A Streetcar Named Desire
Tennessee Williams (1947)
“A fading Southern belle arrives at her sister's cramped New Orleans apartment — and the collision between her illusions and her brother-in-law's brutal honesty destroys them both.”
Character Analysis
A former Southern belle clinging to the remnants of a world that no longer exists. Blanche's elaborate performances of gentility mask real intelligence, real suffering, and real damage. She is not merely a liar but an artist of alternative realities — and her tragedy is that the world she creates with language cannot protect her from the world of fact. Williams based her partly on his sister Rose and partly on himself: she is a portrait of the artist as a destroyed woman.
Affected Southern gentility — literary allusions, French phrases, elaborate courtesy, euphemisms. Her language performs the class she has lost.