I: Introduction

A Streetcar Named Desire is a 1947 play by Tennessee Williams, premiered on December 3rd of that year. It’s considered one of the greatest plays of the 20th century, and is Williams’s most popular, being among his most performed and adapted in many forms, including notably the 1951 film.

The original cast of ASND was made up of almost all the same actors as in the film version, except for Blanche DuBois having been playing by Jessica Tandy onstage, and by Vivien Leigh in the film.

Here’s a link to the entire play.

II: Famous Actors for the Roles

Apart from Tandy and Leigh, other notable actresses who have played Blanche are Tallulah Bankhead (for whom Williams actually wrote the character, though she hadn’t played the role until 1956, because she was felt to be too strong for it), Ann-Margret, Cate Blanchett, Blythe Danner, Uta Hagen, and Rachel Weisz. Every actress Williams saw performing the role he loved, feeling that each of them brought something different to Blanche.

Apart from the most famous portrayal by Marlon Brando, Stanley Kowalski has been played notably by Anthony Quinn, Treat Williams, Alec Baldwin, Rip Torn, Aidan Quinn, and Christopher Walken.

Apart from Kim Walker, Stella–Blanche’s younger sister and Stanley’s wife–has been played by Beverly D’Angelo and Diane Lane.

Karl Malden played Harold “Mitch” Mitchell in the original stage production and in the 1951 film.

III: Themes

A central theme of ASND is narcissism, with the whole spectrum of pride/vanity to humility/shame expressed at many different points at the extremes and in between them. Blanche is vain, insufferably so to Stanley, who has a fierce pride of his own. Stella is much more submissive, forgiving of her husband’s brutality, giving in to his demand to put Blanche in a mental institution, and believing his denials of a rape of her sister that he’s obviously guilty of. Mitch is most gentlemanly to ladies, but when he learns of Blanche’s waywardness, he loses his sensitivity almost immediately.

Blanche’s narcissism is of the covert variety, expressed in a passive-aggressive form, her often seeming to play the victim. Her narcissism is a defence against psychological fragmentation, a defence that apish Stanley will break through, causing her to have a nervous breakdown at the play’s end. Her very name, meaning ‘white,’ suggests her narcissistic False Self of sweetness, purity, and ladylike sense of culture, but it also hides her True Self of promiscuity, snobbishness, and ethnic bigotry (i.e., against the Polish).

Stanley is her diametrical opposite, making hardly the slightest attempt to hide his harshness (or so it would seem). His wish to break through all of Blanche’s masks and disguises and reveal the truth in no way redeems him of his cruelty. He is perceived as an ape, and rightly so, for he rids us of all doubt by the end of the play.

So along with the spectrum between narcissism/pride/vanity and humility/shame, there’s also a spectrum between social artifice/fakery and brutal honesty in ASND. In the case of this latter spectrum, it should be obvious which character personifies social artifice, and which brutal honesty. A character like Mitch falls somewhere in between the extremes, as we’ll see later on.

IV: Scene One

A verse by Hart Crane (the fifth from “The Broken Tower”), which is put before the beginning of Williams’s play, seems to express Blanche’s situation when she arrives in New Orleans. She’s looking for a building on a street called “Elysian Fields,” whose heavenly associations are ironic given what a hell-hole she finds her new home to be.

She is a Southern belle used to a life of dainty clothes, perfume, comfort, and culture in Belle Reve (“sweet dream,” loosely translated), the old home she’s lost to creditors, forcing her to live with Stella and Stanley, or else face homelessness. Living in such a shockingly poor home will be a crushing humiliation for Blanche.

To get to Elysian Fields, she’s taken a streetcar named Desire, then transferred to one called “Cemeteries” (Williams, page 3). The streetcar named Desire was inspired by an actual streetcar with the same name, which ran a half-block away from Williams’s apartment on Toulouse Street in the New Orleans’s French Quarter, where he wrote the play.

The names of the streetcars, as well as the name of Stella’s and Stanley’s home, have been chosen as more than just names of places in the real world, though. Desire leads to cemeteries…rather like, the wages of sin is death…and death leads to an afterlife that may seem like heaven, but is actually hell. It should be easy for anyone who has read or watched a performance of ASND to see how these names are points on the trajectory of Blanche’s life, just as the verse from Crane’s poem reflects her life.

She has led a life of desire–from her marriage to a husband who, it turns out, had homosexual feelings he acted on, then killed himself after knowing her shocked reaction to this acting-on them (recall that Williams himself was gay, and therefore his sexuality rubbed off in some of his plays), to her own promiscuity, which included a sexual relationship with one of her teen students. This inappropriate relationship led to the bad karma of her being fired as a high school teacher. We see how desire has led to the cemeteries of her husband and her job.

And now she has to live in the hellish ‘heaven’ of her sister’s shabby home, to be shared with a man whose bestial nature will be soon apparent to her.

When Blanche sees her sister for the first time in a long time, she addresses her as “Stella for Star!” (page 6). Since this is the literal meaning of her younger sister’s name, Blanche’s imagined poetic pointing-out of that meaning demonstrates her literary pretensions early on in the play.

Though she affects refinement, her own vulgarity and ignorance also come out early in the play as she and Stella discuss Stanley, whom Blanche not only refers to as one of those “Polacks,” but also imagines as being “something like Irish,” but “not so–highbrow?” (page 9) His friends are “a mixed lot,” according to Stella, and are therefore “heterogeneous–types” to Blanche, which suggests a quite racial categorizing of them; after all, there’s Pablo (Nick Dennis in the original production and the 1951 film).

After Blanche has sorrowfully told Stella about the loss of Belle Reve, being so ashamed of its loss that she imagines her sister’s questioning about it to be a judgement on her for losing it (pages 11 and 12), she meets Stanley. It’s so fitting that Brando exemplified Stanislavski‘s Method Acting in the role of Stanley, his name almost sounding like a pun on Stanislavski, since there’s no affectation whatsoever to be seen in Kowalsky; while Blanche’s character seems to require the technique of the classical acting style, with its “saw[ing of] the air too much with [one’s] hand,” and its “tear[ing of] a passion to tatters.”

A cat screeches near the window, startling sensitive Blanche. In the film, Brando’s Stanley imitates the cat’s screeching, a kind of foreshadowing of how upsetting he’ll soon be to her. In fact, he is upsetting to her already by the end of this first scene, when he brings up her marriage (page 15). Bringing this up triggers painful memories for her that will be brought up in full later.

When I referred to Blanche as narcissistic and fake, neither of these faults necessitate our lack of empathy for her. She’s suffered terribly, and she’s about to suffer even worse by the end of the play, thanks to Stanley’s merciless cruelty. Her narcissism and maintaining of illusions are the only things that are keeping her from falling apart completely.

V: Scene Two

When Stanley learns from Stella of Blanche’s loss of Belle Reve, he starts worrying that his wife has been cheated of the family property, for the “Napoleonic Code” (which, contrary to what Williams believed, did not exist in Louisiana at the time) states that what belongs to the wife belongs to the husband and vice versa (though Stanley doesn’t seem too concerned with the vice versa). If Blanche has lost the family property, then so has Stella…and so has Stanley.

The point is that Stanley is a very domineering husband, and he believes he has the right to extend the patriarchal dominance of his home onto Stella’s sister. He doesn’t even like his wife’s leaving him “a cold plate on ice” for dinner while she and Blanche go out to eat, then to a show, so he and his friends can play poker in his home without any women disturbing them (page 16).

His utter lack of respect for a woman’s rights is on full display when he starts pulling out Blanche’s dresses from her wardrobe trunk in search of any documents to tell him what happened to Belle Reve. He imagines Blanche’s fancy-looking clothes are all expensive, too much so for a teacher’s salary, so he says he’ll have an acquaintance in a jewelry store do an appraisal of her “diamonds,” “pearls and gold bracelets” (pages 18-19). Stella insists that the “diamonds” are just rhinestones. Stanley still thinks he has the right to Stella’s ‘wealth.’

Stanley’s borderline, if not outright, misogyny is to the point of bluntly telling Blanche that he has no interest in complimenting women on their looks, since in his opinion, they either already know they’re beautiful and therefore don’t need to be complimented, or they’re so vain that they “give themselves credit for more than what they’ve got.” (page 21) Blanche, in her thirties and with fading beauty, has an already fragile self-concept and therefore doesn’t need Stanley’s kind of bluntness.

He doesn’t take it as well as he dishes it out, though. When she responds to his bluntness by calling him “a little bit on the primitive side,” and says she could tell no more about him than that he’s a man her sister married, he throws a brief tantrum (pages 21-22). In his brutal honesty, he should not be confused with men like Alceste the misanthrope, who sincerely hated social hypocrisy in spite of his continuing attraction to the flirtatious coquette Célimène, who had eyes for him as well as for other men. Stanley, on the other hand, is simply an ape.

His brutish demanding that Blanche show him legal papers connected with the DuBois plantation leads to him grabbing love letters from her husband. Stanley’s insensitivity to her husband’s letters is a touch that insults them, meaning she’ll need to burn them (page 23). He has again triggered painful memories about a husband with the opposite personality of Stanley’s, a sensitive poet, not a growling gorilla.

Her saying she’d not have him touch her letters “because of their–intimate nature…” (page 23) is a foreshadowing of the horrible thing that Stanley will do to her at the play’s–pardon the expression–climax. She surrenders to his looking through her legal papers, just as she’ll surrender to him in a more physical way later.

It’s interesting how his use of legality to persecute her parallels his use of physicality to persecute her. Feminists would have a field day analyzing these parallels, as I’m sure they already have. In this connection, I also find it interesting how the Napoleonic Code didn’t exist in Louisiana at the time of the story: Stanley’s imagined authority over Stella and Blanche is as fake as Blanche’s pretensions to culture and high breeding. As I said above, he has no business pretending to be any more honest than she does.

VI: Scene Three

Stanley, Mitch, Pablo, and Steve (Rudy Bond in the original production and the 1951 film) are playing poker while Stella and Blanche are out. Poker night is an all-boys club in which women are persona non grata, of course. It’s bad enough when people in high positions of political, economic, and religious power and authority use sex roles and the patriarchal family to divide the sexes and keep women down; when working-class men reinforce these divisions and discriminatory attitudes, it makes proletarian solidarity all the more difficult to cultivate.

Another example of this lack of solidarity, but from a racial angle, is Pablo suggesting going to get some chop suey from the “Chinaman’s” (page 27), this being a term which, by the time of the writing of the play, must have already begun to acquire derogatory overtones in the US. Pablo, as an Hispanic and therefore surely someone familiar with being on the receiving end of ethnic slurs (Stanley will have called him a “greaseball” by the end of the play, and I suspect it won’t be the first time), should have at least some sensitivity to how inappropriate “Chinaman” sounds, as should Stanley, as a Polish-American who is infuriated with Blanche saying “Polack.”

Of the poker players, Mitch is the only unmarried one (page 28), and he has a sick mother at home, so he worries about her and must leave the poker game. His duty to her gives off the impression that he’s a ‘mama’s boy,’ and that he’s ‘sensitive.’ Blanche will soon pick up on his “superior” manner (page 30), and see in him the hope of a husband. Stanley shows his contempt for Mitch’s devotion to his mother by saying the guys will “fix [him] a sugar-tit.” (page 28)

Mitch is pleased to meet Blanche when she and Stella have returned and he has stepped away from the poker game for the moment, so he is playing the role of the gentleman while the other boys continue with their all-boys-club card game. Stanley, predictably, feels the most invaded by the feminine presence.

He assures Blanche that none of the men are interested in standing up when she enters the room. He’d have her and Stella go up to Steve’s place and sit with Eunice, Steve’s wife (Peg Hillias in the original stage production and the 1951 film), whom he treats with a shabbiness comparable to how Stanley treats Stella and Blanche. Though it’s nearly two-thirty in the morning, Stanley sees the poker game as not finishing any time soon, and he spanks Stella on the thigh…or is it the ass?…to discourage her and Blanche from staying; this only angers her.

Gentlemanly Mitch, however, will repeatedly insist, “Poker shouldn’t be played in a house with women” (pages 36 and 37). Stanley is annoyed that Mitch, more interested in Blanche than the game, won’t come back to it. He’s particularly angry when Blanche turns on the radio (page 35). He rushes over and smashes it.

Stella, furious, calls Stanley an animal and tells his friends to go home immediately. He goes wild at her ending his sacred card game and goes after her. His friends try to calm him down, but it’s no good.

Both husband and wife go offstage, and we know that he hits her (page 35). Both she and Blanche scream. Stella is taken upstairs to Steve’s and Eunice’s place while Stanley’s friends try again to calm him down by pouring shower water on him, but he just gets angrier, curses at them, and hits them. They all leave with their poker winnings (page 37).

With Stella gone, Stanley finally realizes he’s screwed up. Now we have the famous moment when he screams out “Stella!” repeatedly. Without her, he’s no longer the dominant male, but he’s been reduced to a weepy little boy.

Perhaps his weepiness in part has triggered her maternal instinct, but in any case, she goes back to him and forgives him, a shocking thing for Blanche, Eunice, and any reasonable person to see. Stella is letting him manipulate her with that helpless little boy routine, a classic page out of the narcissist’s playbook.

Eunice would get the law on him for hitting his wife and making such noise so late at night. Just as the men demonstrated by trying to calm him down, there is no social acceptance of violence against women, though that doesn’t mean men never get away with it.

Blanche comes out, horrified that her sister, with child, went back to the man who hit her. Mitch is there to talk with Blanche, since he’s still interested in pursuing her. What should be a bad omen for her is how, in spite of how Mitch is still acting the gentleman, he trivializes this moment of domestic violence.

VII: Scene Four

The next morning, Blanche wants to talk Stella out of remaining in her relationship with Stanley after having seen how bestial he is capable of being. As with Mitch, Stella trivializes what happened the night before, which of course is all the more disturbing.

Stella thinks that Stanley’s having felt ashamed of himself for his barbaric behaviour is enough to forgive him, when she knows full well that he’ll do such things again, and soon.

Stella was as much of a Southern belle as Blanche, but the former being taken off the pedestal didn’t upset her the way the latter was forcibly removed from it. Blanche cannot conceive how Stella is willing to tolerate living with such a man as Stanley.

Part of the difference in the two women’s attitudes is how Blanche, unlike Stella, still believes in romantic notions of gallantry, illusions to protect her–it would seem–from the brutality of reality. When Stella speaks of how Stanley, on their wedding night, went around their home with one of her slippers smashing all the light-bulbs with it, instead of being terrified, as Blanche would have been, Stella admits to having been thrilled by his wildness (pages 41-42).

Blanche feels there’s a desperate need to get herself and Stella away from Stanley. She remembers a wealthy oilman named Shep Huntleigh, who she imagines could use his money to get her and Stella away from that brute of a husband. She imagines she’ll get Western Union through the telephone operator to contact Shep and tell him that she and Stella are in a desperate situation and need his help (pages 43-44). This urgent attempt to get Western Union and contact Shep will be repeated in Scene Ten (page 95), at the climax of the play, when Blanche is sure that Stanley, alone with her at home while Stella is in the hospital to have her baby, won’t have anyone there to hold his leash.

This Shep Huntleigh represents, in another way, the diametrical opposite of Stanley. He’s not only wealthy, but he’s also a gentleman, Blanche’s gallant, romantic ideal. According to Heinz Kohut‘s conception of the bipolar self, the two poles that give a person a stable sense of self are ones based on someone to idealize (in childhood, the idealized parental imago) and someone to mirror the grandiose self. When both of these needs are met, one can live with a healthy, restrained, and moderate sense of narcissism. If one of the poles fails, or is thwarted, the other can compensate. If both fail, one is at best in an extremely fragile position (as Blanche is, already at the beginning of the play), and at worst, one experiences psychological fragmentation and a psychotic break with reality (as happens to Blanche at the end of the play).

Blanche is hoping that a courtship with Mitch will lead not only to a husband who can ‘make an honest woman of her,’ so she can put her promiscuous past and reputation behind her, but also to a satisfying of her narcissistic need for someone to mirror back her grandiose self to her. His gentlemanly routine of putting her up on a pedestal will satisfy that need.

When Mitch learns, through Stanley’s merciless probing into her past, of her promiscuity when she lived in Laurel (living in The Flamingo, a hotel known for prostitution, her sexual relationship with one of her underage students), and he refuses to marry her, she uses her idealization of Shep Huntleigh, a kind of Oedipal transference of the idealized parental imago, to keep her fragile self hanging on. Of course, Stanley tears that compensatory fantasy apart, and she goes mad in the end.

The psychiatrist (played by Richard Garrick in the original stage production and the 1951 movie)–who, with the matron (Ann Dere), comes to take Blanche to the mental hospital at the end of the play–temporarily destroys her ever-so-faint hopes to be taken away by Shep; but he wisely humours her, putting on the gentlemanly act to make her cooperate, and revives for the moment her hope to have the idealizing pole satisfied.

Anyway, Blanche continues trying to convince her sister that Stanley is not worth keeping. When Stella speaks of the “things that happen between a man and a woman in the dark,” making such things as Stanley hitting her “seem–unimportant” (page 46), we’re reminded of how “thrilled” she was at his smashing of the light-bulbs. A nasty man is often exciting to a woman, where a nice guy finishes last. As the Chinese say, “男人不壞，女人不愛” (“If men aren’t bad, women won’t love them.”) Bad boys are sexy, and in this observation come so many of women’s problems with men. Recall, in this connection, how good-looking young Brando was in the 1951 film, with his muscle tone and his shirt off. I’ll bet the girls were swooning with ecstasy at the sight of him on the screen.

Blanche responds to what Stella says by pointing out what I said above about the title of the play–that it’s not just inspired by the name of a streetcar near where Williams was writing his play. Stella is talking about her “brutal desire,” a streetcar that brought Blanche to this Godforsaken home of Stella’s and Stanley’s. A streetcar named Desire, then one named Cemeteries…Blanche imagines that Stella’s desire will lead to her death at Stanley’s hands.

As Blanche goes on condemning him as “common,” he’s approaching home and overhearing her words. He is fuming inside as she speaks of how his wife should be with a better man than “an animal,” someone “subhuman” and “bestial” (page 47).

Since Blanche has been bad-mouthing him so much to his wife, he’ll get his revenge on her by learning the gossip about how “common” she is, making all of her pretensions to art and culture seem utterly hypocritical.

VIII: Scene Five

Stella and Blanche can hear Steve and Eunice fighting upstairs, the latter accusing the former of fooling around with some “blonde,” which Steve denies (page 49). The fight escalates, she throws something at him, then he hits her, and she wants to get the police (page 50). She runs off, and he goes after her. We sense that domestic violence in the ‘heavenly’ Elysian Fields is not limited to Stella and Stanley.

Stanley comes by, and Blanche–in her usual ‘ladylike’ voice–taunts him by saying he must be an Aries, since he’s so “forceful and dynamic,” and he loves “to bang things around” (page 51). Naturally, he’s annoyed at these words. Stella tells her that Stanley was born just after Christmas, making him a Capricorn. Blanche comments, “the Goat!”, annoying him all the more.

When she mentions that her birthday is the following month, in mid-September, making her a Virgo, which is the Virgin, Stanley–already knowing a few things about her scandalous reputation in Laurel–has an opportunity to insult her back. He mentions a man named Shaw, a name common enough that she can pretend this is not someone she knows in particular, a man she apparently met in Laurel, at a hotel named the Flamingo, the place where prostitution goes on (as I mentioned above), so naturally, Blanche denies any association with it.

When Stanley leaves, though, Blanche asks Stella, in a state of great anxiety, if she’s heard any dirty gossip about her (page 52). Stella denies having heard anything nasty about Blanche. Around this time, Steve and Eunice have returned in each others’ arms, fully reconciled; their making-up parallels the making-up of Stanley and Stella that happened so soon before.

Blanche explains to Stella the reason for her bad reputation in Laurel. The loss of Belle Reve, on top of her husband’s suicide and the scandal surrounding her sexual relationship with her teen student, put her into a situation so desperate that she had “to be seductive,” to “put on soft colours” (page 53). She’s needed to do this with men “in order to pay for–one night’s shelter!”

She’s found that “men don’t…even admit your existence unless they are making love to you. And you’ve got to have your existence admitted by someone, if you’re going to have someone’s protection.” So she’s got to “put a–paper lantern over the light”, something she habitually does so people won’t see her aging and fading beauty, something she’s terrified of, just as she’s terrified of the light revealing the truth of her scandalous behaviour, something she’s feen forced into because of her losses…but the cruel, judgemental world will never be understanding to her about that.

And Stanley is the epitome of that cruel and judgemental world, not that he’s any better, of course.

She senses that Stanley wants to throw her out of his and Stella’s home, so she doesn’t want to be a burden to her sister, something she promises she won’t be in the most hysterical of words. Stella is shocked by how emotional Blanche is getting. Blanche is placing all of her hopes on Mitch, with whom she is having a date at seven that very night (page 54).

In anticipation of Stella learning, through Stanley, about Blanche’s reputation in Laurel as a ‘woman of loose morals,’ she frantically insists that on dates with Mitch, he’s gotten only “a good night kiss” from her (page 55). She wants his respect, yet she’s terrified of losing him, hence she’s so sensitive about her age. She wants him to think of her as “prim and proper.”

Of course, Mitch wants her to think of him as a gentleman. He has his social mask, and she has hers, symbolized by that paper lantern over the light, to hide the aging on her face.

Stanley returns, and he leaves with Stella, with Steve and Eunice accompanying them. Blanche is alone in the apartment.

Just before Mitch is to show up for his date with her that night, Blanche sees a handsome young man (played by Wright King in the 1951 film), who appears at the door. He says he’s “collecting for the Evening Star,” a newspaper. She jokes about him as a star taking up collections because she finds him so attractive, but he is so innocent and sweet (just the way she likes her boys), he doesn’t understand her joke.

I suspect that she, in her fragile, unstable mental state, is imagining this boy’s presence. He can easily be seen as reminding her of not only the boy she had the affair with, but also her husband back when she first knew him, when the couple were both very young. Her student/lover presumably reminded her of her husband, too.

The boy collecting money is so perfect to her. He’s polite, he calls her “ma’am,” and he’d never treat her like a whore. He’s shying away as she makes her advances to him.

Finally, she gives him a kiss on the mouth (page 57), but not wanting to go any further, as with Mitch, she sends the boy off. And fittingly, just after he disappears, Mitch arrives for their date.

IX: Scene Six

At 2:00 a.m. of the same night of their date, Mitch notes that Blanche is getting tired. After he drops her off at home, it seems that he’ll take “that streetcar named Desire” back home, for we can see just how much they desire each other. Still, he’s sad because he thinks he hasn’t entertained her much tonight.

Though she still wants him to think of her as a lady who isn’t cheap, she still likes tempting him. She’d have him come into Stella’s and Stanley’s place, since the husband and wife aren’t back home yet. She also wants to give Mitch a drink, and she even asks him, “Voulez-vous couchez avec moi ce soir?” She also says in French that it’s a shame he doesn’t understand the question, but of course she’s happy he doesn’t (page 61). They actually go into the bedroom, her carrying the drinks.

A little later, she has him pick her up to see how light she is. Still, she’d have him let her go and be a gentleman while her sister and Stanley are still away (page 63). She fears Stanley exposing her bad reputation in Laurel, but he can’t resist continuing her coquettishness.

Almost immediately after Mitch’s picking her up and putting her back down, she brings up how much she doesn’t like Stanley, with her worries that he may have told Mitch some bad things about her (page 64). It’s interesting to see this juxtaposition of her teasing of Mitch with her fears of him learning of her ‘loose’ ways in Laurel. It’s as if her unconscious death drive, her Jungian Shadow, is deliberately sabotaging her date.

She gets nervous when Mitch asks her age (page 65). He asks because of his mother, who has wanted to know more about her. After all, his mother will probably die in a few months, and she wants to make sure her son is settled (page 66).

Next, the conversation turns toward Blanche’s old husband, a sad topic for her. The two married when very young. He was “different.” He had “a nervousness, a softness and tenderness which wasn’t like a man’s,” but not at all “effeminate-looking” (page 66). He needed her help.

Eventually, she found him with another man.

They pretended that nothing had happened, then the three of them went to Moon Lake Casino to be drunk and dance, to the music of the Varsouviana in particular. Then her husband broke away from her, ran outside, put a revolver in his mouth, and shot himself.

He ran out and killed himself because, on the dance floor, she’d told him he disgusted her (page 67). So she blames herself for his suicide.

Now, in the 1951 film version, all references to homosexuality in the play–however indirect–were censored for obvious reasons. Instead, the husband is portrayed as simply weak, overly sensitive, weepy, and a poet–all the gay stereotypes without the gay. A similar excising of homosexuality in a Tennessee Williams play was done in the 1958 film adaptation of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.

Empathizing with Blanche, and seeming to be similarly sensitive, Mitch reaches out to her after hearing her tragic story. She needs someone, as he needs someone. He’s seriously considering marrying her.

Except…

X: Scene Seven

In mid-September, it’s Blanche’s birthday, and Stanley has plans of ruining it for her (page 69). He’s found the dirt on her that he needs to prove that she has no business calling him ‘common.’

To add to his irritation, she is “soaking in a hot tub” on a day when the temperature is 100. He can’t stand how Stella serves cokes to “Her Majesty in the tub.” He’s convinced, “from the most reliable sources–which [he has] checked on”, that Blanche is a liar about her past (page 70).

Her singing in the bathtub, like a “canary bird,” is annoying him all the more. He can’t stand her pretense of being some kind of “lily,” all sweet and delicate, when he’s discovered that she, in his judgement, is a common whore.

The sad thing about the animosity between both of them is how it’s based on prejudicial notions of class, ethnicity, and sex. His faults, in her estimation, are because he’s a low-class “Polack.” Her faults, in his estimation, are because she’s a ‘slut.’

His real faults don’t come from his being working-class or Polish. Anyone, of any ethnicity or any social class, can be irascible, crass, rude, or violent, as Stanley is. Her real faults don’t stem from her private sexual life. Any woman, with or without literary and cultural pretensions, can fall the way Blanche has fallen, given the combination of misfortunes she’s had to suffer.

Her promiscuity should be perfectly forgivable if she can find a husband and commit to him. Her questionable relationship with her seventeen-year-old student can easily be forgotten given the same positive change in her fortunes.

What’s more, what he does to her towards the end of the play renders her sins insignificant in comparison to his. This play demonstrates the cruelty of the old double standard between the sexes more vividly than perhaps any story out there. The double standard can be expressed in the metaphorical use of words used in dog-breeding: when a man screws around, he’s a stud; when a woman does it, she’s a bitch.

This cruel double standard can help us to understand why Blanche does the prim and proper routine, why she makes mental escapes into a world of romance, poetry, and gallant gentlemen, and why she sings like a canary bird in the bathtub. It’s all a desperate attempt on her part to survive and stay sane.

Of course, if we had a society that had institutions to care for unfortunates like Blanche, she would never need to sell herself to survive. And if that society gave workers like Stanley the full fruits of their labour, and if that labour was meaningful instead of alienating, he probably wouldn’t be half the ape that he acts like.

But I digress. Back to the story.

Now, while Stanley is telling Stella about Blanche’s lies about only ever being kissed by men, as she’s told Mitch (page 70), and about quitting teaching merely because of her nerves, rather than being fired for sexual misconduct with a minor, Blanche is in the tub singing about such phony things as paper moons, cardboard seas, the Barnum and Bailey circus, honky-tonk parades, and melodies from penny arcades–things that wouldn’t be make-believe if she had a man who believed in her (pages 70-71). Just as I said above: she wouldn’t need to indulge in all the fakery if she had a man to love her…as she once had.

We can’t expect any compassion from merciless Stanley, though, of course. He’s found fault in her, and he has all the reasons he needs to hate her.

Stella tries to reason with Stanley, to get him to understand the misfortunes her sister has gone through to bring her to her current situation. She brings up Blanche’s “degenerate” husband (page 73). Stanley is deaf to all of this: he’d rather hate Blanche than pity her.

In fact, Stanley has told Mitch all about Blanche’s scandalous past, and though he’s infuriated with Stanley for blackening her reputation, he’s checked the sources of Stanley’s stories and has confirmed them. He’s been invited to Blanche’s birthday party, but he won’t show up (page 74).

Stanley has given her some extraordinary birthday gifts. He’s been most thoughtful to her.

Finally, he gets so furious with her holding up the bathroom and singing endlessly that he shouts at her to get out (page 75). She tries her best to hold herself together against his savagery. Still, she worries about what he’s told Stella about her.

XI: Scene Eight

Forty-five minutes later, the three of them are sitting at a dismal birthday dinner (page 76). Blanche is wearing an artificial smile, trying to hide her disappointment at Mitch’s absence.

She asks Stanley to tell them a joke, something to cheer them up without it being vulgar or indecent. In his disgust with her affectations about being the ‘high-class’ lady from Belle Reve, rather than the whore from the Flamingo, he says he knows no jokes “refined enough for [her] taste.” Therefore, Blanche will tell one…a joke that ends with “God damn…!” She’s as capable of rough language as he is (page 77).

When Stella gripes at him for his bad table manners and tells him to help her clear the table, he has another of his temper tantrums, throwing a plate to the floor. He refuses to let himself come anywhere near being dominated by her or Blanche.

He’s infuriated at being called a “Polack” by Blanche, and judged as “vulgar–greasy,” but he sees no injustice in his own dominance as a man over her and his wife. He twists the socialist meaning of Huey Long‘s “Every man a king” slogan, meant to indicate that all people should have access to the plenty that a king enjoys, and instead he uses it to mean that men should be the kings of their women. In this, we can see what I was saying above, that a lack of solidarity between the sexes, as well as between people of different ethnic groups, is bad for the working class.

Blanche is still worried that Stanley has told Stella some dirt he’s learned from Laurel. Stella denies hearing anything, but of course she’s heard plenty. Blanche wants to call Mitch’s home and find out why he hasn’t shown up for her birthday party. She’ll regret making the call (page 78).

Stanley has another ‘gift’ for Blanche: a ticket back to Laurel. She can hear the Varsouviana music. She runs off, coughing and gagging (page 81).

Stella reprimands Stanley for being so cruel to her sister, and he reminds Stella of how he’d pulled her down from the columns of Belle Reve, and she liked it. He’s now pulled Blanche down from those columns, too, and she hates it…therefore, he hates her.

Overwhelmed by stress, Stella is going to go into labour. He has to take her to the hospital.

XII: Scene Nine

Blanche is alone in the apartment again, and Mitch arrives, dressed in his work clothes. He has no more interest in playing the role of the gentleman for her, having confirmed what Stanley told him about her. His coldness to her, and her realization that she has lost him, just as she lost her husband, reminds her of the Varsouviana music she’d heard when he ran off and put a gun in his mouth (page 84).

Mitch doesn’t like how dark it is in the place. He wants to see her in the light, which of course she never wants to be seen in (page 86). She finds the dark comforting, something she can hide in. Just as it hides her age, the darkness also hides her sinful past–it is her Jungian Shadow.

He insists on seeing her in the light even to the point of tearing off the paper lantern from the light-bulb. He wants to see her “good and plain,” which causes her narcissistic injury, for she finds exposure to the light “insulting.”

He wants realism, but she wants “magic.” She wants to hide in romance, to be worshipped by a gentleman. She wants comforting illusions.

When he sees her in the light, he doesn’t mind that she’s older than he thought; but he’s heartbroken to know that she, of supposedly “old-fashioned” ideals, has serviced men in the Flamingo. He at first dismissed Stanley’s accusations as slander, but then he checked Stanley’s sources and he is no longer able to deny the truth about her (page 87).

Blanche tries her best to deny Mitch’s sources, claiming the stories of the men who knew of her promiscuity are slanders to get revenge on her for rejecting their advances, but Mitch won’t believe her. Knowing she can’t get him to sympathize with her, she ironically exaggerates her sin by claiming the hotel she stayed in was not called The Flamingo, but “The Tarantula,” where she supposedly brought all her victims (page 87).

Again, she tries to explain what drove her to promiscuity–the suicide of her husband, Allan, her hopes of finding a man’s protection but never getting it, and the slow fading away of her looks from aging. She still hopes she can win Mitch’s sympathy by appealing to his need for somebody, as she needs somebody, and noting how gentle he seems (page 88)…but all that matters to him is that she lied to him.

As all of this is being said, a Mexican woman outside can be heard saying, “Flowers, flowers, flowers for the dead” in Spanish…some ominous foreshadowing of Blanche’s fate, metaphorically speaking.

Blanche speaks of “blood-stained pillow slips” that need changing, symbolic of her promiscuity. She imagines that “a coloured girl [could] do it,” suggesting a projection of her sin, what makes Blanche “common,” onto blacks, onto common workers. Blanche would continue to use racial and class prejudice as an ego defence mechanism to protect her against judgement for her sins.

Still, not only does Mitch feel no sympathy for Blanche, but he also no longer feels any obligation to play the role of the gentleman for her (page 89). He takes it to the point of wanting sex from her, imagining that she’s owed it to him “all summer.”

As we can see, his gentleman routine is as much of a phony act as is her ladylike routine. So much in this play is illusion and pretense.

Since Mitch has his hands on her waist, and it’s clear that he doesn’t want to marry her, she has no intention of satisfying him like a ‘cheap’ woman. His intention is to have her whether she’ll consent or not…in other words, he’s prepared to rape her.

She screams “Fire! Fire! Fire!” to make him go away, since screaming fire is considered a much more effective way to get help against a rapist than yelling rape. When we consider what’s going to happen to Blanche in the next scene (just after the end of it, specifically), we can see that Mitch is actually a more moderate version of Stanley, or rather, that Stanley is representative of an extreme version of ‘gentlemen’ like Mitch.

XIII: Scene Ten

It’s later that same night. Blanche is dressed in her prettiest of dresses, wearing her rhinestone tiara, and in front of the dressing table mirror. Since Mitch left, she’s been drinking steadily. She imagines she has a number of “spectral admirers” around her (page 90).

As I said above, her loss of Mitch is a loss of the mirror of her grandiose self, one of the two poles that are holding her together. So the group of “spectral admirers” is there in a desperate attempt by her to avoid the psychological fragmentation that is her fate via Stanley.

She’s talking to these imagined admirers: she’s hallucinating their presence. She’s holding a hand mirror to look at herself more closely, the hand holding it trembling. The chasm between who she knows she really is and the Lacanian ideal-I she wants to see in the specular image must be so vast that she smashes the mirror down hard to crack the glass.

Stanley returns from the hospital, and he’s in an uncharacteristically good mood. He is even, for the moment, kind to Blanche. He’s happy because he’s soon to be a father and hoping for a son (page 92).

Blanche has hopes of her own, only hers are completely imaginary. Just as she’s been seeing make-believe admirers in the mirror, for the sake of her grandiose self, she’s also imagining that Mr. Shep Huntleigh, her personified ideal, will take her on a cruise of the Caribbean (page 91).

Only through an escape into fantasy can she hope to keep her bipolar self intact, with Shep at one pole (idealization), and the admirers in the mirror reflection at the other pole (grandiosity). Yet Stanley is about to smash both poles for her, to rid her of her illusions, and traumatize her so severely that her psychotic break from reality will be complete.

Still, though, for the moment, Stanley is being nice to her because of his good mood as an expectant father. He doesn’t believe a word she’s saying about a cruise with Shep, but he’s humouring her all the same, to keep the peace, hence his comment that the rhinestones on her tiara are “Tiffany diamonds” (page 91). In his humouring of her, we can see that he’s as capable of pretense as she is.

Though he’s trying to be generous with her to keep the mood pleasant, she doesn’t want to reciprocate (page 93). She’s annoyed at the continuing lack of privacy, and yearns for her “millionaire from Dallas” to restore it to her. In her swelling narcissism, she boasts of her inner beauty–“beauty of the mind and richness of the spirit and tenderness of the heart”–all of which can replace her fading physical beauty.

This boasting is causing Stanley’s patience to fade, especially when she speaks of “casting [her] pearls before swine!” (page 93) “Swine,” of course, refers not just to Stanley but also to his friend, Mitch, whom she now regards as no less common than Stanley. She lies that Mitch “returned…to beg [her] forgiveness,” which she wouldn’t give.

When Stanley reminds her about the telegram she supposedly got from Shep, and he sees she has briefly forgotten about it, he’s caught her in a lie (page 94). Now his anger comes back in full.

Stanley knows there is no Shep, and he knows that Mitch never came to her asking for forgiveness. It’s all only her “imagination…lies and conceit and tricks!” It was all narcissistic fantasy, which she’s been using to protect her bipolar self from psychological fragmentation.

He is disgusted with her phony charade, but he cannot see the pain she went through that brought her to this. He’s tearing down her fake performance, and he’s about to bring her to that state of fragmentation. But first, he’ll go into the bathroom to change into his pajamas.

Just as before, when she suggested to Stella that their escape from Stanley would be a call to Western Union to contact Shep (Scene Four, page 44), she’s at the phone, trying to do it again for real, to save herself from this beast (pages 94-95).

She hears noises from outside at night. She leaves the phone and, according to the stage directions, she goes to the kitchen. Outside, a drunkard is attacking a prostitute. This is obvious foreshadowing of what’s about to happen to her.

Stanley comes back from the bathroom, having changed into his pajamas, and he’s looking at her lewdly. Part of the problem of being labelled a ‘cheap’ or ‘easy’ woman is, of course, how she becomes prey for lecherous men. Mitch gave Blanche a try; now, Stanley wants to…only he’ll be much more insistent on it.

He hangs up the phone on her, and he’s standing in a place where he can stop her from getting away. She knows what that look in his eyes means, and she needs to protect herself, so she smashes a bottle and points the jagged end at him (page 96).

She tries to fight the good fight, “some rough-house,” but he overpowers her, of course. Now that they’re going to have “this date” (an interesting choice of words on Stanley’s part, reminding us of how her dating Mitch ended), he picks her up and takes her to the bed (page 97). She moans and yields to him in all hopelessness.

XIV: Scene Eleven

A few weeks later, Stella is home with the baby, and she’s packing Blanche’s things. Eunice also comes by.

Stanley is playing poker with Steve, Mitch, and Pablo again at the kitchen table. The atmosphere of this game is the same as the last one (page 98).

Pablo curses at Stanley in Spanish, making the latter call the former a “greaseball.” Once again, the use of ethnic slurs demonstrates the lack of solidarity among the working class.

Blanche has told Stella that Stanley raped her, but Stella refuses to believe it (page 99). Eunice agrees that Stella should never believe it, since she’d never be able to carry on with Stanley. This understanding brings us back to the theme of illusions that keep the pain away, that protect us from fragmentation.

Blanche has finished bathing and is ready to come out of the bathroom. She’s full of anxiety and insecurity, wondering if the coast is clear (i.e., no men to see her), and if she’s failed to rinse all of the soap out of her hair (page 100). Stella and Eunice try to comfort and humour her by telling her how good she looks.

Blanche is still hoping for Shep Huntleigh to call her and take her on that cruise. Again, Stella and Eunice are humouring her with this fantasy, knowing full well that it’s a psychiatrist who is about to take her away. Again, they have to keep her illusions intact, for reality will destroy her.

Blanche imagines she’s going to spend the rest of her life on the sea (page 102). She thinks she’ll die holding “the hand of some nice-looking ship’s doctor, a very young one…” How ironic that it’s actually going to be a doctor who takes her away…and not a young or handsome one.

The doctor and nurse, or matron, arrive at the door and ring the doorbell. Blanche, of course, is full of hope that it’s Shep who has come to her rescue. How disappointed she’ll be.

As Blanche looks in shock at these two unexpected and unwanted visitors, she can hear the Varsouviana again. This was the music she heard just before her husband’s suicide, which in turn led to the events that have been corroding her whole sense of self. She’s hearing the music again in her mind; it’s a trigger leading to her destruction.

She’s trying to escape from the two visitors, claiming she forgot something (page 104). The nurse goes in after her and calls out to her, her voice echoing in Blanche’s mind, a threatening echo that suggests a recurring pain, a returning trauma.

Stanley, impatient to get rid of her, asks if it’s the paper lantern she wants. He tears it off the light-bulb and gestures to give it to her. According to the stage directions, “She cries out as if the lantern was herself.” (page 105) Of course she’d see it that way: all that Blanche has been, to keep her sanity, is a covering-up of the light, a comforting dimness, her narcissistic False Self. Revealing the light’s brightness exposes her True Self and all the ugliness she perceives it to be.

This is her succumbing to psychological fragmentation.

As the nurse is restraining her, Mitch gets up and tries to hit Stanley for his cruelty to Blanche. Mitch would seem to have a modicum of gallantry after all. Stanley’s denial of guilt shows he’s as fake about his commonality as she is about hers.

It is the Doctor, however, whose gentlemanly act of removing his hat and greeting her, that calms her down, restoring her comforting illusions. Stanley’s raping of her means that he has put his filth and commonality inside her, something she cannot expel. For her, kindness comes from strangers, not from people close to her.

The 1951 film changed the ending by having Stella refuse to be with Stanley anymore, since the old Motion Picture Production Code would never tolerate his rape going unpunished. No divorce, of course, but no easy forgiveness of him, either. Among social conservatives, there can be no acceptance of such violence against women as rape, however much the law may allow guilty men to slip through its cracks.

Williams’s play, however, exposes the ugly side of society by granting no justice or satisfaction to the long-suffering marginalized: ‘fallen’ women, ‘degenerate’ gays, ‘mama’s boys,’ ‘Polacks,’ ‘Chinamen,’ and ‘greaseballs.’ Williams would not whitewash cruel reality.

XV: Conclusion

You see, the cruel irony of “depend[ing] on the kindness of strangers” is twofold for Blanche. On the one hand, those strangers who were ‘kind’ to her were the Johns who solicited prostitution from her in exchange for money so she could survive–in other words, total exploitation. On the other hand, those she’s known well have hurt her the most: her husband, whose suicide was an abandoning of her; Mitch, who abandoned her out of a refusal to forgive her for her shady past; Stanley, for obvious reasons; and even Stella, for refusing to believe her accusation of Stanley (her relationship to her oaf of a husband being more important to her than her loyalty to her sister), and for allowing Blanche to be taken to a mental institution, her final humiliation.

In a world of alienation, only strangers can be kind.

Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire, London, Penguin Books, 1947