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

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

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