Many laws against homosexuality were passed and it was even declared to be a ‘mental illness’. With this context in mind, one can see why Blanche was repulsed by it. Blanche’s deliberate act of cruelty of saying to her husband “I know! I know! You disgust me…”, led him to escape from the casino, putting a revolver at the back of his mouth and then shooting himself. Whilst recalling these events to Mitch, harsh lighting and abrupt sound is used “[The headlight of the locomotive glares into the room as it thunders past]”, to supplement Blanche’s frightful reflections. Following from the discovery of her husband’s true identity and his sudden suicide, Blanche oversaw multiple deaths in her family and the ultimate loss of her ancestral home Belle Rêve. All of the tragedies in her life inflicted a great amount of emotional and mental impact on Blanche, as she turns to alcohol and sexual promiscuity, in order to escape the brutalities and the void of loneliness in her life. In the last few scenes of the play, Blanche and her lies begin to unravel as Mitch is told the truth about her history from …show more content…
Blanche DuBois was already deeply-damaged emotionally and economically vulnerable seeks hope and her own hero in this new setting, but in a cruel twist of fate, she suffers a full-blown mental breakdown at the hands of Stanley Kowalski. Violence mainly occurs within Stanley’s behaviour and Blanche’s past, but he does not restrict violence to just the physical sort, as he manifests brutality in emotional and psychological violence. Williams uses the motif of violence to emphasise conflict within the play through Stanley and Blanche and to highlight issues in society between the genders and different