Streetcar Named Desire - Blanches Downfall essays

Streetcar Named Desire - Blanche's Downfall essays In Tennessee Williamss play A Streetcar Named Desire, the character Blanche DuBoiss mental state deteriorates as the story progresses. During the play, several events in Blanches past are revealed. These events allow one to understand why Blanche acts the way she does, and why certain events affect her the way that they do. In the end, these events cause Blanches total mental breakdown. The event that started Blanches mental deterioration was her husbands suicide. Her husband was a homosexual, and Blanche had caught him with another man. Later, while dancing with him to the Varsouviana, she told him that he disgusted her. He ran off the dance floor and shot himself. Blanche always blamed herself for her husbands suicide, and grief overcame her. As she says in the play, the light that her husband cast on her world went out. Without her husband, Blanche was lost. Blanches familys estate, Belle Reve, was lost after the deaths of many family members. The bills for the funerals of her family fell upon Blanche. Now she was not only stricken with grief after the loss of family members, she was forced to give up her home. The estate her family had owned for hundreds of years was gone. Blanche was forced to find a place to stay, and a place for her to try and pick up the pieces of her shattered life. In order to try and end her grief, Blanche was intimate with many men over a short period of time. She lived in Laurel, in a sleazy hotel called the Flamingo. During her time in this hotel, she became quite infamous. She would try to fool men into believing that she was an innocent southern woman. Since the town was small, the facts about Blanche spread rapidly, and she was asked to turn her room key in at the Flamingo. She realized that she had failed to make herself feel better. Her relations with these men only made her feel worse in the long run. ...