70 pages • 2 hours read
Tennessee WilliamsA Streetcar Named Desire
Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 1947A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Scenes 7-9Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Scene 7 Summary
It is mid-September now, and Stella puts together a cake for Blanche’s birthday. Stanley comes home, saying he’s “got th’dope” (118)on Blanche. The first lie she’s told them is about her virginity. He has confirmed that she is infamous at the Flamingo Hotel in Laurel for her risky relationships with men. She was, allegedly, booted from the hotel for her behavior.
Throughout this conversation, Blanche can be heard singing the song “It’s Only a Paper Moon” in the bathroom. Stella doesn’t believe a word of these accusations.
Stanley continues, suggesting that her reputation got her ostracized from Laurel, which is why she ended up coming to New Orleans. She didn’t leave her teaching position; she was fired for her affair with a 17-year-old student. At this point, Blanche calls upon Stella to bring her a towel for her hair. She notices the look on Stella’s face, but Stella waves it off as exhaustion.
Stella returns to the kitchen. Although she knows her sister is “flighty” (124), she still denies the claims. She begins explaining Blanche’s hardships with her husband. She puts candles in Blanche’s cake and informs Stanley that Mitch is invited to join the celebration that evening. Stanley, however, has relayed all of the gossip to Mitch and suspects he won’t show. This agitates Stella even more. Now, according to Stanley, Mitch won’t marry Blanche, and everything has been ruined. Stanley has bought a bus ticket and is shipping Blanche out on Tuesday, declaring: “Her future is mapped out for her”(127). Stella doesn’t understand, but her questioning remains unanswered as Blanche frantically emerges from the bathroom.
At scene’s close, Blanche knows something has happened, “star[ing] fearfully at Stella” (128), but Stella won’t tell her what’s wrong.
Scene 8 Summary
Slightly later that evening, Stella, Blanche, and Stanley sit around the kitchen table. There is one empty spot, where Mitch should have been. Everyone is in a depressed mood.
Blanche asks Stanley to tell a joke, but he doesn’t comply, so she tells one instead. Her joke begins with an old woman who owns a foul-mouthed parrot. To shush it, she’d place a cover over its cage so that the parrot would think it was nighttime and go to sleep. One day, the preacher comes over. She places the cover over the cage before answering the door. However, as she is preparing some coffee for the preacher, the parrot exclaims, “God damn, but that was a short day!” (130).
Stella tries to laugh, but Stanley remains silent. He eats sloppily and quickly, and Stella begins to badger him for his habits, even going so far as to call him a "pig" (131). He smashes his plate to the floor and begins to yell, grabbing her arm. He exclaims that nothing but criticism has come from Stella since Blanche’s arrival. He declares, “I am the king around here, so don’t forget it” (131), and proceeds to throw his cup and saucer to the floor and stalks off.
Blanche wants to know what happened earlier that evening while she was bathing. Since Stella still won’t tell her, she goes into the bedroom and picks up the phone to call Mitch. Unable to get through to him, she leaves a message.
In the kitchen, Stella continues confronting Stanley about how he has soured the evening. He looks forward to Blanche’s departure and to when they can be alone again with their approaching baby as well as continue the intense intimacy that Blanche’s arrival has stultified.
As Stella prepares Blanche’s birthday cake, Blanche and Stanley bicker. Stanley takes a phone call about bowling and after hanging up gives Blanche the bus ticket, or the “little birthday remembrance” (135)he bought her. Her excitement halts when she realizes the contents of the gift, and the polka music begins. Blanche begins choking and retreats to the bathroom.
Stella reprimands Stanley:“You needn’t have been so cruel to someone alone as she is” (136). She continues, explaining that her sister was an impressionable young girl, and over the course of her life, has changed as a result of forceful people like Stanley. Stella emphasizes that they had a different upbringing than Stanley.
He tells Stella that when they met, he showed her a different kind of life, one that she loved. As he speaks, Stella’s expression and demeanor begin to shift. “Take me to the hospital” (138), she says, and Stanley takes her arm and leads her out the door.
Scene 9 Summary
Later than evening, Blanche is seated in her scarlet satin robe, drinking, while the "Varsouviana" plays in her head. When Mitch climbs the stairs to the apartment and knocks, she hides the bottle to greet him. She frantically reprimands about him not attending the party and for showing up at such a late hour in such casual clothes.
She tries to be accommodating by offering him liquor, but he refuses to drink it since it belongs to Stan. She tells him she knows something is wrong and comments on “[t]hat—music again” (141). Mitch is baffled. A gunshot is heard, and the music stops.
Blanche’s behavior and speech remain erratic as she looks for the bottle. Mitch comments on the darkness of the room, noting that he’s never seen her in the light and how she never wants to go out with him in the afternoon. He tears the paper off of the kitchen light so that he can see her face. She begins to admit that she bends the truth: “I tell what ought to be truth. And if that is sinful, then let me be damned for it” (145).
As the light strikes, Blanche covers her face. Mitch turns it back off. He always knew she wasn’t as young as she claimed to be, but he didn’t know she’d lied to him about so many other things. At first, he didn’t believe Stanley’s accusations, but he followed up with Stanley’s sources, and everything was confirmed.
She initially denies these claims, but when Stanley mentions the hotel, she begins to relay her history from her own perspective. After her husband’s suicide, she tried to quell her depression with the company of strangers. She tells about the student and how she lost her job, continuing to drink and becoming increasingly manic. She recognized her youth was all but gone, and the only place she could run to was New Orleans. When she met Mitch, he was like “a cleft of the rock of the world that [she] could hide in” (145). Mitch retorts that she has lied to him.
A blind Mexican flower vendor appears outside, softly calling “Flores para los muertos, flores—flores" (145). Blanche wanders to the door and is scared as she declines the flowers. She begins speaking loosely and associatively about Belle Reve and about how death was all around. She recalls how there was a camp for soldiers near the place, and men came into town at night. Sometimes when they’d call for her, she’d answer them. She lived only with a deaf woman who suspected nothing.
Mitch begins to embrace her, but when she mentions marriage, he replies that he’s not interested in that anymore. She orders him out of the house, screaming, “Fire! Fire! Fire!” (150).
Scenes 7-9 Analysis
In the joke Blanche tells at dinner, an old woman tries to hide her swearing parrot from the preacher by covering up the parrot’s cage. But, rather than remaining quiet, the parrot remarks, inappropriately, how short the day was. The old woman, like Blanche, has a secret. Unlike Blanche’s secret, however, this one has been spilled. The meaning of the story is ambiguous: it seems to be a combination of Blanche’s awareness plus dramatic irony. While the audience knows the other characters have learned Blanche’s history, she reveals her latent character traits through the actions Williams gives her. She constantly has a panicked look on her face, moves abruptly, and takes swigs of alcohol while telling other characters she’s not drinking.
Stella’s abrupt criticism of Stanley at the dinner table comes as a surprise, as the only time she’s stood up to him has been for his outburst on poker night. It seems predicated on Blanche’s monologue about how humanity has progressed too far for Stellato value Stanley’s brutishness. His quoting of Huey Long—“Every Man is a King!”(131)—is perhaps the only overtly political references of the play. It is, however, misrepresented by Stanley. Long, Governor of Louisiana and member of the U.S. Senate from the early to mid 1930s, was a populist, and the quote was one of his slogans emphasizing the need for redistribution of wealth. The term “man” was likely synonymous with “humankind.” Aside from making Stanley’s character clownish, Williams has backdropped the play with reality and emphasized the class-gap between the once-wealthy sisters and Elysian Fields. Blanche has interrupted the pace of Stella and Stanley’s domesticity.
These scenes begin in autumn, and aside from being a time of change and of preparation for the long winter, it is also Blanche’s birthday evening. Blanche considers her age a major source of anxiety, so the birthday celebration Stella plans is laced with tension. The birth of her younger sister’s child and Mitch’s lack of attendance at the party only exacerbate the problem, catalyzing her hallucinations and the song, the "Varsouviana," that periodically plays in Blanche’s head throughout the remainder of the play.
Mitch’s motivations for severing his romance with Blanche are ambiguous. He tells her, “Lies, lies inside and out, all lies” (147). His conversations with her have, up until this point, been rooted in empathy and careful listening. As leader of the pack, Stanley’s opinion and influence have herded Mitch away from Blanche. It is perhaps the case that Mitch would risk ostracization if he proceeded to marry her. He is very much a product of his time.
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