Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire

1001 Words3 Pages

While watching A Streetcar named Desire, the character of Blanche Dubois at first appeared to be a weak self-absorbed southern woman, when really what started coming from her character was a flawed personality. What is not known is whether this is something that runs in the family, or has only shown itself through Blanche. Since this was during a time when mental illness was not yet studied deeply, the way Blanche is treated while succumbing to her illness and how she was sent off to the mental hospital was rather archaic. Blanche is the central character and the movie shows her spiraling down into the abyss of mental illness apparently escalated by the loss of family, her home and the treatment by Stanley.

Inside, Blanche had wantonness, sexual desire that she apparently gave into frequently at the Flamingo Hotel. Though it was never stated directly in the movie, the assumption placed before the audience was that Blanche had been involved in a form of prostitution. This may have been a factor to her declining mental health, or could have been a side effect of her condition. Mental illness presents differently through each person. What may have appeared to the other characters as choices for Blanche may have been something she was not able to control. It is not clear whether she had been that way before her marriage.

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The way that Blanche’s character was written shows a strong tendency towards a mental health issue known as Histrionic Personality Disorder. The earmarks of this illness are as follows: excessively emotional, need for an audience, shallow and rapidly shifting emotions, inappropriate sexual or provocative behavior, and does not form strong relational bonds amongst a wh...

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...sed, Stella used the same defense mechanism Blanche resorted to, to help Stella endure the pain in her life. The emotional response was to believe how life should be and not as it actually was resulted in a fairytale like expectation of their own world.

Works Cited

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Griffies, W. Scott, A Streetcar Named Desire and Tennessee Williams’ Object-Relational Conflicts, DOI: 10.1002/aps.127, September 1, 2007, Retrieved from, http://web.a. a.ebscohost.com.cwi. idm.oclc.org/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?sid=7260b208-7178- 43fa-8426-400cfc364c1b%40sessionmgr4002&vid=2&hid=4114, 14 March 2014

Williams, Tennessee, A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), Retrieved from, https://swarm.tv/t/Z2l,

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U.S. National Library of Medicine, 11/17/2012, Retrieved from http://www.nlm.nih.gov/ medlineplus/ ency/article/001531.htm, 14 March 2014

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