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32 Cards in this Set
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When Stella arrives, Blanche blurts out how awful the apartment is but then tries to laugh off her comment. She asks for a drink in order to restore her nerves. Blanche then returns to the subject of the apartment, wondering how Stella could live in such a place. Stella tries to explain that New Orleans is different and that the apartment is not so bad. Blanche promises to say no more about it.
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Essentially, the play can be read as a series of encounters between the Kowalski world and the Blanche DuBois world. Each of these encounters will intensify with each subsequent meeting. The first encounter occurs at the end of Scene 1. The overly sensitive Blanche must introduce herself to Stanley, who immediately offers her a drink after he notices that the bottle has been touched. He takes off his shirt and makes a shady remark to Stella, who is in the bathroom. He then asks Blanche some pointed questions which end with an inquiry about her earlier marriage. By the end of the first encounter, Blanche is feeling sick. Thus, Stanley’s rough, common, brutal questions end by hitting on the most sensitive aspect of Blanche’s past life—her marriage with the young boy. Stanley’s animalism almost destroys Blanche’s sensibilities even in this first meeting. Thus the conflict is between the oversensitive aristocratic world of Blanche and the brutal, realistic, present-day world represented by Stanley. But as an afternote, it should be added that Stanley is the type of person who likes his “cards on the table.” He doesn’t go in for subtleties and deception; thus, had Blanche been honest about his liquor, perhaps they could have gotten off to a better start.
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The first part of this scene introduces us symbolically to the essential characteristics of Stanley Kowalski. He enters in a loud-colored bowling jacket and work clothes and is carrying “a red-stained package.” He bellows to Stella and throws her the raw meat which she catches as she laughs breathlessly. The neighbors laugh over the package of bloody meat—an obvious sexual symbol which depicts Stanley in the same way as Blanche later describes him to Stella: He is a “survivor of the stone age! Bearing the raw meat home from the kill in the jungle; and you—you here—waiting for him.” This scene, therefore, shows Stanley as the crude and uncouth man. The scene also sets a tone of commonplace brutality and reality into which the delicate and sensitive Blanche is about to appear.
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Blanche’s emphasis that she can’t be alone suggests that she is at a point of desperation at the opening of the play. She has absolutely no place to go and no one to turn to or else she would not be here in these surroundings. Her explanation of how Belle Reve was lost and her recounting her frequent encounters with death serve in some ways to account for Blanche’s present neurotic state.
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Notice that Blanche is described as wearing white and having a mothlike appearance. Williams often dresses his most degenerate characters in white, the symbol of purity. Blanche’s dress hides her inner sins and contributes to her mothlike appearance. Her actions also suggest the fluttering of a delicate moth. And as a moth is often attracted by light and consequently killed by the heat, later we will see that Blanche is afraid of the light and when Mitch forces her under the light, this act begins Blanche’s destruction.
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A key to Blanche’s character is given to us in this first scene by her reliance upon and need for whiskey. Then later when Stanley asks her if she wants a drink, she tells him that she rarely touches it. Here then is an example of Blanche’s inability to tell the truth and her desire to be something different from what she actually is.
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Note the symbolic use of names throughout the play. Blanche DuBois means white of the woods. The white is a play on Blanche’s supposed innocence and the woods are used as another Freudian phallic symbol. Stella’s name means star. The name of the plantation home was Belle Reve or beautiful dream—thus the loss of Belle Reve is correlated with the loss of a beautiful dream that Blanche once possessed.
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In the first meeting between Stella and Blanche, Blanche tells Stella to “turn that over-light off!” This is a first reference to Blanche’s aversion to too much light. It correlates with her moth-like appearance and will later develop into one of the controlling motifs throughout the play. Her fear of light will be seen to be connected with the death of her first husband and her fear of being too closely examined in the cold, hard world of reality. She prefers, instead, the dim, illusionary world of semi-darkness.
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The first part of this scene introduces us to the motif of Blanche’s baths. She bathes constantly so as to soothe her nerves. But this is also a cleansing symbol. By her baths, she subconsciously hopes to cleanse her sins away. The baths are also another quirk which annoys Stanley since the hot baths make the apartment even hotter.
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When Stella goes to the bathroom, Blanche moves back into the light and continues to undress as she listens to rumba music over the radio. Stanley calls for her to turn the radio off. As Stella comes out of the bathroom, Blanche turns on the radio and begins a little waltz, and Mitch clumsily tries to follow when suddenly Stanley charges into the room and throws the radio out the window. Stella screams at him and tells everyone to go home. Stanley becomes enraged and hits Stella. The men pin Stanley down while the women leave. They force him under the shower and then leave.
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Blanche meets Harold Mitchell coming from the bathroom. When he leaves, Blanche thinks that he looks more sensitive than the others and is told that Mitch’s mother is very sick. Blanche begins to undress until Stella reminds her that she is in the light. The sisters begin to laugh, and Stanley yells to them to be quiet. Blanche is immediately aware of Mitch’s difference. Her own sensitivity allows her to recognize it in others. This is a quality that Stanley does not possess. Mitch excuses himself again and goes into the other room, where he meets Blanche again. She asks him for a cigarette, and he shows her his cigarette case with an inscription on it. Blanche recognizes the inscription and Mitch is pleased and explains that there is a story connected with the case. It was given to him by a girl who was dying and knew it when she gave him the present. Blanche explains that people who suffer are often more sensitive and sincere than the average person. After more conversation, Blanche explains how she tried to teach English and an appreciation for literature to youngsters who were not interested in it.
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Blanche asks Mitch to cover the light bulb with a paper lantern because she can’t “stand a naked light bulb, any more than a rude remark or a vulgar action.”
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The reader should be aware of Blanche’s almost pathological need to lie. She lies to Mitch about her reason for visiting Stella and about her age. But as Blanche will later say, these are only little illusions that a woman must create.
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This is the third confrontation between Blanche and Stanley. Here Blanche is the witness to the animal brutality and the coarse behavior of Stanley. The violence that he perpetrates is totally alien to Blanche’s understanding. But more amazing to Blanche is the fact that Stella returns to Stanley after the fight is over.
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Note that as soon as Blanche says that she was born under the sign of the virgin, Stanley chooses this moment to ask her about the man named Shaw. Blanche becomes visibly agitated during the cross-examination. At the end, when Stanley leaves, she is trembling and in need of a drink. This, then, is Blanche’s past life beginning to close in upon her. This is also the beginning of Stanley’s plan to destroy Blanche, and she feels herself being trapped. Thus in this encounter between Blanche and Stanley, Blanche is seeing her own valued world disintegrate under the force of Stanley’s attack.
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At this point in the drama, the scene with the young boy might seem puzzlingly out of place. It is not until later that we learn Blanche had once married a young boy and had been terribly cruel to him when he most needed her. Therefore, her sexual promiscuity returns to her guilt feelings over her failure to help her young husband. She seeks to relive the past and longs for a young lover to replace the young husband who shot himself. In other words, since she once denied help to her young husband, she now tries to compensate by giving herself to almost anyone.
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An important question is, which is the real Blanche? Is she the innocent, naive girl that she presents to Mitch or is she the depraved woman whose past Stanley uncovers and reveals? Actually, she would like to be the girl she is presenting to Mitch. Ideally, she pictures herself as this girl. Even though this is a pose for her, she feels that it is the pose that she, as the southern belle, must take. she feels it is her duty to entertain the man and to make the man feel welcomed.
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In Blanche’s narration of her tragic marriage with the young Allan, we see the source of all the rest of her difficulties. Here was the man whom she loved “unendurable” but whom she was unable to help. Her love came like a “blinding light” and after his death, she has never had a light “that’s stronger than this—kitchen—candle!” Thus, Blanche’s aversion to lights, seen in earlier parts of the play relates both to her attempt to disguise her age, and more important to the images connected with her young husband.
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We now find out why the Varsouviana music has been playing as background music. This was the song which played while Blanche and her young husband were dancing, and the same song, running through her mind is interrupted by the sound of her husband’s gunshot. So now when Blanche hears the music, she must drink until she hears the gunshot which signals the end of the song.
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As Blanche is in the bathroom bathing and singing about the paper moon and make-believe world, the realistic Stanley comes home with a complete case against Blanche. He has collected all the facts and has assembled a list of all the lies that she has told him. Stanley is now ready for his final confrontation with Blanche. He now has all the information he needs to prove again his superiority over her.
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Stanley does not have the sensibility to realize that perhaps Blanche and Mitch could have had a successful marriage in spite of Blanche’s past. Instead, he feels some manly obligation to inform Mitch of Blanche’s past life. And not only does he tell Mitch, but he buys a bus ticket for Blanche back to Laurel. Note that he could have bought a ticket to another town, but he cruelly buys one that sends her back to the scene of her last failure and the one place where she cannot possibly return.
It is ironic that Blanche is bathing (again symbolic of a cleansing ritual) while all the past that she is trying to wash away is about to be revealed by Stanley. |
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Scene 8 is the scene of violence. It begins with a small birthday party for Blanche, but as Blanche waits for Mitch to arrive, Stanley and Stella know that he is not coming. Thus there is a tension in the air which explodes when Stella tells Stanley that he is making a pig of himself and that he should wash and help her clear the table. Stanley violently throws his dishes away and then announces that he is king here.
In actuality, we see in this scene that Blanche’s presence is actually destroying Stanley and Stella’s marriage. This type of scene would probably never have occurred if Blanche had not moved in; therefore, Stanley is fighting for his marriage. |
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According to Stella, whom we must believe, Blanche was once “tender and trusting” but people abused her. Thus perhaps she has always been the type who was unfit for the world of reality.
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Note the opening description of Blanche. She is in her old dilapidated clothes—her last remnants of a past life. The “Varsouviana” music—the tune which played when her husband shot himself—is heard as background music and Blanche is drinking to escape it all.
The appearance of Mitch, unshaven and dressed in his dirty work clothes emphasizes again that he is Blanche’s last chance—that he is a rough and rather uncouth character. With Mitch’s appearance, Blanche immediately begins to act the part of the innocent young girl and the polka music stops. But almost immediately she realizes that something is wrong and the music begins again. During the first part of this scene, Blanche talks so much that Mitch doesn’t have a chance to make his accusations against her. Her incessant line of chatter functions to cover up her fears and to postpone hearing what she fears to hear. |
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Mitch’s first confrontation comes when he forces Blanche under the light. This act has multiple significance. First, on the realistic level, Blanche has deceived Mitch about her age and the light reveals Blanche’s deception. The revelation of this deception leads to the other deceptions. Second, Blanche has constantly avoided the light ever since her young husband shot himself. She has had nothing stronger than a candle light since his death. Thus, Blanche has passed her life in semi-darkness and to be forced into the light makes her violate her inner nature. Third, being forced into the light here symbolizes the revelation of the truth about Blanche’s past life. She has tried to conceal her life of dissipation and when Mitch forces her under the light, it is the same as making her realize and confess her past life. And fourth, Blanche’s whole theory of living involves magic and illusion. She doesn’t want realism. Instead, she prefers the magic of illusion. And rather than the truth, she lives for “what ought to be.” Thus forcing Blanche into the light makes her see things in their ugly realism—that is, it makes her see how her life actually was instead of how it ought to have been.
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Blanche’s confession of her past life is almost too much. It has that Tennessee Williams quality of sensationalism. It is almost unbelievable, and, as some critics would maintain, unnecessary for her to have such a lurid and degenerate past. Her confession doesn’t seem to fit with this delicate moth-like creature on the edge of disintegration. But the opposite argument must be seen. Williams has attempted to show how Blanche’s over-delicate and over-sensitive nature was the reason she sought escape from her failure with her young husband by turning to alcohol and to intimacies with strangers.
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When Mitch accuses Blanche of lying to him, she maintains that she never lied “inside. I didn’t lie in my heart.” Blanche means that she has used some deception to trap Mitch, but a certain amount of illusion is a woman’s charm, but as she said to Stanley in Scene 2: “when a thing is important, I tell the truth.” And she did tell the truth to Mitch when she told him that she loved and needed him and that they needed each other.
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Mitch, having learned of Blanche’s past, then feels that she should sleep with him. In his disappointment with the truth about Blanche, he doesn’t realize that she could give herself to a stranger but not freely to someone whom she knew as well as she knows Mitch and certainly not under such crude circumstances. Therefore, at the end of the scene, Blanche is at her lowest ebb of existence now that Stanley has given her a bus ticket back to Laurel and Mitch has deserted her.
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This scene presents the final confrontation between Blanche and Stanley, with Stanley emerging as the undisputed winner.
The beginning of the scene reestablishes the basic difference between Blanche and Stanley. She is once again living in her world of illusion and pretense—a world that Stanley, the realist, cannot understand or tolerate. |
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Blanche says that she dismissed Mitch, because “deliberate cruelty is not forgivable. It is the one unforgivable thing in my opinion.” Therefore since Blanche was once deliberately cruel to her young husband, she has since formulated this idea. And of course, she must view herself as being unforgivable for her cruelty to him. This perhaps motivates a lot of her actions, but her statement comes at an ironic point—that is, just before Stanley is about to rape her—an act of extreme cruelty.
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In his exhilaration over the forthcoming birth of his child, Stanley is seen as a wild animal on the prey. For the first time, he sees Blanche as someone whom it “wouldn’t be bad to—interfere with.” This idea plants the idea of seduction in his mind. He also feels that Blanche has been “swilling down my liquor” all summer and that he deserves a little pay. But also, Stanley cannot understand why a woman who has slept with so many men would object to sleeping with him. And, most important, Stanley has always functioned with the idea of enjoying the things that are his—that is, “his car, his radio, everything that is his, that bears his emblem of the gaudy seed-bearer.” Blanche has lived in his house, has eaten his food, and has drunk his liquor, but she is definitely not his; in fact, she is openly antagonistic toward him. Thus, his rape is partially to prove again his superiority over her. And since her presence in his house has almost destroyed his marriage, he feels no remorse or regret over Blanche’s destruction.
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Blanche’s horrified aversion to sleeping with Stanley is not based on any moral grounds. Instead, he represents every aspect of life which she is unable to cope with. He appears to her as her destroyer, and his rape of her is actually the cause of her madness. And she was not strong enough to defend herself against this hostile force. Thus it is not the actual rape which causes her madness, but the idea that she was raped by a man who represents everything unacceptable to her. Thus, she is symbolically unable to cope with the brutal realistic world represented by Stanley.
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Williams’ position is probably best stated in Eunice’s remark to Stella after Stella says that she couldn’t go on living with Stanley if Blanche’s story is true. Eunice tells her “Don’t ever believe it. Life has got to go on. No matter what happens, you’ve got to keep on going.” But apparently Blanche did not have the strength to go on living in spite of everything. She was too delicate to be able to withstand the pressures of living in a brutal, realistic world.
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When Blanche refuses to go with the doctor and matron, she tells them that she has forgotten something. It is then that Stanley wonders what and takes off the “magic” Chinese lantern from the light, leaving the naked light bulb glaring at Blanche. This is the final blow for Blanche who tries to escape and is trapped by the matron. Again the light symbolism emphasizes Blanche’s desire to live in a world of semi-illusion which contradicts Stanley’s world.
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The last line of the play puns on the man’s world as Steve announces that the game is “seven-card stud,” a particularly wild poker game.
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