FREE ESSAY ON BLANCE DUBOIS

BLANCE DUBOIS

Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire is to some extent living an unreal existence.
Jonathan Briggs, book critic for the Clay County Freepress.
In Tennessee Williams' play, A Streetcar Named Desire the readers are introduced to a
character named Blanche DuBois. Blanche is Stella's younger sister who has come to visit
Stella and her husband Stanley in New Orleans. After their first meeting Stanley develops
a strong dislike for Blanche and everything associated with her. Among the things Stanley
dislikes about Blanche are her spoiled-girl manners and her indirect and quizzical way of
conversing. Stanley also believes that Blanche has conned him and his wife out of the
family mansion. In his opinion, she is a good-for-nothing leech that has attached itself
to his household, and is just living off him. Blanche's lifelong habit of avoiding
unpleasant realities leads to her breakdown as seen in her irrational response to death,
her dependency, and her inability to defend herself from Stanley's attacks. 
Blanche's situation with her husband is the key to her later behavior. She married rather
early at the age of sixteen to whom a boy she believed was a perfect gentleman. He was
sensitive, understanding, and civilized much like herself coming from an aristocratic
background. She was truly in love with Allen whom she considered perfect in every way.
Unfortunately for her he was a homosexual. As she caught him one evening in their house
with an older man, she said nothing, permitting her disbelief to build up inside her.
Sometime later that evening, while the two of them were dancing, she told him what she
had seen and how he disgusted her. Immediately, he ran off the dance floor and shot
himself, with the gunshot forever staying in Blanche's mind. After that day, Blanche
believed that she was really at fault for his suicide. She became promiscuous, seeking a
substitute men (especially young boys), for her dead husband, thinking that she failed
him sexually. Gradually her reputation as a whore built up and everyone in her home town
knew about her. Even for military personnel at the near-by army base, Blanche's house
became out-of-bounds. Promiscuity though wasn't the only problem she had. Many of the
aged family members died and the funeral costs had to be covered by Blanche's modest
salary. The deaths were long, disparaging and horrible on someone like Blanche. She was
forced to mortgage the mansion, and soon the bank repossessed it. 
At school, where Blanche taught English, she was dismissed because of an incident she had
with a seventeen-year-old student that reminded her of her late husband. Even the
management of the hotel Blanche stayed in during her final days in Laurel, asked her to
leave because of the all the different men that had been seeing there. All of this,
cumulatively, weakened Blanche, turned her into an alcoholic, and lowered her mental
stability bit-by-bit. 
Her husband's death affects her greatly and determines her behavior from then on. Having
lost Allan, who meant so much to her, she needs to fill her empty heart, and so she turns
to a lifestyle of one-night-stands with strangers. She tries to comfort herself from not
being able to satisfy Allan, and so Blanche makes an effort to satisfy strangers,
thinking that they need her and that she can't fail them like she failed Allan. 
At the same time she turns to alcohol to avoid the brutality of death. The alcohol seems
to ease her through the memories of the night of Allan's death. Overtime the memory comes
back to her, the musical tune from the incident doesn't end in her mind until she has
something alcoholic to drink. All of these irrational responses to death seem to signify
how Blanche's mind is unstable, and yet she tries to still be the educated,
well-mannered, and attractive person that Mitch first sees her as. She tries to not let
the horridness come out on top of her image, wanting in an illusive and magical world
instead. 
The life she desires though is not what she has and ends up with. Already in New Orleans,
once she meets Stanley, Blanche is driven to get out of the house. She needs get away
from Stanley for she feels that a Kowalski and a DuBois cannot coexist in the same
household. Her only resort to get out, though, is Mitch. She then realizes how much she
needs Mitch. When asked by Stella, whether Blanche wants Mitch, Blanche answers I want to
rest...breathe quietly again! Yes-I want Mitch...if it happens...I can leave here and not
be anyone's problem.... This demonstrates how dependent she is on Mitch, and consequently
Blanche tries to get him to marry her. There is though Stanley who stands between her and
Mitch. Stanley is a realist and cannot stand the elusive dame Blanche, eventually
destroying her along with her illusions. Blanche cannot withstand his attacks. Before
her, Stanley's household was exactly how he wanted it to be. When Blanche came around and
drank his liquor, bathed in his bathtub, and posed a threat to his marriage, he acted
like a primitive animal that he was, going by the principle of the survival of the
fittest. 
Blanche, already weakened by her torturous past, did not have much of a chance against
him. From their first meeting when he realized she lied to him about drinking his liquor,
he despised her. He attacked her fantasies about the rich boyfriend at a time when she
was most emotionally unstable. He had fact over her word and forced her to convince
herself that she did not part with Mitch in a friendly manner. This wild rebuttal by
Stanley she could not possibly take, just as she could not face a naked light bulb.
Further when Stanley went on to rape her, he completely diminished her mental stability.
It was not the actual rape that represents the causes for her following madness, but the
fact that she was raped by a man who represented everything unacceptable to her. She
couldn't handle being so closely exposed to something that she has averted and diluted
all of her life - reality, realism, and rape by a man who knew her, destroyed her, and in
the end made her something of his. 
She could not possibly effectively refute against him in front of Stella. Blanche's past
and present actions & behavior, in the end, even in Stella's eyes depicted her as an
insane person. All of Blanche's troubles with Stanley that in the end left her in a
mental institution could have been avoided by her. Blanche made a grave mistake by trying
to act like a lady, or trying to be what she thought a lady ought to be. Stanley, being
as primitive as he was, would have liked her better if she was honest with him. But being
brutally raped by him in the end destroyed her. He knew her, he made her face reality,
and in a way he exposed her to the bright luminous light she could not stand all her
life.