Blanche is seemingly obsessed with death, and although she make speak humorously of the ‘Grim Reaper’ in scene 1, who had put up his tent on our doorstep!’, it is evident that her experiences at Belle Reve have severely disturbed her state of mind.
Later in scene 9, Blanche speaks of the Mexican flower seller of paper flowers for the dead, this brings to Blanche’s mind -
‘a house where dying old women remembered their dead men’.
Also in scene 1, Blanche describes her miserable life at Belle Reve with a physical image, -
‘I took the blows in my face and my body!’.
Her obsession is primarily evident when its clear that Blanche revels in using crude images of blood and death to describe something -
‘Margaret so swollen with disease that she could not be fitted into a coffin! But burned like rubbish! You just came home in time for the funerals, Stella, And funerals are pretty compared to deaths. Funerals are quiet, but death - not always. Sometimes their breathing is hoarse breathing, and sometimes it rattles, their desperate clinging to life’.
Blanche's philosophical remarks about death have emanated from her sad and constant experiences with dying. She carefully avoids seeing herself as anything but young, thus she carries a vain and compulsive concern with her appearance and her age. She compares her name to "an orchard in spring"; but also informs Mitch that her name means "white wood". Figuratively, white wood brings to mind trees covered in snow. This symbol can be read in many ways; however I feel that this symbol suggests Blanche deliberately presenting a deluded and dreamy view of being surrounded within a flourishing of spring season, while in reality she is a widow whose prospects of love and marriage are nearing the autumn and winter phase, where all plant life (or in this case, trees) are shedding away life and subsequently dying slowly away. Trees deliberately shed away their growth, and Blanche does the same, as aforementioned she continues to dig a deeper grave for herself. This ironic symbol also suggests Blanche’s misreading of the meaning of her name, she may have deliberately lie about its meaning, or she may have been so desperate to win Mitch’s affections that she needed to lie to secure and win him over. Consequently this would allow Blanche to fulfil her dreams of marriage, and ultimately feel young again.
Williams also conveys emphasises on light and dark. The light represents truth and reality, which is both figuratively and literally revealed in Scene 9. In this scene the final confrontation between Mitch and Blanche occurs. Mitch complains the room is dark, and Blanche reveals that the dark is comforting to her. When Mitch tears the paper from the Chinese lantern, he allows it to produce a blinding light. The light shows Mitch Blanche’s fading beauty, and figuratively exposes her pretence of righteousness and innocence. Blanche finds the dark comforting because she is not able to see the world in illumination, she casts a dark shadow over the ugliness and cruelty of the real world and is able to hide from it. It metaphorically conceals the ugliness of the real world around her. With this in mind Blanche can continue living her life with pretend ignorance, and consequently this enables her to preserve her illusions of the real world. When Mitch removes the paper from the lantern bulb, he can reveal that she is no longer young and believably innocent. However, when the notion that Blanche’s dreadful past is centrally exposed within her sad world, she cannot no longer maintain her illusions, and subsequently she is unable to maintain her sanity. The light and dark message is also a sign of the questionable bond between Blanche and Mitch. Blanche is aware of her need to camouflage reality, in Scene 5, she admits to Stella that she has had to put on a seductive pretence -
‘Put a - Paper Lantern over the light’
Blanche continually uses metaphors throughout such scenes; primarily to disguise the truth of her deceits and pretences. This is addressed by Williams through the interaction between them, Mitch speaks ungrammatically short and contemptuous lines, while Blanche evidently speaks with an enormous (and strangely overused) vocabulary which is artificially calculated and constructed by her in order for her achieve her aims. This is especially true in this scene, since Blanche resorts once more to the educated speech of a school teacher in order to take control of an aggressive situation. The question on which character represents dark and who represents light is debatable, yet it seems that both light and dark contain both a softness and a harshness which is decided upon by the individual. However, with this mind, it is certain that the relationship between them was destined to fail someday.
I feel the final scene which presents Blanche’s dramatic departure is intriguing. When she dreams a dramatic death of dying by an unwashed grape, she begins a bizarre and yet amazing reverie of her remaining life at sea, a life of seclusion from the rest of the world and its ugliness. She describes her death with a continual use of vibrant colours to depict her death, and the doctor is perhaps seen as a ship doctor who will be romantically by her side -
’and into an ocean as blue as my first lover’s eyes!’
However it is unclear whether this dream is a figment of a crazed mind, or a dream that Blanche’s uses as her way of handling and contemplating with the situation of being taken away to a mental hospital.
Blanche has been betrayed by her sister who chose to stay with a man who raped her, and the recent exposition of her past being laid ‘bear’ for all the world to see has severely wounded her sanity. Williams inclusion of the chime of the cathedral bells carries its representations. Perhaps the chime of the bells symbolises her deluded dream of being buried at sea, and being purified and forgiven for her past sins, this is accentuated by her penchant for taking continual baths.
There Is also an image of the, -
’The blue of the robe in the old Madonna pictures’
This is an image of the Virgin Mary, who symbolises virginity, and of unquestionable purity.
I feel that Blanche is consciously continuing to live in a dream world, she understands that she’s on a journey to a mental hospital, she will be incarcerated and released into the harsh ugliness of life in an institution. She handles this truth by backfiring, she replaces such an image by believing that she’s on a journey to a peaceful and harmonic death; and therefore to a pure death, rather than the living the death she about to endure.
Blanche and Stanley can be viewed as two distinctive characters who both represent different worlds. Themes like these have been used on a number of occasions by writers. Tennessee Williams employs this meaning to convey the new America, which consists of the new age of urban immigrants; who are the flamboyantly free and sexually alive; and against the old orders of the agricultural way of living which originated from the slavery system. Stanley obviously represents this self-governing culture in the play, while Blanche represents the older America which had died away at this time.
The audience understands that these images are used deliberately and conspicuously by a Tennessee Williams. This allows the audience to identify the symbols and provide their own personal interpretations of their meanings. There are also meaning which are much more hard pressed to identify, and some which may have no even thought of by Williams. A notable image which I found was the image of Blanche and her drinking, which represents Blanche drinking her way to disaster, a her for her to continually escape from the real world. This brings to mind a thought of weakness, in correspondence to the aforementioned image of a waning moth. Blanche lives in an illusion, and fantasy is her final and primary means of defending her shattered sanity. I don’t believe that her deceits carry spitefulness, they however come from her weakness and inability to confront the difference between simultaneous reality and fantasy. She views the world in accordance to her own idea of the world, and her fantasy life protects her from the tragedies she has had to endure. This is eventually shattered by Stanley, while Stella leaves the mental hospital is to pick up the rest of the pieces. The ideal of living an illusion is not isolated to Blanche either, Stanley and Stella will also resort to living an illusion, since Stella will force herself to believe that Blanche's accusations against Stanley were utterly false.
