her sister, he calls her “Dame Blanche” to his wife, but eventually he hears Blanche urging Stella to leave both him and the life she has married into. “Don’t hang back with the brutes!” Blanche tells Stella at the end of scene four. Williams delivers this scene to us making powerful use of both dramatic irony and off set sounds. Stanley hides behind a door, and the noises of a locomotive, trumpets and drums add to the sense of unease thus ensuring that the reader understands the strength of the danger that Blanche is in from this moment onwards. Here it is clear to see the beginning of Stanley’s intent to bring Blanche down. He becomes Blanche’s antagonist; it is he alone that eventually brings about her downfall. Stanley discovers that Blanche has, if not lied about her past, then certainly covered up the real reasons for her leaving Laurel. He informs his best friend Mitch, whom Blanche had hoped to marry, of Blanche’s promiscuity in her hometown and the fact that she was dismissed from her job and subsequently run out of town by the local townspeople. In the course of the play he appears obsessed with finding Blanche's weakness; when he discovers that she has committed sexual indiscretions in Laurel and senses her feelings of guilt concerning them, he immediately acts. Blanche’s past is revealed to the reader by her flashbacks, the discoveries that Stanley makes about her, and in her late night conversations with Mitch. It is both colourful and unhappy. She fell deeply in love and married very young to a poet called Allen Grey, whom she then discovered in a homosexual act with friend. Later, after she expressed her disgust at him, a shame filled Allen shot and killed himself. Blanche has had to live with the guilt and loneliness that this caused her, and spent much of her time sleeping with other men for both comfort, and later on after nursing and then burying both her parents and losing Belle Reve, for a roof over her head. Mitch, whom she had seen as her way out of her problem of being homeless and alone, tells her that she is not clean enough to reside in the same house as his dying mother whom he loves and cares for. He ends their relationship at the end of scene nine, which pushes Blanche even further over
the edge. She had already been told to leave Elysian Fields (a place according to mythology that heroes went after death), and was presented with a bus ticket back to Laurel where she is no longer welcome by Stanley during a small celebration for her birthday.
In scene ten of the play, we see the final calamity, consistent with the genre of tragedy. Stanley violently rapes Blanche after he returns from the hospital where Stella is giving birth to their first child. Blanche, alone and drunk, tells Stanley that her old sweetheart Shep Huntleigh has sent her a telegram to come and join him on a cruise. It’s unclear as to whether Blanche actually believes it to be true that she is going on a cruise, as she is already losing her mind, but her apparent mendacities anger Stanley even further, and the scene ends with the rape. Stanley appears to be determined to possess Blanche in a way that he has been unable to throughout the play so far, and by doing this, he is also “cancelling out” her aristocratic upbringing.
Finally, in scene eleven, we see the punishment. When Blanche returns from hospital some days later and Blanche tells Stella what has happened, she chooses to disbelieve Blanche. As Stella says to her neighbour Eunice, “I couldn’t believe her story and go on living with Stanley” They arrange for Blanche to be committed to a mental institution. At the end of this final scene, whilst Stanley and his friends are playing poker, we see Blanche becoming hysterical as a nurse arrives and attempts to take her away. She only relents and becomes passive when the doctor enters the apartment, behaving like a gentleman. She then allows herself to be led away, quite calmly. I believe this symbolises the death of Blanche, the final, overwhelming punishment.
We see both pity and terror in Stella and also in Mitch. They are in an anguished state, with Mitch shouting to Stanley “You! You done this to her!” and Stella calling out her sisters name, sobbing on the steps of the apartment.
Tennessee Williams told Elia Kazan, who directed “A Streetcar Named Desire in 1959: “There are no 'good' or 'bad' people. Some are a little better or a little worse, but all are activated more by misunderstanding than by malice. A blindness to what is going on in each other's hearts. Stanley sees Blanche not
as a desperate, driven creature backed into a last corner to make a last desperate stand - but as a calculating bitch with 'round heels'.... Nobody sees anybody truly but all through the flaws of their own egos. That is the way we all see each other in life.
“I remember you asked me what should an audience feel for Blanche. Certainly pity. It is a tragedy with the classic aim of producing a catharsis of pity and terror, and in order to do that, Blanche must finally have the understanding and compassion of the audience. This without creating a black-dyed villain in Stanley.” This would indicate that Williams fully intended that the character of Blanche Dubois should be seen as a tragic figure; that the play “A Streetcar Named Desire” should be viewed as her tragedy.
References:
Isaac, Dan. (1997) No Past to Think In: Who Wins in A Streetcar Named Desire. Louisiana Literature, 14 (2).
Kazan, E. (1988) A Life, Cambridge, New York, DaCapo Press.