Characters - A Streetcar Named Desire
Blanche DuBois - When the play
begins, Blanche is already a fallen woman in society’s eyes. Her family fortune
and estate are gone, she lost her young husband to suicide years earlier, and
she is a social pariah due to her indiscrete sexual behavior. She also has a
bad drinking problem, which she covers up poorly. Behind her veneer of social
snobbery and sexual propriety, Blanche is an insecure, dislocated individual. She is an aging
Southern belle who lives in a state of perpetual panic about her fading beauty. Her
manner is dainty and frail, and she sports a wardrobe of showy but cheap
evening clothes. Stanley quickly sees through Blanche’s act and seeks out
information about her past.
In the Kowalski household, Blanche pretends to be a woman who
has never known indignity.
Her false propriety is not simply snobbery, however; it constitutes a
calculated attempt to make
herself appear attractive to new male suitors. Blanche depends on male sexual admiration
for her sense of self-esteem, which means that she has often succumbed to
passion. By marrying, Blanche hopes to escape poverty and the bad reputation
that haunts her. But because the chivalric Southern gentleman savior and
caretaker (represented by Shep Huntleigh) she hopes will rescue her is extinct,
Blanche is left with no realistic
possibility of future happiness. As Blanche sees it, Mitch is her only
chance for contentment, even though he is far from her ideal.
Stanley’s relentless persecution of Blanche foils her pursuit
of Mitch as well as her attempts to shield herself from the harsh truth of her
situation. The play chronicles the subsequent crumbling of Blanche’s self-image
and sanity. Stanley himself takes the final stabs at Blanche, destroying the remainder of her
sexual and mental esteem by raping her and then committing her to an
insane asylum. In the end, Blanche blindly allows herself to be led away by a
kind doctor, ignoring her sister’s cries. This final image is the sad
culmination of Blanche’s vanity and total dependence upon men for happiness.
Stella Kowalski - Blanche’s younger sister,
about twenty-five years old and of a mild disposition that visibly sets her
apart from her more vulgar neighbors. Stella possesses the same timeworn
aristocratic heritage as Blanche, but she jumped the sinking ship in her late teens
and left Mississippi for New Orleans. There, Stella married lower-class
Stanley, with whom she shares a robust sexual relationship. Stella’s union with Stanley is
both animal and spiritual,
violent but renewing. After Blanche’s arrival, Stella is torn between
her sister and her husband. Eventually, she stands by Stanley, perhaps in part because she
gives birth to his child near the play’s end. While she loves and pities
Blanche, she cannot bring
herself to believe Blanche’s accusations that Stanley dislikes Blanche,
and she eventually dismisses Blanche’s claim that Stanley raped her. Stella’s denial of reality at the
play’s end shows that she has more in common with her sister than she thinks.
Stanley Kowalski - Audience
members may well see Stanley as an egalitarian hero at the play’s start. He is loyal to his friends and passionate to his wife.
Stanley possesses an animalistic
physical vigor that is evident in his love of work, of fighting, and of
sex. His family is from Poland, and several times he expresses his outrage at
being called “Polack” and other derogatory names. When Blanche calls him a
“Polack,” he makes her look old-fashioned and ignorant by asserting that he was
born in America, is an American, and can only be called “Polish.” Stanley represents the new,
heterogeneous America to which Blanche doesn’t belong, because she is a
relic from a defunct social hierarchy. He sees himself as a social leveler, as
he tells Stella in Scene Eight.
Stanley’s intense
hatred of Blanche is motivated in part by the aristocratic past Blanche
represents. He also (rightly) sees her as untrustworthy and does not appreciate
the way she attempts to fool him and his friends into thinking she is better
than they are. Stanley’s animosity toward Blanche manifests itself in all of
his actions toward her—his investigations of her past, his birthday gift to
her, his sabotage of her relationship with Mitch.
In the end, Stanley’s down-to-earth character proves harmfully crude and brutish.
His chief amusements are gambling, bowling, sex, and drinking, and he lacks
ideals and imagination. His disturbing, degenerate nature, first hinted at when
he beats his wife, is fully evident after he rapes his sister-in-law. Stanley shows no remorse for his brutal
actions. The play ends with an image of Stanley as the ideal family man,
comforting his wife as she holds their newborn child. The wrongfulness of this
representation, given what we have learned about him in the play, ironically
calls into question society’s decision to ostracize Blanche.
Harold “Mitch” Mitchell - Perhaps because he lives with his dying mother, Mitch is noticeably more sensitive than
Stanley’s other poker friends. The other men pick on him for being a mama’s
boy. Even in his first, brief line in Scene One, Mitch’s gentlemanly behavior
stands out. Mitch appears to be a kind, decent human being who, we learn in
Scene Six, hopes to marry
so that he will have a woman to bring home to his dying mother.
Mitch doesn’t fit the bill of the chivalric hero of whom
Blanche dreams. He is clumsy, sweaty, and has unrefined interests like muscle
building. Though sensitive, he lacks Blanche’s romantic perspective and
spirituality, as well as her understanding of poetry and literature. She toys
with his lack of intelligence—for example, when she teases him in French
because she knows he won’t understand—duping him into playing along with her
self-flattering charades.
Though they come from completely different worlds, Mitch and
Blanche are drawn together
by their mutual need of companionship and support, and they therefore
believe themselves right for one another. They also discover that they have
both experienced the death
of a loved one. The snare in their relationship is sexual. As part of
her prim-and-proper act, Blanche repeatedly rejects Mitch’s physical
affections, refusing to sleep with him. Once he discovers the truth about
Blanche’s sordid sexual past, Mitch is both angry and embarrassed about the way
Blanche has treated him. When he arrives to chastise her, he states that he feels
he deserves to have sex with her, even though he no longer respects her enough to think her fit
to be his wife.
The difference in Stanley’s and Mitch’s treatment of Blanche
at the play’s end underscores Mitch’s fundamental gentlemanliness. Though he desires
and makes clear that he wants to sleep with Blanche, Mitch does not rape her and leaves when she cries
out. Also, the tears Mitch sheds after Blanche struggles to escape the
fate Stanley has arranged for her show that he genuinely cares for her. In
fact, Mitch is the only person other than Stella who seems to understand the tragedy of
Blanche’s madness.
Eunice - Stella’s friend, upstairs neighbor,
and landlady. Eunice and her husband, Steve, represent the low-class, carnal life
that Stella has chosen for herself. Like Stella, Eunice accepts her husband’s affections despite
his physical abuse of her. At the end of the play, when Stella hesitates to
stay with Stanley at Blanche’s expense, Eunice forbids Stella to question her
decision and tells her she has no choice but to disbelieve Blanche.
Allan Grey - The young man
with poetic aspirations whom Blanche fell in love with and married as a
teenager. One afternoon, she discovered Allan in bed with an older male friend.
That evening at a ball, after she announced her disgust at his homosexuality, he ran outside and shot himself in the head.
Allan’s death, which marked the end of Blanche’s sexual innocence, has haunted her ever since.
Long dead by the time of the play’s action, Allan never appears onstage.
A Young Collector - A
teenager who comes to the Kowalskis’ door to collect for the newspaper when
Blanche is home alone. The boy leaves bewildered after Blanche hits on him and
gives him a passionate farewell kiss. He embodies Blanche’s obsession with youth and presumably reminds her of her
teenage love, the young
poet Allan Grey, whom she married and lost to suicide. Blanche’s flirtation
with the newspaper collector also displays her unhealthy sexual preoccupation with teenage boys,
which we learn of later in the play.
Shep Huntleigh - A former
suitor of Blanche’s whom she met again a year before her arrival in New Orleans
while vacationing in Miami. Despite the fact that Shep is married, Blanche hopes he will provide the
financial support for her and Stella to escape from Stanley. As
Blanche’s mental stability deteriorates, her fantasy that Shep is coming to
sweep her away becomes more
and more real to her. Shep never appears onstage.
Steve - Stanley’s poker buddy
who lives upstairs with his wife, Eunice. Like Stanley, Steve is a brutish, hot-blooded, physically
fit male and an abusive
husband.
Pablo - Stanley’s poker
buddy. Like Stanley and Steve, Steve is physically fit and brutish. Pablo is Hispanic, and
his friendship with Steve, Stanley, and Mitch emphasizes the culturally diverse nature
of their neighborhood.
A Negro Woman - In Scene One,
the Negro woman is sitting on the steps talking to Eunice when Blanche arrives,
and she finds Stanley’s openly sexual gestures toward Stella hilarious. Later, in Scene Ten, we
see her scurrying across the stage in the night as she rifles through a
prostitute’s lost handbag.
A Doctor - At the play’s
finale, the doctor arrives to whisk Blanche off to an asylum. He and the nurse
initially seem to be heartless
institutional caretakers, but, in the end, the doctor appears more kindly as he takes
off his jacket and leads Blanche away. This image of the doctor ironically
conforms to Blanche’s notions of the chivalric Southern gentleman who will offer her salvation.
A Mexican Woman - A vendor of
Mexican funeral
decorations who frightens Blanche by issuing the plaintive call “Flores
para los muertos,” which means “Flowers for the dead.”
A Nurse - Also called the
“Matron,” she accompanies the doctor to collect Blanche and bring her to an institution. She possesses a
severe, unfeminine manner and has a talent for subduing hysterical patients.
Prostitute - Moments before
Stanley rapes Blanche, the back wall of the Kowalskis’ apartment becomes
transparent, and Blanche sees
a prostitute in the street being pursued by a male drunkard. The prostitute’s
situation evokes Blanche’s
own predicament. After the prostitute and the drunkard pass, the Negro
woman scurries by with the prostitute’s lost handbag in hand.
