A Streetcar Named Desire - Themes

LonelinessApart from her sister, Blanche is alone in the world. She loved once, and deeply, but since the death of her husband, the world has had no love in it for her. She longs for a deep connection with another human being. But her pathetic attempt to find love through sexual affairs with casual acquaintances has only made her situation worse. The attraction she feels toward very young men (the young man who come to the apartment for newspaper money, for example) is an attempt to reproduce the one magical, fulfilling thing Blanche had found in life—her love for her young husband. The more desperate Blanche becomes in her loneliness, the more deeply she digs herself into it.Mitch is lonely too. He only has his mother and he is shortly to lose her. The brief moment of hope that he and Blanche share, when it seems as if they might find happiness together, is a poignant and tender moment in a world that will not sustain such romantic hopes for long. At least it will not do so for Blanche, and probably not for Mitch either, who also seems bound for failure and continued loneliness in life.Blanche’s isolation and loneliness is contrasted with the hearty embrace that Stanley gives to life. He enters into male friendships with an easy camaraderie, and he effortlessly wins and retains Stella’s love. Unlike Blanche, he is well adapted to his environment. So are Steve and Eunice. They belong where they are; it is only Blanche who is rootless, unable to find her own niche.

Passion, Sex and DeathThe audience is given an early clue to the theme of sex and death when Blanche in scene 1 describes the directions she was given to reach her sister’s house. She was told to take a streetcar named Desire, and then take another called Cemeteries.The theme is stated again in scene 9, when Blanche says that the opposite of death is desire. Blanche means love as well as sexual desire— the need for connection with another person. She does not admire the raw desire embodied by Stanley, even though it is sexual passion that makes Stella and Stanley (as well, in a lesser way, as Steve and Eunice) so fully alive in a way that Blanche is not. Stanley and Stella know how to keep the “colored lights” going, which is their term for rewarding sexual relations. Everything about Stanley suggests that sexual fulfillment is the center of his life. The playwright emphasizes this in the stage direction that accompanies Stanley’s first appearance: “Animal joy in his being is implicit in all his movements and attitudes.” His sexuality is the “complete and satisfying center” of his life.Blanche, on the other hand, finds that her desires are continually frustrated. She is associated with death—the death of her relatives at Belle Reve, and the death by suicide of her husband, which still haunts her. Reminders of death keep popping up to torment Blanche—the inscription on Mitch’s cigarette case, the Mexican woman who sells flowers for funerals. It was to stave off this death-impulse that Blanche indulged in promiscuous sex after her husband’s death. This was simply an attempt to keep life going, to stop her from withering inside, and to try to rekindle the transforming love and desire she had felt for her husband. But sensitive Blanche is no healthy animal like Stanley, which is why she is bound for failure and madness, while the final sight of Stanley is of him comforting Stella and reaching inside her blouse.

The final destruction of the Old South, symbolised by Blanche and Belle Reve This theme—not unlike that in Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind—begins to unfold in the opening scene of the play. Two women, one white and one black, sit as equals on the steps of an apartment building while Blanche arrives on scene accoutred in the attitude and finery of a southern belle of yesteryear. She is an alien, a strange creature from another time, another place.

The reluctance or inability of people to accept the truthBlanche lives in a cocoon of unreality to protect herself against her weaknesses and shortcomings, including her inability to repress sexual desire. To preserve her ego, she lies about her promiscuous behaviour in Laurel; she shuns bright light, lest it reveal her physical imperfections; and she refuses to acknowledge her problem with alcohol. Stanley effectively penetrates her cocoon verbally with his crude insults and near the end of the play. Stanley has his own problem: He lacks the insight to see what he really is—a coarse, domineering macho man ruled by primal instincts. Unlike Blanche, though, he is happy in his ignorance. For her part, Stella accepts the truth—partly. She acknowledges that Stanley is crude and that her apartment is cramped and shabby. But, in the end, she refuses to accept the truth about her sister’s past and about Stanley’s violation of Blanche. “I couldn’t believe [Blanche’s] story [about the rape] and go on living with Stanley," Stella says.

Illusion and RealityBlanche is sufficiently self-aware to know that she cannot survive in the world as it is. Reality is too harsh, so she must somehow create illusions that will allow her to maintain her delicate, fragile hold on life. “A woman’s charm is fifty percent illusion” (scene 2) she acknowledges to Stanley. And then when Mitch wants to switch the light on so that he can get a realistic look at her, she tells him that she does not want realism, she wants magic. This means that she seeks to manipulate reality until it appears to be what Blanche thinks it ought to be. She wants life to be lived in a permanent romantic glow, like the light that lit up the entire world when she first fell in love. But in this play, reality dominates. The realism of the setting, with its down-to-earth characters and the sounds of the busy life of this corner of New Orleans, suggests that Blanche’s illusions are not going to be sufficient. The fact that Blanche is probably aware of this too is what wins her the sympathy of the audience. Eventually, her thin hold on reality disappears altogether and she takes refuge in an illusory world in which she is about to go on a trip with her imaginary rich beau.

MadnessBlanche’s fear of madness is first hinted at in Scene 1 (‘I can’t be alone! Because — as you must have noticed — I’m — not very well ...‘). Never stable even as a girl, she was shattered by her husband’s suicide and the circumstances surrounding it. Later the harrowing deaths at Belle Reve with which she evidently had to cope on her own, also took their toll. By this time she had begun her descent into promiscuity and alcoholism, and in order to blot out the ugliness of her life she created her fantasy world of adoring respectful admirers, of romantic songs and parties.She is never entirely successful at this, as the memories of her husband’s suicide remain persistently alive in her mind, always accompanied by the polka music. Drink is her solace on these occasions as she waits for the sound of the shot that signals the end of the nightmare. It seems that she has learned to live with this, as she remarks to Mitch in a matter-of-fact way, ‘There now, the shot! It always stops after that!’ (Scene 9).She has reached an accommodation with the nightmares in her mind, but she cannot bear the intrusion of ugly reality into her make-believe world. Stanley’s revelations of her past, Mitch’s rejection of her as ‘not clean enough’, and finally her rape by Stanley on the night when her sister is giving birth to his child, all these break her and her mind gives way. She retreats into her make-believe world, making her committal to an institution inevitable.