost deranged life.Stanley is shortsighted and unsympathetic, as we can see in his inability to understand why the story of Grey, Blanche’s lost husband, moves Stella so deeply. To Stanley, the fact that Blanche’s husband committed suicide renders her a weak rather than sympathetic person. Stanley’s behavior toward Blanche seems even crueler once he reveals that Blanche is not just erratic and sensitive but also mentally unsound. In addition to proving Blanche’s actual behavior and personality, the stories Stanley tells Stella about Blanche introduce the first outright -reference to Blanche’s mental state. Blanche’s frequent baths function represents her need to cleanse herself of her sordid past and reputation. She emerges from them refreshed and temporarily renewed.
Scene 8: Stanley seeks to find out about Blanche's past and when he learns of her promiscuity, he tells Stella about it on Blanche's birthday. He also informs Stella that he has told Mitch that his innocent goddess was no more than a slut. He takes pride in the fact that he prevented Mitch from making a fool of himself by marrying Blanche. He hands Blanche a bus ticket to Laurel as a birthday present. This gift causes a scene between Stanley and his wife and as a result, she goes into an early labor and is rushed to the hospital.
For the first time Blanche openly express anger in the play.Stella too becomes increasingly assertive as she begs Stanley to explain his contempt for Blanche and to attempt to understand Blanche’s nature. She insists that Stanley not leave to go bowling and demands an explanation from him for his cruelty to Blanche. These actions compose the greatest assertion of independence Stella makes toward Stanley throughout the entire play.But just when Stella seems to be thinking independently from Stanley and reasserting her connection to Blanche in her outrage at Stanley’s cruelty, she goes into labor. The baby reasserts Stella’s connection to Stanley and makes Stella dependent on him for help. He is once again in control as he takes her to the hospital.Stella does not recognize her own similarities with Blanche. Her comments to Stanley as she begs him to understand Blanche’s situation show that she views Blanche with pity.
Scene 9: While Stanley and Stella are at the hospital, Mitch arrives, confronts Blanche about her past, and accuses Blanche of being a liar. She tries to explain her actions, but he is not refined enough to understand. He then demands that she surrender to him as well. When she says she wants to marry him, he tells her, "You're not clean enough to bring in the house with my mother". This remark angers her, and she dismisses him from her life.
His advances demonstrate that the only way he knows how to express his frustration over the relationship ending is through sexuality.Whereas Mitch faces his breakup with Blanche with resignation, Blanche becomes desperate and unhinged. She sees marriage as her only means of escaping her demons, so Mitch’s rejection amounts to a sentence of living in her internal world. Once Mitch crushes the make-believe identity Blanche has constructed for herself, Blanche begins to descend into madness. With no audience for her lies, which Blanche admits are necessary when she tells Mitch that she hates reality and prefers “magic,” Blanche begins performing for herself. Instead of fancy and desire, her new alternate reality reflects regret and death. She is alone, afraid of both the dark and the light; her own mind provides her with a last bastion of escape. Her fantasies control her, not the other way around, but still she shrinks from the horror of reality.
Scene 10: Realizing that she has nothing left in New Orleans, Blanche starts drinking and packing to leave. Stanley returns to say that Stella's baby will come the next morning. When he inquires what she is doing, Blanche makes a last-ditch effort to hang on to her illusions by lying that Shep Huntleigh has invited her to a cruise on the Caribbean. He sees through her story and decides to take advantage of the situation. When Stanley expresses his dishonorable intentions, she tries in vain to defend herself. The scene ends with her brutal rape by Stanley.
Stanley’s final statement to Blanche that they have “had this date from the beginning” suggests that his rape of her has been fated all along. Instead of an act of force, he casts what happens as the endgame of their elemental struggle against each other.The way Stanley terrorizes Blanche by shattering her self-delusions parallels and foreshadows his physical defeat of her. Increasingly, Blanche’s instinct experiences are the delusions and repressed memories that trouble her, so that her physical rape seems an almost inevitable consequence of her psychological pain.
Scene 11: The last scene shows Eunice and Stella helping Blanche to pack her things. The tragedy is that when, for once, Blanche speaks the truth about Stanley's assault, Stella disbelieves her and decides, with her husband, to send Blanche to the state institution. The doctor and the nurse arrive to take Blanche away. At first she resists, but the kind doctor finally persuades Blanche to accompany him. She pathetically admits, "I have always depended on the kindness of strangers." When Mitch learns that Blanche was tricked into going to the institution, he turns on Stanley and accuses him of master minding his and Blanche`s unhappiness. He strikes Stanley and then collapses in sobs. After Blanche has left, Stanley and Stella are together again.
By the end of the scene the marriage proves to be a sort of illusion, based on deception. The two sisters’ roles reverse. Stella admits that she may have entered a world of make-believe when she acknowledges that she cannot believe Blanche’s story about the rape and continue to live with Stanley. Blanche, by retreating into hysteria and madness, and by refusing to acknowledge her sister as she leaves the apartment with the doctor, may be sparing Stella the horror of having to face the truth about her husband. Blanche’s descent into madness shields Stella from the truth. If Blanche were to remain lucid, Stella might have to give Blanche’s claims credibility.
