Character Study of Blance Dubois in A Streetcar Named Desire, by Tennessee Williams

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Character Study of Blance Dubois

Tennessee Williams was once quoted as saying that "symbols are nothing but the natural speech of drama...the purest language of plays" (Adler 30). This is clearly evident in Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire. As with any of his major characters, any analysis of Blanche DuBois much consist of a dissection of the play’s dialogue, supplemented by an understanding of the “language” of symbols in which Williams often speaks.

Before one can understand Blanche's character one must understand the reason why she moves to New Orleans and joins her sister, Stella, and brother-in-law, Stanley. By analyzing the symbolism in the first scene, one can understand what prompted Blanche to move. Her appearance in the first scene "suggests a moth" (Williams 96). In literature a moth represents the soul. So it is possible to see her entire voyage as the journey of her soul (Quirino 63). Later in the same scene she describes her voyage: "They told me to take a streetcar named Desire, and then transfer to one called Cemeteries and ride six blocks and get off at Elysian Fields" (Quirino 63). Taken literally this does not seem to add much to the story. However, if one investigates Blanche's past one can truly understand what this quotation symbolizes. Blanche left her home to join her sister, because her life was a wreck. She admits, at one point in the story, that "after the death of Allan [her husband] intimacies with strangers was all I seemed able to fill my empty heart with" (Williams 178).

This “desire” is the driving force, the vehicle of her voyage. It was this desire that caused her to lose her high school teaching position, and it is this desire that brings her to the next stop of her symbolic journey, “Cemeteries,” and finally to "Elysian Fields". The inhabitants of this place are described in Book six of the Aenied:

“‘They are the souls,’ answered his [Aeneas'] father Anchises, ‘whose destiny it is a second time to live in the flesh and there by the waters of Lethe they drink the draught that sets them free from care and blots out their memory.’"(Quirino 61)

This is the place of the living dead. Blanche came to Elysian Fields to forget her horrible past, and to have a fresh start (Quirino 63). In fact Blanche admits in the fourth scene that she wants to "make (herself) a new life" (Williams 135).

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