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- Vulnerable: Anxious for protection
- Weak: Lets here sexual desires cloud her judgement - takes risks like using a pickup line from an upper-class call girl and flirts with the young man
- Needs to be the centre of attention
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- Shows the conflict between realism and fantasy: Blanche represents how the world should be - happiness, passion and 'magic' - but is constantly thwarted by Stanley, who represents how the world is - tragedy, treachery and depravity.
- Represents the decay of the Old South: She has lost the family home and her job due to 'epic fornications.' This means that her ancestors, alongside her, were too frivolous with their lives and so it led the family to ruins; reflects the story of the Civil War.
- Represents the conflict between capitalism and socialism
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- Mental decay: In Scene One we do suspect that the loss of Belle Reve has affected Blanche more than she's willing to let on. Then in Scene Five, when she tries to seduce the collection boy, we realise that she is constantly trying to protect her fantasy world. When Mitch tries to **** her (Scene Nine) and Stanley does **** her (Scene Ten) her fantasy world has been destroyed and her sanity is reduced from fragmented to non-existent.
- Gradually loses her Southern Belle personality: In contrast to Scenes One, Three and Five - where she expects social inferiors to serve her, men to stand up when she enters (being gentlemen) - she demeans herself to the status of a prostitute.
- Become the tragic heroine: As a result of her complete mental decay in Scene Eleven, she is taken to a mental hospital. This makes her the tragic heroine because she has struggled throughout the play and has finally found some sort of peace, albeit through suffering from violence.
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- Scene One quotes: 'They told me to take a streetcar named Desire, and to transfer to one called Cemeteries, and ride six blocks and get off at - Elysian Fields.', 'suggests a moth', 'nervous or overwrought', 'fought and bled', 'touches her handkerchief to her forehead', 'the long parade to the graveyard', 'had put up his tent on our doorstep!' “Where were you! In bed with your—Polack!” [She pours a half tumbler of whisky and tosses it down.] 'I've got to keep hold of myself!' 'Only Poe! Only Mr Edgar Allan Poe!'
- Scene Two: 'If I didn't know that you was my wife's sister I'd get ideas about you!'"I called him a little boy and laughed and flirted. Yes, I was flirting with your husband!" - [She sprays herself with her atomiser; then playfully sprays him with it] -
- Scene Three: 'I think I will bathe', [Blanche looks after him [Mitch] with a certain interest], [Blanche rises and crosses leisurely to a small whit radio and turns it on.] 'I can't stand a naked light-bulb, any more than I can a rude remark or a vulgar action.', 'I need kindness now.'
- Scene Four:"What such a man has to offer is animal force […]. But the only way to live with such a man is to – go to bed with him! And that’s your job – not mine!", 'It brought me here - where I'm not wanted and where I'm ashamed to be!', 'You're married to a madman!'
- Scene Five: 'Virgo is the virgin.','I'm spending the summer on the wing, making flying visits here and there.', [It foams over and spills. Blanche gives a piercing cry.]
- Scene Six: 'Voulez-vous couchez avec moi le soir? Vous ne comprenz pas? Ah, quel dommage!', 'Sometimes - there's God - so quickly'
- Scene Eight: “You didn’t know Blanche as a girl. Nobody, nobody was tender and trusting as she was. But people like you abused her, and forced her to change.”
- Scene Nine: “I don’t want realism, I want magic! [..] Yes, yes, magic! I try to give that to people. I misrepresent things to them. I don’t tell the truth, I tell what ought to be truth. And if that is sinful, then let me be damned for it!”, "I had many intimacies with strangers. After the death of Allan—intimacies with strangers was all I seemed able to fill my empty heart with."
- Scene Ten: 'casting my pearls before swine'; 'soiled and crumpled' evening grown and her 'scuffed silver slippers
- Scene Eleven: 'an ocean as blue as...my first lover's eyes', 'I have always depended on the kindness of strangers', 'I shall die of eating an unwashed g**** one day out on the ocean.
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