Blanche Dubois Tragic Hero

As defined by Aristotle, a tragic hero is “a literary character who makes a judgment error that inevitably leads to his/her own destruction.” In Tennessee William's A Streetcar Named Desire, Blanche Dubois is a prime example of a tragic heroine. Blanche’s entire life could be considered a tragic one, bearing in mind all that has happened before and after she is introduced. Her mental state is unstable from the beginning of the book as she suffers from mental illness throughout Streetcar. On multiple occasions, Blanche has awkward or even uncomfortable interactions with others that shows her lack of intimacy and her delusion to the outside world. Due to her own and other characters choices, Blanche Dubois ultimately meets her ruin.
When Blanche

is first introduced in Scene One, she wears white, “looking as if she were arriving to a summer tea or cocktail party in the garden district… Her delicate beauty must avoid strong light. There is something uncertain about her manner, as well as her white clothes, that suggests a moth” (Williams 5). From the beginning, Blanche is seen as delicate and moth-like. Before her arrival in New Orleans, Blanche lived on the family plantation dubbed Belle Reve (French, meaning “beautiful dream”) in small town Laurel, Mississippi. At the young age of sixteen, Blanche was married to the late Allan Gray. Blanche eventually becomes a high school teacher in Laurel until a carnal interaction with an student and the foreclosure of Belle Reve forced her to leave the district and move to New Orleans with her sister- and brother-in-law, Stella and Stanley Kowalski.
From the beginning of A Streetcar Named Desire, Blanche was destined to be a tragic character.

In Scene Six she tells Mitch about her late husband Allan Gray, whom she married at the early age of sixteen years old. She says, “… He came to me for help. I didn’t know that… all I knew was I’d failed him in some mysterious way and wasn’t able to give the help he needed but couldn’t speak of! Then I found out… by coming suddenly into a room that I thought was empty[…] but, had two people in it […] the boy I had married and an older man who had been his friend for years…”(Williams 114). She does not share explicit details, but it can be concluded Blanche walked in on her husband committing adultery with another man. She continues on to tell Mitch, “Suddenly in the middle of the dance the boy I had married broke away from me… a few moments later–a shot!…He’d stuck a revolver into his mouth, and fired…”(Williams 115). She admits she was horrified with Allan’s sexually deviated actions, telling Allan “I saw! I know! You disgust me…”(Williams 115). From author Bert Cardullo, “[Blanche] refuses from the beginning to forgive herself for denying Allan the compassion that would have save and perhaps changed him, or at any rate, made his burden easier to bear.” Blanche implies that her deliberate act of cruelty, that her lack of compassion towards him when he needed to be “saved” by his homosexuality is what drove him to suicide. She made clear that though his death was decades ago, she

was never able to forgive herself.
Blanche’s anguished past helped contribute to her mental illnesses, which plays in favor the idea that Blanche is a tragic heroine.

According to the National Institute of Mental Health, post traumatic stress disorder is defined as “a disorder that develops in some people who have seen or lived through a shocking, scary, or dangerous event.” Post traumatic stress disorder can occur in people who have experienced war, victims of rape and even first responders aiding an emergency situation. A few of the symptoms listed for PTSD are flashbacks, frightening thoughts, feeling tense or “on edge,” and substance abuse or destructive behavior. As seen in A Streetcar Named Desire, Blanche Dubois displays all of these symptoms. At multiple points in Streetcar, stage directions give hints of Blanche’s hallucinations of the polka music that played the night her husband died. In Scene Nine where Mitch in confronting Blanche for all that Stanley said about her, the stage directions point to Blanche’s actions and thoughts, “[… she touches her forehead vaguely. The polka tune starts up again]”(141). When Blanche makes a comment about “That—music again…”(Williams 141). Mitch has no idea what Blanche is talking about, to the point that he asks her if she is “boxed out of [her] mind…”(Williams 141). It is evident that Mitch does not hear the music Blanche is speaking of and even thinks that she is crazy. Another common symptom of post traumatic stress disorder is destructive behavior or

substance abuse. From the start of the book, Blanche exhibits problems with starting alcoholism. Before Blanche even sees her sister, Stella, she looks for alcohol and finds whiskey in a closet. After Stella arrives and greets Blanche, she asks Stella for something to drink and immediately goes to the closet where she replaced the whiskey beforehand, saying to Stella “I know you must have some liquor on the place! Where could it be, I wonder? Oh, I spy, I spy!”(Williams 11). It is obvious throughout A Streetcar Named Desire, that Blanche has a tendency to lie about her problems with alcohol, among other things.
After Allan’s suicide, Blanche struggles to find intimacy with another for the remainder of her life and turns to sexual promiscuity. Her “intimacies with strangers”(Williams 146) are “less the freestanding acts of a nymphomaniac than those of a woman trying to find momentary relief or protection with having deeply personal demands placed on her”(Cardullo). Until she met Mitch, Blanche only had sex without compassion–without love. She eventually finds an intimacy she fits with, something with Mitch that respects her “old-fashioned ideas”(Williams 108).
The destruction of Blanche Dubois is that of a dreadful one. After an overstayed welcome, Blanche celebrates her thirtieth birthday with Stella and Stanley Kowalski. While Mitch was supposed to celebrate with them, Mitch stood Blanche up because of the ill words Stanley spoke of Blanche’s life back in Laurel. Some time after her birthday dinner, Stanley presents her with “a little birthday remembrance”(Williams 135), that is a bus ticket back to Laurel. This deliberate act of cruelty from Stanley devastates Blanche so much that she runs sick to the bathroom. Later that night, Stanley returns from the hospital alone to walk in on a drunken Blanche who is dressed up in an old, white evening gown. Blanche lies to Stanley about how she received a telegram from an old lover, Shep Huntleigh, inviting her to go on a cruise along the Caribbean. She then proceeds to tell Stanley that Mitch returned to her, but came a second time that night after she rejected him on the first occasion. After Stanley catches her in her lie, he becomes violent and threatening towards Blanche, cutting her down and standing intimidatingly close. It is not explicitly stated in Scene Ten or Scene Eleven, but is heavily insinuated that Stanley raped Blanche. Blanche later shares this information with Stella, who does not believe her. Stella comes to the final decision to have Blanche committed to a mental institution. Stanley wanted Blanche gone and he “[sensed] in this woman a challenge to his authority and his family. He must be rid of the meddlesome woman but finally realizes that he can be rid of her only by destroying her himself”(Tischler).
Blanche Dubois, unfortunately, had very bad luck in how her life turned out. Her decisions and the decisions of the ones around her led to her downfall. Because of her tragic past, Williams used Blanche to invoke pity in his audiences. Her painful past, symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder, and ultimate destruction all contribute to the theory that Blanche Dubois is, in fact, a tragic heroine.