The Characters in "A Streetcar Named Desire":
CHARACTERS IN THE PLAY
BLANCHE DUBOIS
A homeless woman in her thirties, Blanche arrives at her sister’s house at the beginning of the play. Blanche had been a schoolteacher, married Allan, a man she later discovered to be homosexual. Her reactions to his sexual orientation cause him to commit suicide. Lonely and guilty, she becomes a prostitute, who loses her teaching position when her sexual relationship with a teenager is discovered. After the family plantation Belle Reve is lost, she turns to her sister Stella, who lives in with her husband Stanley in a poor area of New Orleans. She hides her past and fragility behind her Southern aristocrat clothes and manners and is critical of Stanley, calling him “bestial” (71). When her past is revealed, she loses Mitch’s love and the potential of marriage. At the end of the play, she is raped by Stanley, falls into insanity, and is taken to the state mental asylum.
Perhaps because of his famous scene screaming “Stella, Stella!” Stanley is probably the best-known character; however, most critics agree that Blanche is the focus of the play. She is a complex character worth serious study. “If a single character in contemporary American stage literature approaches the classical Aristotelian tragic figure, it must surely be Blanche DuBois. Deceptive, dishonest, fraudulent, permanently flawed, unable to face reality, Blanche is for all that thoroughly capable of commanding audience compassion, for her struggle and the crushing defeat she endures have the magnitude of tragedy. The inevitability of her doom, her refusal to back down in the face of it, and the essential humanity of the forces that drive her to it are the very heart of tragedy. No matter what evils she may have done, nor what villainies practiced, she is a human being trapped by the fates, making a human fight to escape and to survive with some shred of human dignity, in full recognition of her own fatal human weaknesses and the increasing absence of hope” (Miller 11).
STANLEY KOWALSKI
Like Blanche, Stanley is a complicated mix of coarseness and sensitivity. He clearly loves his wife Stella, as is shown when he fears that she has left him after he has thrown a radio through a window and then attacked her. His famous cry, “Stella! My baby doll’s left me! . . . Stell-ahhhhh!” (59), makes clear both his love for her and his violent nature. The very act of hitting her shows his crude and violent side. Early in the play he says to Blanche, “I’m afraid I’ll strike you as being the unrefined type” (31). When he hears her describe him as “an animal,” “ape-like,” and “bestial” (71-72), she becomes his enemy. His violence is not aimed just at Blanche or Stella; he fights with his friends while playing poker. “Stanley, as brute force incarnate, has no poetry or sensitivity or nobility in him . . . His intelligence is mostly animal cunning and his power of speech limited to expressing basic desires” (Brustein 10). After several violent acts related to Blanche’s clothing, jewelry, and love poems from her dead husband, his final act is to rape her. He does so saying, “We’ve had this date with each other from the beginning!” (130).
Like Blanche, Stanley is a complicated mix of coarseness and sensitivity. He clearly loves his wife Stella, as is shown when he fears that she has left him after he has thrown a radio through a window and then attacked her. His famous cry, “Stella! My baby doll’s left me! . . . Stell-ahhhhh!” (59), makes clear both his love for her and his violent nature. The very act of hitting her shows his crude and violent side. Early in the play he says to Blanche, “I’m afraid I’ll strike you as being the unrefined type” (31). When he hears her describe him as “an animal,” “ape-like,” and “bestial” (71-72), she becomes his enemy. His violence is not aimed just at Blanche or Stella; he fights with his friends while playing poker. “Stanley, as brute force incarnate, has no poetry or sensitivity or nobility in him . . . His intelligence is mostly animal cunning and his power of speech limited to expressing basic desires” (Brustein 10). After several violent acts related to Blanche’s clothing, jewelry, and love poems from her dead husband, his final act is to rape her. He does so saying, “We’ve had this date with each other from the beginning!” (130).
STELLA KOWALSKI
Blanche’s sister and Stanley’s wife, Stella is happily married throughout the play, in spite of incidents such as the argument resulting in Stanley hitting her. Even then, she is quickly brought back to her happiness by Stanley’s crying out for her. She is a contented person, adjusted to a life that is very different from her younger years on the plantation. She has many friends, most of whom reflect the neighborhood in which she lives. The contrast between the two sisters—Stella a normal, happy, and average woman and Blanche a refined, hypersensitive, and decadent aristocrat—is soon obvious. Shortly after Blanche’s arrival, Stella seems uneasy although she clearly wants to help her sister. Stella is the real hero of the play, “for she alone is prepared to offer the necessary comfort and understanding. She discovers a genuine fulfillment based on sexuality but, more significantly, she thereby stumbles on the urgent need for that tenderness and compassion which . . . is the key to human predicament” (Bigsby 107-108). At the end of the play, as she holds her child and sobs as Blanche is led away by the doctor and nurse, she is held “voluptuously, soothingly” by Stanley who “kneels beside her and his fingers find the opening of her blouse” (142). Stella has to make a choice between dedication to Blanche and commitment to Stanley. She chooses Stanley, although painfully, and lets her sister walk out of her life.
Blanche’s sister and Stanley’s wife, Stella is happily married throughout the play, in spite of incidents such as the argument resulting in Stanley hitting her. Even then, she is quickly brought back to her happiness by Stanley’s crying out for her. She is a contented person, adjusted to a life that is very different from her younger years on the plantation. She has many friends, most of whom reflect the neighborhood in which she lives. The contrast between the two sisters—Stella a normal, happy, and average woman and Blanche a refined, hypersensitive, and decadent aristocrat—is soon obvious. Shortly after Blanche’s arrival, Stella seems uneasy although she clearly wants to help her sister. Stella is the real hero of the play, “for she alone is prepared to offer the necessary comfort and understanding. She discovers a genuine fulfillment based on sexuality but, more significantly, she thereby stumbles on the urgent need for that tenderness and compassion which . . . is the key to human predicament” (Bigsby 107-108). At the end of the play, as she holds her child and sobs as Blanche is led away by the doctor and nurse, she is held “voluptuously, soothingly” by Stanley who “kneels beside her and his fingers find the opening of her blouse” (142). Stella has to make a choice between dedication to Blanche and commitment to Stanley. She chooses Stanley, although painfully, and lets her sister walk out of her life.
HAROLD MITCHELL (MITCH)
Mitch, one of the poker players, is a young unmarried man who lives with his mother. During the poker scene, he and Blanche are attracted to each other. He leaves the game to talk with her. Blanche turns on a radio and they dance until Stanley in a rage throws the radio out a window and hits Stella. Later Blanche and Mitch talk. She tells him of the death of her husband, at first making it appear she was not critical or angry with him, then confessing the truth. Mitch comforts her, then proposes: “You need somebody. And I need somebody, too. Could it be—you and me, Blanche?” (96). Later Stanley tells Mitch the full story about Blanche’s past. Mitch confronts Blanche and attempts to have sex with her, but she drives him away. “Blanche knows that any hope now of establishing a saving relationship with another human being is lost” (Adler 22).
EUNICE AND STEVE HUBBELL
The upstairs neighbours of the Kowalskis. Eunice is present when Blanche arrives. Steve is one of the poker players.
YOUNG MAN
A boy who arrives in Scene Five to collect money for the newspaper and is approached sexually by Blanche, although, other than flirting and a kiss, nothing happens between them.
PABLO GONZALES
A player in the poker game.
COLOURED WOMAN
A neighbour of the Kowalskis, about whom, Williams writes, “the colored woman [is] a neighbour, for New Orleans is a cosmopolitan city where there is a relatively warm and easy intermingling of races in the old part of town” (13).
MEXICAN WOMAN
A street vendor about whom Williams writes, “She is a blind Mexican woman in a dark shawl, carrying bunches of those gaudy tin flowers that lower class Mexicans display at funerals and other festive occasions” (119). She appears selling flowers near the end of the final argument between Blanche and Mitch.
A DOCTOR AND A NURSE
They arrive at the end of the play and lead Blanche away to the mental hospital.
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