A Streetcar Named Desire: Scene Notes – Scene 9
Summary:
·
The scene opens with Blanche alone in the apartment drowning
her sorrows with a bottle of liquor as the ‘rapid, feverish polka tune, the
Varsouviana,’ is played in her head.
·
Mitch arrives unannounced, dressed in his working clothes
and unshaven and Blanche rushes to make herself look presentable hoping that
there is still a chance to mend their relationship
·
Instant tension is created when Mitch ignores the
opportunity to kiss Blanche on the lips and this is reinforced by Blanche’s
incessant speeches which prevent Mitch from talking because she knows that
something is wrong.
·
Mitch startles Blanche by bringing up the subject of light
and how he has never seen her in the light Blanche or in the daytime.
·
They argue and Mitch rips the paper lantern off the light discovering
that Blanche is older than he thought her to be.
·
Blanche’s checkered past is discussed and we learn that
after the death of her young husband, Blanche had nothing to fill the void except
intimacies with strangers.
·
The truth of her past is revealed including the stories
involving the soldiers and a degree of sympathy is evoked for her.
·
At the end of this scene, Blanche is reduced to hysteria
when Mitch refuses to marry her because she is “not clean enough to bring in
the house with his mother”
·
Mitch attempts to rape Blanche saying that he has come here
after ‘What he has been missing all Summer’ but Blanche easily scares him away
by screaming of ‘Fire’
·
The scene finally ends with Mitch running away as Blanche
sinks down with the ‘distant blue piano’ being heard.
Motifs &
Connotations:
Pleasant Dreams vs.
Ugly Realities
“I’ll tell you what I want. Magic!...p204” Although
we sometimes view Blanche as a deceptive and manipulative character, especially
in her relationship with Mitch, here Williams paints her lies in as sympathetic
a light as possible. The reference to magic suggests that Blanche has not
intended to deceive anyone but instead has simply been trying to make the world
a better place. While this could be interpreted as a further attempt at
manipulation the impression we are given here is that Blanche is genuine and
that, unable to accept the world as it really is, she would rather dress it up
in the colours of butterflies wings.
Insanity
Although lucid in the
conversation with Mitch Blanche’s accelerating descent into insanity is implied
by her distraction when, on (pg.206) she mumbles ‘[as if to herself]:
Crumble and fade…’ Blanche here is portrayed as barely sane because her stories
and recollections are constantly switching as various interruptions, such as
the Mexican women, trigger different recollection which interrupt the flow of
Blanche’s thoughts.
The Avoidance of Light
In previous scenes,
we see how Blanche refuses to be seen under a bright light and it is also said
that, since the death of Allan, she has lived with nothing in her life stronger
than a candle light. On a physical level, Blanche avoids light to prevent
others from seeing the reality of her fading beauty. However, the light also
represents a past that haunts her as a result of the death of her young husband,
and it appears that world appears dull in comparison to the bright ‘spotlight’
of love that shone on her in her youth. In this way her later promiscuity can
be seen as simply an attempt to find a spark or light of passion bright enough
to light the gloom she was left with after Allan’s death.
In this scene
however, the truth is brought to the surface when Mitch forces her under the
lamp. “He turns the light on and stares
at her…p204” Blanche’s exposure to light causes her pain and suffering
because of her ugly past that she attempts to cover through the coloured
lantern. Ironically, even though the truth is revealed by Mitch as he turns on
the light, we see that the two characters are eventually again plunged in
darkness as Mitch turns off the light once he has seen Blanche’s face. This
suggests that, a little like Blanche, he has seen an ugly reality which in fact
he also does not wish to accept. We can imagine that
Drunkenness
A common theme
throughout the play we see a different view of Mitch when under the influence
of alcohol. Mitch has always been depicted as different from the rest of the
men, gentlemanly almost. However, at the end of scene 9, we see him treating
Blanche like the other men, expecting her to sleep with him. “What I have been missing all summer…p207” The
impression, however, is not that Mitch is actually as barbarous as
While the alcoholism
of Stanley, Steve and Mitch reveals the coarse and brutal side of life often
ending in violence, Blanche’s drinking is an attempt to hide from the truth, in
her case this is that she is an old, destitute spinster.
The Varsouviana Polka
Music
With Mitch’s
appearance, Blanche immediately begins to act the part of the innocent young
girl and the polka music stops. But almost immediately she realizes that
something is wrong and the music begins again. The ‘Varsouniana’ is a
representative of her past that she wishes to escape from but finds herself
trapped. At numerous times during this scene the music plays when her past is
brought up. The fast and feverish pace of the music also suggests her impending
madness.
Death
Death has appeared as a motif infrequently throughout the play but when it does appear it is often the result of misguided desire – indeed to get to Elysian Fields in the first place Blanche has to transfer from the streetcar named Desire to the one called Cemeteries. The appearance of death from the beginning of the play suggests that it is inescapable for Blanche, possibly reflecting the fact that the class and value system she seems to represent is decaying. This idea is established by the loss of Belle Reve and the fact that Death seemed to have set up camp there as she watched the lives of her relatives and the estate itself gradually slip away. Blanche's fears of aging and of lost beauty are perhaps an extension of this and the motif is reinforced in this scene when the Mexican women says that she is ‘selling flowers for the dead’, Blanche reacts in horror because it triggers her memories of the past when she was once young and beautiful, which contrasts with the present. It shows her denial of reality and her paranoia and foreshadows her eventual insanity.
Themes &
Connotations:
Female dependence on
men
“…intimacies with strangers was all I seemed able to fill my
empty heart with…p205” “Well, I needed somebody…”p205” Not only Blanche but
women in general have been portrayed as dependent on men in both a financial and
sexual sense. There is a sense of desperation in the way Blanche is portrayed at
the end of this scene as her suggestion of marriage to a drunken man who is
about to rape her reveals that her only escape from the destitute and lonely
life that she is living is through marriage to a man. Although she disapproves
of Stella and Stanley’s abusive relationship, she is unable to avoid finding herself
in a similar situation to Stella’s where she too is dependent on a sex that
would exploit her.
Loneliness and
longing for love
“Then marry me Mitch!...p207” Whether or not
Blanche is in love with Mitch, it is clear that marriage is a way out for her.
It is also stated that she had many intimacies with strangers to fill her empty
heart. However, this eventually leads to Mitch’s rejection of her when he
discovers her past. Blanche’s motives are questionable and it is never quite
clear whether she has pursued Mitch out of love or simply out of a desire for
protection. In a sense, the images of dim candle light actually suggest that
she has never really been able to recover from the death of her young husband
and that it is really his love that she is yearning for.
Fantasy’s Inability
to Overcome Reality
“I’ll tell you what I want. Magic! Yes, yes magic! I try to
give that to people…p204” Even when confronted, Blanche denies doing anything wrong.
“Never inside, I didn’t lie in my heart…p205” Blanche has been portrayed as
living her life as according to her fantasy, still trapped in her past where
she still had Belle Reve and continued living her life as in a higher social
class. This is the most sympathetic reading of a character who,
more cynically, could be called deceptive and manipulative. However, regardless
of the motivation for lies, it is clear that the fantasy world Blanche has
tried to create has been destroyed by the harsh realities of the world that she
actually finds herself in. The image of a tin can being tied to the tail of a
kite in the previous scene encapsulates this idea nicely as Blanche as does the
image of Mitch turning on the light to reveal the, literal, ugliness of the
reality before him.
Characters:
Blanche
In contrast to
previous scenes, there is a degree of sympathy created for Blanche here after
hearing her story and we seem to see her as a delicate moth-like creature on
the edge of disintegration. Williams has attempted to show how Blanche’s
over-delicate and over-sensitive nature was the reason she sought escape from
her failure with her young husband by turning to alcohol and to intimacies with
strangers. We see her in this scene as desperate (in seeking marriage) and at
points, delusional (her throat is tightening with hysteria) which intimates
that Blanche is on the verge of a breakdown.
We are also finally
given an insight into the motivation behind Blanche’s lies as Mitch tears
the paper lantern off the light bulb. pg. 203 after which she claims that her
lies have only been motivated by the desire to create ‘magic’. She is portrayed
sympathetically here as even though she knows it’s sinful’ she is
willing to be dammed for it. We see her desperation is stretched to the point
that she begs Mitch to marry her to which he responds that she is ‘not clean
enough to bring in the house’.
Mitch
Mitch is introduced,
unshaven and dressed in his dirty work clothes when he dropped by unannounced.
Although he has been portrayed as softer compared to other men, in this scene,
we see a side of him that parallels them. Reeking with alcohol, he confronts
her and at the end, attempts to rape her. The pathos generated by the fact that
Blanche feels differently about him that the other men she has encountered, “I
thank God for you…p205”, heightens the tragedy of the situation as we see
Blanche’s last chance for happiness, sanity and safety slip through her hands..
Mitch’s unshaven and
rugged appearance represent his honesty and his confrontation with her
emphasizes his beliefs which represent the social class he is from; honesty and
realism, ideals which he shares with Stanley. However, as with
Setting:
The setting takes
place in
Relation of Part to
Whole:
Prior to this scene
we learn of how