A Streetcar Named Desire

10 Pages 2617 Words

eality, or to the people and circumstances to which Stella has learned to adjust. Talking to Mitch in scene nine, Blanch insists “I don’t want realism. I want magic! . . . Yes, yes magic! I try to give that to people. I misrepresent things to them. I don’t tell truth. I tell what ought to be truth. And if that is sinful, then let me be damned for it!” (SND, p. 117). Mitch, a poker playing friend of Stella’s husband, Stanley, is the closest thing Blanche can get to a meaningful relationship, but his own illusion about her is shattered when Stanley reveals the facts of her sordid life back in Mississippi. But Blanche thinks of herself as a refined, cultured woman of education and sophistication, an illusion which fully encompasses the beautiful dream of her life on the plantation. What might once have been a grand estate, Blanche bitterly describes as having been lost “as piece by piece, our improvident grandfathers and father and uncles and brothers exchanged the land for their epic fornications” (SND, p. 43). What was left of the house and a few acres of land, Blanche tells Stella, was lost to the expenses of the many family deaths: “now you sit there telling me with your eyes that I let the place go! How in hell do you think all that sickness and dying was paid for? Death is expensive, Miss Stella.” (SND, p. 27).
The loss of the plantation, and the excuses Blanche makes to avoid responsibility are just the first part of her self-delusion. Tennessee Williams sets the symbolism early when Blanche arrives at Stella’s home. Alice Griffin observes that “On one level Blanche’s opening words ask directions of the woman on the stoop; on another they symbolize her life journey and state a major theme of the play: ‘They told me to take a street-car named Desire, and then transfer to one called Cemeteries and ride six blocks and get off at—Elysian Fields.’” (1) To clearly illustrate how ...