A Streetcar Named Desire

“She is [delicate].  She was.  You didn’t know Blanche as a girl.  Nobody, nobody was as tender and trusting as she was.  But people like you abused her, and forced her to change.”  

            What is love, but the opposite of apathy?  What is life, but the opposite of death?  What is death in Tennessee Williams play, A Streetcar Named Desire, but the opposite of desire?  Indeed the two streetcars which carried Blanche DuBois to her sister’s home were named Desire and Cemeteries.  The symbolism of these streetcars is not lost, nor is Blanche’s final destination of the Elysian Fields.  The streetcars are symbolic of Blanche’s life, one which began with desire and ended with death – though not hers.  The subject of Blanche’s rejection of men is one which is only fully developed through a comprehensive grasp of the entire play.  Through three episodes in her life, the topic of Blanche’s systematic self-destruction will be traced to show that though the act of fulfillment is the ultimate, the loss of that fulfillment is even more devastating than the lack of its attainment. 

            In the opening quote, Stella Kowalski addresses her husband Stanley.  This quote appears in the latter part of the book on page 111.  This quote is watershed to the understanding that Blanche was not originally the woman who she appears to be now.  To Stanley , Blanche seems to be condescending and overly haughty.  Moreover he takes offense to the fact that she has influenced his life with lies.  Blanche indeed has adopted an arrogant and deceitful manner about her, but for no other reason than as a defense.  The fact that at the end of the play she is losing her mind is a testament to the detrimental effect that living a lie had upon Blanche.  With a habitual liar, the truth and lies become one.  With Blanche the emotional duress helped to advance this amalgamation.  The key to Blanche’s fall is two-fold.  Firstly she set herself up on a porcelain pedestal with Allan Gray, and the only direction she could go was down.  Here desire carried her to the fulfillment of her life, and his death ripped the fledgling fulfillment from her puerile hands.  With Allan’s death comes the death of Blanche.  Not only did Blanche loose her husband on that dance floor, but she lost her naïveté.  The naïveté was rooted in her blind desire for the young boy, and she is damned to forever re-live this fantasy of naïveté.  Stella knew Blanche before she fell from her pedestal of passion.  Blanche very well could have been delicate or “fair” as her name suggests, but with the loss of her “desire” she was forever damned defend herself from being hurt again.  The “people like you” that Stella refers too are more of an idea than a personification.  The misogynist society has forced Blanche not to feel love, but they have struck her down.  This society, embodied by Stanley and later by Mitch, is the reason that Blanche goes crazy.  It is true that the immediate reason for Blanche’s change was the betrayal by the society she began to trust, but her change was cast in stone by the fact that she couldn’t revert to the life she had previously known because it was too painful. Her quip to Stanley is telltale that she is in denial of her situation at present, “I hurt [Allan] in a way that you would like to hurt me, but you can’t!  I’m not young and vulnerable anymore.  But my young husband was.”  Oh, but she was so very vulnerable…

            Allan’s death indeed is the cause of Blanche’s demise, but there are other extenuating factors which are hinted too in the opening quote.  Because her “desire”, i.e. the infatuation embodied by Allan, died suddenly, her “death” too came suddenly.  Every day after Allan killed himself, Blanche has been dying.  As was said before the opposite of desire is death, and the opposite of death is life.  Therefore without desire, one cannot live his or her life to the fullest.  Blanche’s existence is completely devoid of desire, and thus to call it a life would be a fallacy.  After the loss of Allan, Blanche became numb to true love.  All that she could feel was sexual love, especially with younger men.  The symbolism here is one which is overtly complex.  Blanche “desires” young men because she is trying to relive what she felt with Allan, who was only a teenager at the time of their marriage.  She never holds a relationship with a young man for very long because she fears that it will result in her heartbreak again.  This mentality is clear in her treatment of the paper boy.  Upon seeing him she immediately begins to flirt with him, first asking him for a light and then the time.  She proceeds to say that he makes her mouth water.  Finally she breaks down and kisses him.  Here the reaction is watershed to framing her mentality.  “It would be nice to keep you, but I’ve got to be good and keep my hands off children.”    “Be good”…apparently being a pedophiliac and a psychotic is copasetic in her world.  Though Blanche is aware that her transgressions with young men are not acceptable, she has little control over her passions.  These passions however are far different that the desire which she felt for Allan.  The passions are fleeting, so much so that she can just dismiss the paper boy.  Her desire haunts her still.  Her acknowledgement of the objectionability of her actions with the seventeen year old student is clear in her blatant lie to Stella, when she attributes her presence in New Orleans as a “leave of absence” granted by the superintendent.  It is not that she is embarrassed, just that she feels that society at large will not understand her motives.  In truth, she herself does not understand fully her own motives.  When she admits to Mitch about her many trysts she comments that the society viewed her as “morally unfit” to teach.  Indeed she was unfit, but her own morality provided for the need to fulfill her fantasy.  When she could no longer co-exist with her fantasy and the community around her, she was forced to move.  No longer could she live the life to which she had grown accustomed.  “There was no where else I could go.  I was played out…My youth was suddenly gone.”  Blanche’s youth is not only her physical beauty, but the illusion of Allan was forever lived in the past, in her youth. 

When she saw Stanley , the antithesis of Allan, Blanche was forced to adapt.  She no longer could freely harbor her illusions about Allan, though the polka music in her head serves as a remembrance that he is never far away.    Stanley ’s abuse forced Blanche to change.  However, without her illusions, she had nothing, and thus she crept even deeper into lunacy.  Her desire of Allan was her life.  Without that desire, even the false life she was leading was nothing.  What Stanley brought was a reality check.  Stanley stands for the reality of society, while Blanche is the antithetical fancy and whimsy.  It is as such that she survives.  Once her proverbial bubble is burst, she has not the capacity to live.  Stanley, an agent of truth or reality, serves to bring Blanche off of the pedestal of illusion on which she stands.  Once she touches the ground, her will to live is gone.  She is reduced to a shadow of her former self.  Spiritually she dies the death of desire, and Stanley is her executioner. “The first time I laid eyes on him [Stanley] I thought, that man is my executioner!  That man will destroy me.”  Indeed the truth that Stanley represents “kills” the idyllic fantasy which Blanche lives.  Where then does Mitch fit in?  Mitch serves as a dynamic character, in contrast to all others, save Blanche.  It is fair to say that Mitch is even more dynamic than Blanche.  Mitch, like Blanche, lost a lover when he was young.  Unlike Blanche, however, he has handled himself in a far better manner.  Could it be that his love was fickle, and that the loss of his companion was not such so warrant Blanche’s pain?  It is fair to say that Mitch did not set himself up to fall, for if he had he would have ended up like Blanche.  Mitch needs someone as does Blanche, and thus the match is made in heaven.  Blanche, however, treats Mitch with silent contempt.  Unlike Allan, or even the paper boy, she makes Mitch wait for any sign of sexual attraction.  It seems that Blanche treats Mitch as another tryst, as evidenced by the lack of compassion in their parting.  As Blanche betrays Mitch, so does Mitch betray Blanche in the end by trying to force himself on her.  He goes from innocent lover to the symbol of Blanche’s hatred of men in one fell swoop. The entire pretense of Blanches illusions and lies lie in the quote to Mitch, “I don’t tell the truth, I tell what ought to be the truth.  And if that is sinful, let me be damned for it.”  Indeed, she is damned for it.

Blanche hates men and needs them all at once.  She hates the fact that they control her.  Men like Stanley physically control her, and they staunch her fantasy and illusion.  Men like Allan spiritually control her, because she cannot let herself forget about a love once felt.  Blanche lives only in the memory of a past love, a past fulfillment.  Indeed she feels that if she can preserve some semblance of the fulfillment of the desire, she can live.  Stanley is an agent of reality, and any direct contact with him compromises her illusion.  This understanding leads to the ultimate understanding of Blanches over reaction as Stanley touches Allan’s love letters.  “The touch of your hands insults them. Now that you have touched them I’ll burn them.”  Stanley , by contact with the letters, compromises Blanche’s tender illusion and preservation of that said illusion.  The infatuation that Blanche held towards Allan was so strong that she could not fall without being forever scarred.  “All at once and much, much too completely.  It was like you suddenly turned a blinding light on something that had always been half in shadow, that’s how it struck the world for me.” She “fell” in love, and the realization that her husband was homosexual was so devastating that it hit her like a ton of bricks, yet she kept falling.  She sought love with desire, and she found its fulfillment in Allan.  However, this fulfillment was short lived, and when Allan died so did her true fulfillment.  The pitiful aspect of Blanche is that she is the only character to reach the true fulfillment of desire, however short lived it was.  The most pitiful aspect of Blanche is the fact that she cannot “live” without the sense of fulfilled desires.  She lives in the past in her illusions.  She covets young men because she needs to fulfill the shred of desire which remains.  As has been said, death comes in the absence of desire.  Therefore Blanche dies five deaths.  She dies first when she sees her husband with another man, second when he kills himself, third when she is forced to leave Laurel , fourth when she loses Mitch, and fifth when she is raped by Stanley .  Being raped by the beacon of truth brings Blanche to the ultimate realization that her entire life after Allan’s death has been a compensation illusion.  She loses all sanity, as the final shreds of her desire is ripped away.  Her lost sanity is a result of her lost fulfillment.  The loss of a fulfilled desire is the worst “death” that Blanche could suffer.  Though Stella is pitiable for never having attained true fulfillment, as her relationship is purely sexual, she is not pitiful as Blanche is.  Blanche garners this appellation because she throws her life away to relive the only moment of happiness she ever had.  Her life is spent not living, but reliving.  Though once fulfilled, Blanche’s life is like a train wreck of the good streetcar named Desire. Past the junction of Allan’s death, Blanche does not live, but rides closer to death every day.