Slipping in the Quicksand: Guilt, Psychology, and the Fall of Blanche Dubois

Blanche needs Mitch as a stabilizing force in her life; if her relationship with him fails, she knows she faces a world that offers few prospects for a financially challenged, unmarried woman approaching middle age. She tacitly admits to Mitch that she needs him when she accepts his embrace, but her fears of acknowledging her past and current situation overpower her and prevent her from telling the full truth. She hides her past not only from Mitch, but also from herself because to acknowledge it is to also admit the unhealthy choices she has made. When Stanley tells Mitch about Blanche’s blemished past Mitch recognizes that Blanche’s deceptions have relied on a symbolic and literal darkness which obscures reality. When Mitch asks Blanche to be honest about herself she says, “I don’t want realism. I want Magic! I don’t tell truth, I tell what ought to be the truth” (145). In these lines Blanche clearly expresses her desire not to deal with reality; this inability to face her circumstances signifies that Blanche is not recovering from her mental stress, but rather descending further into it. Blanche becomes desperate and delusional and her descent into mental

Blanche lives in a fantasy world where truth and logic are replaced by a fake humanity. At one point she says,

Blanche’s financial decline, illuminating her vulnerability, links to Aristotle’s theory that the tragic heroine must fall, allowing the audience to relate to her. Her insecurities – “I won’t be looked at in this merciless glare!” stereotypically reflects the insecurities women feel about their appearance and age. The uses of imperatives and exclamatory sentences suggests Blanche’s obsession over her appearance, a flaw leading her to dismiss her true identity. Her inability to avoid drink and her compulsive lies, demonstrated in her frequent references to Shep Huntleigh’s letters, makes her a more authentic woman than Stella, who is described by Williams as the “gentle, mild and contented one”. Blanche’s loss of identity, dominated by her homosexual husband’s suicide, exacerbates her solitude – “The boy-the boy died. (She sinks back down) I’m afraid I’m – going to be sick!” The fragmented, repetitive speech Blanche uses illustrates her guilt and pain, whilst the physical act of “sinking” highlights the extent of her regret, giving a sense of foreboding for her downfall. Her guilt is also exacerbated by the implied physical act at the end which shocks the contemporary audience, who would not sympathise with homosexuals, evoking pity and reinforcing that “Streetcar” is a tragedy for Blanche.

Firstly, the reader may initially feel Blanche is completely responsible or at least somewhat to blame, for what becomes of

She said “I, I, I took the blows in my face and my body! All of those deaths! The long parade to the graveyard! Father, mother! Margaret, that dreadful way!” She fell apart even more as she saw all of her family around her pass away. She was face to face with death. They used flowers and ornamental caskets, but the funerals were the least of the problem. “Funerals are quiet, but deaths-not always. Sometimes their breathing is hoarse, and sometimes it rattles, and sometimes they even cry out to you, ‘Don’t let me go!’” This did not start her mental disorder, because it already existed, but it did not make it any better. Of course, all people must deal with the inevitable ending of life, but watching it all happen around you is different. She has to see people meet their fate and she sees that life is not a dream. The first death she had to deal with was her first loves and that is what starts her downward spiral. She came out of the dance to see where he had gone and heard people say “Allan! Allan! The Grey boy! He’d stuck the revolver into his mouth, and fired-so that the back of his head had been-blown away!” Ever since this traumatizing event she had a weakness for young men and hides under a façade of makeup, costume, and jewelry. If she is attracted to younger men she cannot attract them without looking younger herself. Blanche believes that

In Tennessee William’s A Streetcar Named Desire, Blanche DuBois unveils the theme of the story through her representation of the struggle to maintain innocence in a tragically guilty world. The main theme of the story is that the façade of performed perfection will always be unsuccessful; fantasy cannot overcome reality. As hard as Blanche tries to hide in her fantasy, eventually truth persists and, in the end, overtakes the delusions she holds. Blanche uses her appearance to suggest innocence and youth, yet with a closer look, readers see that, though she attempts very hard to be, she is neither. She also has a symbolic relationship with Mitch; the further they draw apart, the further into madness she descends. While it is clear that Blanche is not entirely innocent, the author creates her as a symbol of such. This way, as she slowly loses her mind—and Mitch—she symbolizes the loss of said innocence. Blanche can also be considered an embodiment of Williams’s older sister Rose, who is known to have been institutionalized for her erratic behavior. Rose Williams’s inability to overcome her mental instability is directly represented through Blanche, a character who also cannot maintain fantasy and ultimately succumbs to reality. Had Blanche been able to sustain her pretense of innocence, it is possible she could have avoided the harsh realities of life.

The audience always had the feeling that Blanche was a little nuts, but we see her condition worsening as the play goes on. During the final scene we see Blanche go with a doctor and nurse to, presumably, a mental hospitable. Eunice

One of the roles of this excerpt is to provide the background towards understanding Blanche, and the justifications for her mental state and actions. It is evident that in the past she belonged to a higher class where extravagance was common. But when her family in

As she reveals to Mitch in the end of the play, intimacies with strangers was all she seemed to be able to fill her empty heart with after the death of her young husband, Allan (Baym 2349). What Blanche obviously has not realized is that the unnatural, “messed up” relationship to her own desire has made it destructive and thereby inextricably linked it to death.

Blanche could not accept her past and overcome it. She was passionately in love with Alan; but after discovering that he was gay, she could not stomach the news. When she revealed how disgusted she was, it prompted Alan to commit suicide. She could never quite overcome the guilt and put it behind her. Blanche often encountered

She tries to hold on to him but is unable to keep him attracted. Blanche is lost, confused, conflicted, lashing out in sexual ways, and living in her out own fantasies. She has no concern for anyone’s well being, including her own. Thus, this is her utter most harmful demise. She has no realistic outlook for the future.

due to her past blanche’s actions are unusual and to many they are considered inappropriate. Blanche lives through some very dark and intense incidents before the play takes place, she witnesses the death of her entire family, she loses her family home, and to add to the misery she believes she is the reason her husband killed himself. In an act to move on she retreats into illusion acting as if these incidents never happened. Blanche decides to lie to everyone, from her sister to the man she potentially wanted to marry, she does not give them the truth. She wants to marry mitch but does not tell him about her past, mitch had all right to know, yet she led him on, actions like these in an environment of connection is inappropriate beyond a doubt. Because of her lies and illusions Blanche ends up losing everything, she loses her only chance at a future with Mitch and her freedom when she is sent to the mental institution. Blanches motivation by the past caused her life around her dissolve.

She begins to ramble on more, have more delusions and lie about crazy things such as Shep Huntleigh inviting her on a cruise to the Caribbean. She begins to shower more often or “hydrotherapy” as she calls it, because it “is necessary for her probably to wash away the feeling of guilt as also the stains of her promiscuous life” (Kataria 96). As the play comes to an end, Blanche becomes more psychotic and no one is on her side. Blanche appears to swirl into oblivion towards the end of the play when a fiight with Stanley gets physical. “She finally realizes to her dismay that she has lost her reputation, a place to go to, and what is worse, her charm. This realization, painful as it is, coupled with the rape, sends her reeling into a world of shadows from which she was never really far away” (Kataria 182.)

While drinking heavily after Mitch’s refusal to marry her, her delusional madness worsens. With very little self esteem left Blanche begins to pretend that there are people

            Blanche is not really lost in illusions; rather she uses them as camouflage. She wears them as she wears her clothes and her glass necklaces, as protection from a reality that she finds horrifying. One must not think of Blanche as just a fragile, delicate blossom. There is a fierce desire in her for life at any cost. Her masquerade may