A Streetcar Named Desire

“You came to New Orleans and looked out for yourself! I stayed at Belle Reve and tried to hold it together!”

This bit of dialogue introduces the core of tension between the sisters. Blanche, someone who seeks companionship as validation, feels that Stella abandoned her.

“And funerals are pretty compared to deaths.”

Blanche was left without any funds after her the death of their parents and someone named Margaret. The deaths were messy, their proceedings fraught with struggle and fear. The funerals, as she explains, were the packaged products of death. This is an iteration of her awareness that appearances can conceal less-appealing realities.

“It looks to me like you have been swindled, baby, and when you’re swindled under the Napoleonic code I’m swindled too.”

Stanley’s exchanges with Blanche have been cordial up until this conversation he has with Stella, during which he expresses that he thinks Blanche has stolen the money she made from Belle Reve. This suspicion sets into motion his hunt for the truth about Blanche.

“You’re simple, straightforward and honest, a little bit on the primitive side I should think.”

Blanche is flirting with Stanley in this scene, after he has raided her clothing. She seems to think that she can win him over with compliments, but Blanche is unaware that Stanley has decided she’s a threat. It is later revealed that the “primitive” quality of Stanley repulses Blanche.

“Poems a dead boy wrote. I hurt him the way that you would like to hurt me, but you can’t! I’m not young and vulnerable any more.”

This quote is a bit enigmatic at this point of the play because what happened to Blanche’s marriage it is not yet disclosed. That she becomes so animated when Stanley handles the poems foreshadows the importance of the unrevealed tragedy.

“The blind are leading the blind!”

Questions of blindness, both literal and metaphorical, occur often in the play. Characters turn a blind eye to the needs of others (in the cases of domestic violence, etc.) or pretend not to know what they know (Stella won’t tell Blanche what she’s learned about Blanche’s history). This quote occurs as a joke, said by Blanche, when Stella leads them to dinner on poker night. It, however, resonates when the blind Mexican Woman later comes to sell funereal flowers at Elysian Fields.

“That one seems—superior to the others.”

Blanche has just met Mitch as he exits the bathroom and prepares to go home to take care of his sick mother. She immediately picks up on his manners and his gentle demeanor, sparking her interest in him. Blanche aptly reads character throughout the play.

“The little there is belongs to people who have experienced some sorrow.”

Blanche’s first conversation with Mitch revolves around both their acquaintances with loss. She means, literally, that there is a bond that unifies those who have experienced sorrow and that they understand each other on a level deeper than those who have had charmed lives cannot perceive. They are the only characters of the play whose sorrows are discussed.

“Poker shouldn’t be played in a house with women.”

Mitch repeats this line twice as Stanley rages through the flat on poker night. Aside from revealing the strict gender codes of the time, this piece of dialogue shows Mitch’s awareness of his friends’ tendencies to act inappropriately when fueled by alcohol and gambling.

“What you are talking about is brutal desire—just—Desire!—the name of that rattle-trap street-car that bangs through the Quarter, up one old narrow street and down another…”

Blanche captures the pace and atmosphere of the play in this quote, containing, of course, the contents of the play’s title. The rhythmic pacing of the language reminds of the blue piano music. She is attempting to demystify her sister’s love of Stanley, which she characterizes as unremarkable and worn.

“In this dark march toward whatever it is we’re approaching…Don’t—don’t hang back with the brutes!”

Blanche has just explained to Stella why she thinks Stanley is, essentially, “sub-human.” She questions how Stanley can exist in the face of humanity’s progressions in poetry and music. Her mention of “this dark march toward whatever it is we’re approaching” is romantic while echoing the ideology of modernism.

“When people are soft—soft people have got to shimmer and glow—they’ve got to put on soft colors, the colors of butterfly wings, and put a—paper lantern over the light…”

Blanche has just received the first wind of her history catching up with her. Stanley received information from a man named Shaw, which she’s denied. She, however, is paranoid about what people might have said to her sister and begins telling her version of the story before Stella is aware of anything. The images in this piece of dialogue are translucent and delicate. They are things of beauty, but they are not resilient. This is how Blanche characterizes herself.

“The first time I laid eyes on him I thought to myself, that man is my executioner! That man will destroy me, unless—”

The word "executioner" is particularly jarring for Blanche. Her chilling prophecy is fulfilled by the end of the book, when she is taken away to an asylum. Mitch cuts her off to ask how old she is, and the conversation is not revisited. The audience is left to wonder what she might have said; perhaps she would have reiterated her need to leave Elysian Fields. In any case, her gut instinct has once again lead her to an accurate conclusion.

“And then the searchlight which had been turned on the world was turned off again and never for one moment since has there been any light that’s stronger than this—kitchen—candle…”

Blanche has just narrated to Mitch the events of her marriage, which led to her husband’s suicide. The “searchlight which had been turned on the world” seems to signify a certain sensibility for discovery, creation, and curiosity that accompanied her love for her husband. Immediately after Blanche says this, Mitch embraces her and proposes they be together.

“That’s why she’s here this summer, visiting royalty, putting on all this act—because she’s practically told by the mayor to get out of town!”

Stanley is in the midst of relaying Blanche’s history to a dumbstruck Stella. This scene permanently alters the atmosphere of the play, for no one remains in ignorance. Now Stella must begin lying to Blanche, and Blanche becomes increasingly aware of her reputation being tarnished. The secrets that separate them ultimately destroy them, to varying degrees.

“You remember that way that it was? Them nights we had together?”

As Blanche’s time at the Kowalski’s flat increases, both Stanley and Stella grow weary of their lack of alone time. It is improper for them to be intimate with Blanche in the next room. Stanley’s rhapsodizing about time passed seems romanticized given his otherwise violent behavior.  He considers their intimacy to be the foundation of their relationship and implies that their happiness is contingent on it.

“You needn’t have been so cruel to someone alone as she is.”

Stella says this to Stanley after he gives Blanche the bus ticket back to Laurel. This is her first time explicitly classifying his actions, accurately pinning down the dynamic of that flat that has taken shape over the summer. She subsequently demands explanation from Stanley. He asks her “wasn’t we happy together” (137)and before she has the chance to answer, she goes into labor. Given her confrontational nature just moments ago, it is unclear what her answer might have been. This is one of many examples of a moment during which the opportunity for honesty is thwarted by arbitrary circumstance.

“There now, the shot! It always stops after that.”

This marks the beginning of Blanche’s imagined world being made a part of shared reality. She is talking to Mitch once he’s arrived late into the evening of her birthday, after having missed the party. She refers to the sound of the gunshot that killed her husband, and how the feverish "Varsouviana" stops playing in her head once it passes. Death marks the beginning of silence, or a kind of calm.

“I don’t want realism. I want magic! [Mitch laughs] Yes, yes, magic!”

Blanche is justifying her tendency to bend the truth. She thinks she does the world a service by portraying things how they “ought to be” rather than how they are. This relates to the theme of what is real versus what is imagined. It is true that Blanche has lied, but it becomes increasingly difficult to make ethical and moral judgment calls about whether her lying is right or wrong, as she is so desperate to be loved by those around her and so ashamed of her life.

“I think it was panic, just panic, that drove me from one to another, hunting for some protection—here and there, in the most—unlikely places—”

This is the audience's first time hearing the story of Blanche’s history coming from Blanche, herself. As much as panic drove her to seek protection in Laurel, panic now drives her to come clean to Mitch. Her honesty is too late, as Mitch has already made up his mind about severing their relationship. Although she has reached her breaking point, this moment of lucidity illustrates her devotion to Mitch and her willingness to tell him what she has refused to reveal to anyone else in the play.

“But beauty of the mind and richness of the spirit and tenderness of the heart—and I have all those things—aren’t taken away, but grow! How strange that I should be called a destitute woman!”

Blanche is explaining Shep Huntleigh’s interest in her to Stanley. She has retreated back to the idea of Shep after being discarded by Mitch. She is in the midst of tangling herself in a lie, but this quotation is, ironically, pivotal for Blanche. She addresses the importance of sustainable qualities of wisdom over the superficial qualities of physical beauty and youth. The latter have, henceforth, been the objects of her obsession, and casting them off represents a personal growth.

“Tiger—Tiger! Drop the bottle-top! Drop it! We’ve had this date with each other from the beginning!”

Stanley physically thwarts Blanche’s efforts at self-defense before carrying Blanche into the bedroom and raping her on the night of his child’s birth. This marks one of the most emotionally difficult and intense moments of the play—the disgraceful culmination of Stanley’s attempts to ruin Blanche. After this, she is unable to fully connect with reality for the remainder of the play.

“I couldn’t believe her story and go on living with Stanley.”

Stella says this to Eunice as the flat awaits the arrival of the Nurse and Doctor. She means, fundamentally, that Blanche and Stanley could not coexist in her life. Stanley is the source of her financial support and the father of her newborn child, and it seems that these values took precedence over her yearning to help Blanche. As the play progresses to its end, however, Stella revisits this dilemma, wondering how much of Blanche’s downfall is due to her own negligence. Eunice responds to her by saying, “[l]ife has got to go on” (166), which accounts for the constant cycle of conflict and resolution that take place in the lives of the Elysian Fields residents.