With an examination of this scene as you starting point, explore the ways in which Williams presents and uses the relationship of Blanche and Mitch in the play as a whole.

          “Voulez-vous coucher avec moi ce soir?” By offering to sleep with Mitch in French, a language that means nothing to him and rolling her eyes self-mockingly when she speaks of her old fashioned ideals in the behaviour of women. Here she risks getting found out by Mitch. The fact she hides her lust and question to Mitch, foreshadows the tragedies that follow that night. Williams presents Blanche as naïve yet faintly hints through foreshadowing and through Blanche herself that behind her innocent and vulnerable exterior this lusty and dubious character is hidden. From her actions in this scene the readers of the play can predict that Blanche is not what she first seemed and expectancy is created to find out more about this suspicious character.

  Rest of smit (bkwards)

Imaging herself to be ‘in a little artists’ café on the Left Bank in Paris’ and saying that she, who couldn’t be more conformist, is to be ‘very Bohemian’ reaffirms her inability to interact and shows her hidden in her imaginary world. This links back to the idea that this relationship is being presented as nothing more than this coming together of two wretched lives. As well as presenting this relationship as on dependant on falsification for it to be even marginally exciting, it also presents it as being one to be an ultimate failure because of Blanche’s dependence on unreality. This ‘play acting’ simply makes the relationship seem even more pathetic when we see the two address serious topics of conversation. In the ninth scene we see equally false behavior from Blanche, she hides the signs of her drinking, brings up irrelevant topics of conversation (‘have you ever had anything caught in your head’). The falsity on which this relationship is built becomes.

By the ninth scene Williams’ presentation of this relationship is based on revelations of past falsification and this is not only on Blanche’s part. As well as having a new light shone on Blanche, the innocence that we associated with harmless Mitch. Williams gives the character the words ‘You’re not clean enough to bring in the house with my mother’ but then attempts to rape the woman suggesting that Mitch sees women as either virgins or whores. But what is vital here is that Mitch suddenly seems to find her sexually desirable because he knows her to be ‘unclean’. This can be expanded to a wider theme that Williams may be examining with this relationship. The constraints of the 1940s meant that most people felt obliged to behave in an innocent and inexperienced way, but this hid raw animal instinct for sexual desire (we see this openly expressed through the character of Stanley Kowalski, the somewhat modern man).

        We certainly see elements of the way that Williams presents this relationship in scene six. But rather than being a scene which is indicative and representative of all of Tennessee William’s presentations of the relationship between Blanche Dubois and Mitch, scene six is a transitional scene in which we see suggestions of what is to come while retaining the fragile and innocent appearances of the initial meeting of the two.