The tension is finally relieved after Stella returns. For a brief moment the two girls stare at each other, causing the audience to wonder how Stella will react to the unexpected guest, but they then both embrace lovingly. Once they start talking it is quite a tense situation, especially when the audience see Blanche searching around frantically for another drink, purposely hiding the fact she’s had one already so causing dramatic irony as the audience knows that Blanch already knows where the drinks are kept.
Throughout their whole conversation, the girls are uneasy, Blanche’s glass ‘shakes in her hand’, and she talks ‘vaguely’ and ‘abruptly’, and tamps ‘nervously’ on her cigarette. Stella speaks ‘uncomfortably’ and feels ‘embarrassed’ at points, but both girls manage to keep themselves together until Blanche starts slipping, as she lets the cat out of the bag. Blanche then starts to speak in an ‘uneasy rush’, and ‘begins to shake with intensity’, while Stella ‘turns anxious’. Blanche’s long, almost speech like, outburst is probably the most intense part of scene one. Blanche speaks irrationally, playing out the situations she’s been in to Stella using voices and detailed descriptions, ‘..struggle for breath and bleeding..’, ‘..sickness and dying..’ etc. She repeats herself to create a bigger impact, ‘I saw! Saw! Saw!’, and Tennessee Williams probably had her moving about the room with big hand gestures to increase the intensity of the moment.
After Blanche finishes her little scene, Stella ‘springing’ up runs to the bathroom in tears. This is all adds to the tension as the audience watches riveted, they then hear Stanley coming up the stairs, and wonder what he would say to having a stranger in the house, and his wife crying in the bathroom? When he finally comes in ‘throwing’ open the screen door he looks at Blanche in such away she has to draw ‘back from his stare’. The situation is an awkward one as the two make small talk without Stella there to introduce. When Stanley reaches for the whisky bottle, he observes it, he can see Blanche has had some. Stanley doesn’t directly accuse Blanche but hints that he knows, after she lies again about ‘rarely’ touching it.
The two people have an obvious class difference, Blanche teaches English, where as Stanley was ‘never a very good English student’. Stanley sees Blanche as ‘the unrefined type’ where as I’m sure Blanche feels the same about him. However they do already show similarities too, they both reached for the whisky bottle when not comfortable with their new surroundings or company.
The end of the scene is a very tense one, as it ends in a cliff hanger, leaving the audience in wonder and wanting to find out more. Blanche has revealed that she was once married but the boy died, she then collapses as ‘her head falls on her arms’, in a very dramatic ending. This scene is full of very different characters, the very emotional and dramatic Blanche described to be like a ‘moth’, maybe hinting she’s attracted to danger. The beautiful and quiet Stella who doesn’t quite fit in with the surroundings, and Stanley, a good looking, proud man typical of his surroundings. When put together they cause a lot of tension, and interest as they interact with one another, each having very different personalities. They each also have very different backgrounds and past experiences, which is evident when they speak, causing even more contrast between them and therefore more tension within this first scene as they all meet.
