Borderline Personality Disorder In A Streetcar Named Desire By Tennessee Williams

Throughout his life, Tennessee Williams, had many encounters with mental illness in his family. In his play A Streetcar Named Desire, he projected many of these disorders he encountered in his life onto his characters that he created in the play. The play implies that these characters could have some of these mental illnesses, particularly the main character of the play, Blanche DuBois. Signs of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) are shown in her character and are significantly shown throughout the play as her character suffers many hardships. Blanche obviously wasn’t well and there were many reasons why she wasn’t. Blanche shows a lot of signs of having PTSD throughout the play. Blanche went through …show more content…
Blanche goes through many changes in her identity, some quick and some permanent. Many times she is not herself and changes personalities very quickly. Blanche comes across as a very prim and proper woman, although she wants to be respected by her significant other and for him to be chivalrous as well loyal, as she is supposed to be the same. Her mindset and personality completely changes when she meets a paper boy and starts to flirt with him. She flirts with this young paper boy, even though she still has a boyfriend, but it is unknown if she is even in her right state of mind because it is so unlike her. Right after the boy is gone, Mitch comes to pick her up for their date and she snaps back to her usual self. (“It would be nice to keep you, but I’ve got to be good - and keep my hands off of children[.] Look who’s coming! My Rosenkavalier! Bow to me first… Now present them! Ahhh - Merciii!” Williams, 99) She switches from flirtatious to chivalrous within seconds which happens many times in the play. It seems as if Blanche is unaware of these personality switches and she almost seems unaffected by it, as if it never happened and she ends up empty, nevertheless she seems to have to always be with someone else and to never be alone, she has a fear of abandonment and has …show more content…
The outcome of the possible conjunction of these illnesses shows that Blanche seems as if she’s normal just until she has encounters and delusions about her past with her past lover or with Stanley. Blanche completely changed personalities when she met the young paper boy because he reminded her of her late fiancé and changed right back to her normal self when Mitch arrived, because he has nothing to do with how Stanley acts or is a part of her past, when she is not reminded of either, she returns to normal. Stanley is probably the root cause of the amplification of her outbursts and delusions because he is reminiscent of the vulgar men from her past that probably caused the possible PTSD she has. Stanley even raped her which just made all of the terrible memories locked away in her head come flooding back and caused her to circle the drain even more than she already was with her other possible mental disorders brought to the surface with past memories and Stanley which caused her to be sent to a sanitarium. Blanche was done wrong so many times, however there was no real diagnosis for her and people thought that she was just a mean person, but it really wasn’t her fault, she went through so much pain and suffering and it’s heartbreaking for thinking that she herself thought she was to blame for her