Belle Reve is the name of the former plantation where Stella and Blanche grew up in faded post-Civil War splendor (or decay, depending on your point of view). It is described as a southern mansion with tall columns. Its name means "beautiful dreams" in French.

The home is most associated with Blanche, who perceives herself as a genteel lady far superior to Stanley based on her birth and younger life on the estate. It represents a dream world Blanche has never been able to fully pull herself out of, one that has been destructive to her by preventing her from facing the reality that the old days—if they ever really existed—are long over.

Ironically, the street Stanley and Stella live on in New Orleans is called Elysium Fields, which means paradise, a name similar to the dreamlike fantasy name Belle Reve. The tiny apartment Blanche, Stanley, and Stella share, which consists of only a kitchen, a bedroom, and a bathroom, is anything but a paradise, which leads us to suspect that Belle Reve was never quite a perfectly beautiful dream either.

Blanche, however, is captured by her belief in the ethereal fantasy of the past. The play both critiques living in this kind of beautiful dreamland but shows it, too, to have an alluring, poetic beauty that Stanley and Stella's more pragmatic world does not share. Blanche is the artist whose canvas is her life, weaving romantic fictions: the play shows the costs of living a fiction but perhaps leaves us sympathetic with the yearning for such a life.

Belle Reve is the name of Blanche and Stella's previous twenty-acre estate in Laurel, Mississippi. Belle Reve, which means "beautiful dream," is the prestigious plantation home that symbolically represents the Old South throughout the play. Blanche mentions that Belle Reve was lost due to her ancestors' "epic fornication," and she was forced to vacate because she could not afford the payments. Much like the Old South, Belle Reve has become a figment of the past and is no longer the glorious, thriving estate. However, Blanche continually references Belle Reve and compares it to the urban, lower-class French Quarter. Blanche cannot fathom how Stella has forgotten Belle Reve and believes that she is living well below her standards in New Orleans. Belle Reve also represents Blanche's unblemished past before she was forced out of town for her scandalous behavior. To Blanche, Belle Reve represents her adolescence before her young husband committed suicide. Similar to Blanche, the history of Belle Reve is more appealing than its present circumstances. In Blanche's mind, the "beautiful dream," namely, Belle Reve, is all that remains.

Belle Reve, which means beautiful dream, is the name of the plantation, the former home of Stella and Blanche DuBois.  Representative of the Old South and the charmed lives that the sisters known as Southern Belles, Belle Reve represents the past as well as a part of the present of Blanche; for, it is connotative of the illusionary life of Blanche, who continues to act as though she is central to everyone's attentions. The author of A Streetcar Named Desire, Tennessee Wiliams, himself writes, 

"... when I think about her, Blanche seems like the youth of our hearts which has to be put away for worldly considerations: poetry, music, the early soft feelings that we can't afford to live with under a naked light bulb which is now."

Belle Reve suggests, too, the streetcar ride that Blanche has taken on Desire, then she has transferred to a car named Cemeteries. According to one interpretation by John J. Mood, in her attempts to recapture the dream of youthful happiness--her personal belle reve, Blanche remains in a state of emotional death on the street named Cemeteries as she wishes to cling to the past, a past that makes her brittle because it reminds her of her young dead husband.

Continuing this motif of a beautiful dream, Blanche imagines herself getting off one day at Elysian Fields, a street named for the soul's journey back to life in Virgil's Aeneid. She hopes that she can break her chain of lustful desires that end in destructive relationships and marry Mitch.  In Scene Six of the play, Blanche is honest and relates her past and what has happened to her young husband. Sympathetically, Mitch tells her, "You need somebody, and I need somebody,too."

At this point, Blanche can reach Elysian Fields; however, she is too weak and retreats into reverie and illusion as in Scene Seven she is confronted with her past because Stanley has talked to Mitch, but Blanche wants the lights dimmed, "I don't want realism. I want magic." Indeed, her dreams of life with Mitch are ruined with this retreat of Blanche. If she were to continue her honesty with Mitch, Blanche could find, at least, a Nouvelle Reve, a new dream, but as it is,  Blanche can only "be dependent upon the kindness of strangers."