Blanche Dubois

• Blanche Dubois is the anti-hero in the play.
• Tennessee Williams characterised Blanche as a woman with a narcissistic personality disorder who uses alcoholism as a coping mechanism to forget the guilt she carries from her past.
• Blanche grew up with Stella, her sister, on the family plantation, which she eventually came to own.
• At 16, she met Allan Grey, her first love, who she later insults and belittles when she sees him having sex with another man. When she lashes out at him during a dance, Allan runs outside and dies by shooting himself in the head. This incident torments Blanche.
• Following the death of Allan Grey, Blanche's life turns for the worse - she spends the last of her youth watching the rest of her family die and loses Belle Reve due to bankruptcy.
• Blanche loses her job as an English teacher after sleeping with a seventeen-year-old student, and then engages in a string of affairs with various men. After being kicked out of the Hotel Flamingo, she decides to visit her sister in New Orleans, where the play begins.
• Southern Belle and Aristocracy

  Blanche and Stella are both from the Old South with an aristocratic heritage, from a lineage of plantation owners. They are both cultured in manner; Blanche in particular never fails to flaunt her educated and knowledgeable self. Her references to arts and culture, as well as her idiolect, reinforces this.
• Manipulative, Pathological Liar

  • labelled as manipulative as she bends the truth to fit her stories, which ends up affecting Stella and Mitch
  • Openly admits to Stella that she wants to deceive Mitch into desiring her - when caught fibbing she claims that "it is a part of womanhood" and believes that the lies help her confidence
  • Manipulates Stella throughout the play, often about Stanley. Stella says things to Stanley that she otherwise would not have done, such as "pig" and "drunk animal thing"
• Insecure and Sensitive

  • Blanche is very aware and insecure about ageing. She shies away from bright light and only goes out at night
  • Spends a lot of time fixing her appearance and fishes for compliments and attention
• Lonely

  • Extremely lonely figure
  • Established in the first scene when she says that Stella is all she has in the world
  • Cries out that she cannot be alone
  • Relationship with Mitch is built on mutual loneliness
• Flirtatious and Seductive

  • flirts with Stanley, asking him to button her dress as she tries to win him over
  • Often talks about bathing, which implies images of nudity
  • Seen as half-dressed through the gaps in portieres,
• Constantly tries to relive her youth and seems to be stuck in the loop, as she slept with young soldiers and students in the past. Her kissing the paper boy is a symbol of her desire to be young again.
• Delusional

  • stuck in traumatic past with Allan and constantly hears polka music and gunshots
  • states that she doesn't want realism, she wants magic
  • on her dates with Mitch, she states that they will pretend to be in France and then begins speaking French. showcases how she can switch into her fantasy world to help her escape the past
• Modelled after Rose Williams, Tennessee Williams' sister who suffered from mental illness, was institutionalised and eventually had a lobotomy.
• Represents a decaying Southern Belle, who is struggling with the difference between what she 'should be' and what she has become.
• Blanche Dubois is the embodiment of the decline of the Old Southern agrarian economy, defined by race and class.
• Understanding if a work fits into realism or modernism, or has aspects of both is looking at its literary context.
• Critics will judge a work and talk about what they like and don't.
• All works that are published are critiqued in a critical context.
• What other works or authors influence a work? Did the author create other works based on this work? These questions look at a work's literary context.
• Time plays a crucial role in a critical context, as it reveals greater works as they survive other inferior works.
• Transcendentalism is a philosophy that believes that all people are instinctively good and pure and that society corrupts them.
• Blanche Dubois is the anti-hero in the play 'A Streetcar Named Desire' characterised by Tennessee Williams as a woman with a narcissistic personality disorder who uses alcoholism as a coping mechanism to forget the guilt she carries from her past.
• Blanche Dubois grew up with Stella, her sister, on the family plantation, Belle Reve, which she eventually came to own.
• Stanley returned with a box of roses to beg Blanche's forgiveness.
• Stanley dared to come to work in his work-clothes and repeat slanderous stories about Blanche.
• Blanche gave Stanley his walking papers.
• Stanley raped Blanche after she insisted that she had never been deliberately cruel.
• Blanche refused to forgive Stanley for his deliberate cruelty.
• At the young age of sixteen, Blanche met Allan Grey, her first love, who she later insults and belittles when she sees him having sex with another man.
• Shortly after Blanche, his wife at this point, angrily lashes at him during a ball, Allan runs outside and dies by shooting himself in the head.
• This incident torments Blanche throughout the rest of her life and turns her into the Blanche we see in the play.
• Following the death of Allan Grey, Blanche’s life turns for the worse, she spends the last of her youth watching the rest of her family die out and loses Belle Reve due to bankruptcy.
• Blanche also loses her job as an English teacher at a local high school for sleeping with a seventeen-year-old student.
• Blanche’s rants are a window to her psyche, often reflecting her attempts to convince herself that she is who she wants to be.
• Blanche’s obsession with death is interwoven with sex, as evidenced by the stage directions, the chiming of church bells, which can also be read as an extension of this interpretation.
• Blanche's understanding of a relationship with Stanley is based on sex and she cannot have that.
• Blanche's obsession with death, young men, and Allan is reflected in her final illusion, where she envisions herself dying on the sea with a young ship doctor and her first lover.
• Blanche's last line, "I have always depended on the kindness of strangers", drips with irony as it tells us that Blanche has many a time depended on the kindness of strangers but was left abused, battered and discarded.
• The sea could be understood as a symbol of freedom, characterised by its openness, juxtaposed to the apartment, the hotel rooms or the death-stricken house she was trapped in.