“A Streetcar named Desire” by Tennessee Williams is a play in which internal and external forces lead to a characters downfall. In this play Blanche Dubois’ own actions bring about her decline in mental stability as well as Stanley Kowalski, her brother-in-law, being a contributing factor to her deterioration. Her downfall is due to her lying, her drinking, her insulting behaviour and her disastrous relationships with men. Blanche’s disorderly drinking subsequently leads to her inevitable downfall. When she firstly arrives in scene one “she springs up and crosses to the closet”. In the closet of Stanley and Stella’s apartment, there is a whiskey bottle which she then goes on to have a drink of and then washes the glass to conceal her drinking problem. When she is drunk she can’t remember her horrible past and therefore uses drink to forget. This is then continued in scene ten “as the drinking and packing went on a feeling of hysterical exhilaration came into her.” This links to scene one as “drinking” was a habit introduced at the very …show more content…
In one scene she is talking about her young husband “I knew I had failed him in some mysterious way”. When Blanche discovers her husband was homosexual she told him he disgusted her which then lead him to commit suicide and shot himself. At the exact time he did this, polka music was playing and this music has haunted her ever since. She knows if she had never said he disgusted her then he wouldn’t have killed himself. The guilt of her actions is revealed as the root of her mental deterioration and her subsequent drinking and promiscuous behaviour. In scene one Blanche “sprays herself with an atomizer then playfully sprays with it”. Here it is flirting with Stanley and treats him the same way she treats other men but he doesn’t want to have anything to do with her. The fact that she flirts with Stanley puts ideas in his head and foreshadows the rape