that Mitch is clearly her intellectual inferior, she manipulates their relationship so that she can pretend Mitch is the ideal suitor and thus enact the rituals of courtship. For example, when Mitch and Blanche return to Stella's flat after their date, Blanche says, "We are going to be very Bohemian. We are going to pretend that we are sitting in a little artists' cafe on the Left Bank in Paris!" Mitch could be any man here; his purpose is merely to function in the role Blanche has cast him in so that she can take pleasure in the fantasy of falling in love.

Lastly, Blanche desires to be open about her sexual wants while at the same time maintaining the decorum of a proper southern woman, an impossible balance to accomplish. She tries to be both women—the sexual one in her flirting with Stanley and the proper one in her relationship with Mitch. But those two identities are irreconcilable: the sexual side of her is punished when Stanley rapes her, and the proper side of her is punished when Mitch becomes disgusted by her, telling her "You're not clean enough to bring in the house with my mother."

Blanche is an incredibly complex character in that she is both victim and perpetrator. Her being taken away to a mental asylum at the play's end feels like the best possible solution: at least there she can live away from her rapist, in the world of "make-believe" she always sings about while she bathes.

Desire is a constant motif throughout this play, and it is Blanche's destructive desires which become her ultimate downfall.

At the onset of Streetcar, Blanche is told to get on the streetcar named Desire and then transfer to one called Cemeteries and get off at Elysian Fields (scene 1). Williams begins the play intertwining desire and death. Blanche begins with desire, changes to death, and ends up in Elysian Fields (a mythical place of the afterlife). This opening scene foreshadows the end of the play where she is defeated and sent off to a mental asylum.

What is her desire? First of all, she desires intimacy with a man. She mistakenly confuses this intimacy for sex which leads to the loss of her job and promiscuous behavior. Secondly, she desires magic, an unrealistic desire for an adult as the desire to believe in magic takes away personal responsibility (scene 9). Lastly, Blanche desires youth. Again, just as her desire for magic, the wish to stay young is unrealistic. This desire illustrates her abhorrence of light because she can't "stand a naked light bulb" (scene 3). Bright light reveals Blanche's age.

The theme of Blanche's desire and its ramifications can be traced throughout the entire play.

In Scene 4 of A Streetcar Named Desire, Stella tells her sister of her strong desires for Stanley, her husband.  Stella then asks her sister if she has not ridden on a streetcar of the name of Desire.  Blanche replies, "It brought me here--Where I'm not wanted and where I'm ashamed to be." Blanche, whose very name means white, the symbol of purity, constantly takes baths as if to wash away her past sins and shame, yet she desires to return to her past by recreating it in New Orleans through carefully woven tales of Belle Reve and her past lovers.  She creates the illusion of being younger by avoiding bright light with paper shades on the lamps in the apartment and going out only in the evening. And, she wants to be desirous to others, "Oh, in my youth, I excited some admiration," she says to Stanley in Scene Two. 

In Scene Five her sudden desire to be with the young man exemplifies further her attempts to recapture youth and a happiness that now eludes her.  This desire for the dreams of her youth and its illusion of happiness--"Belle Reve means beautiful dream"--leads, of course, to Blanche's tragedy of illusions.  For, she gradually loses touch with reality, sinking further and further into her delusional character that has "always been dependent upon the kindness of strangers."

On the other hand, as a foil character to Blanche, Stella's desires are practical.  She clearly loves Stanley and chooses to go along with the decision to have Blanche committed because she wishes to continue to live with her less than perfect husband for her own sake and for the sake of her child.  Practical minded, Stella rejects the glamorous life Blanche has desired for the reality of her flawed life with Stanley.  She chooses instead the

things that happen between a man and a woman in the dark--that sort of make everything else seem--unimportant.

A tragic hero or heroine evokes our pity or fear, according to Aristotle, because he or she suffers misfortune that seems cruel or disproportionate to what is deserved. The tragic hero/ine is a decent person to whom suffering comes, often because of a flaw.

Blanche's flaw is that she has lived too long in unreality—the world of the beautiful dreams of her faded (and now lost) southern home, aptly named "Belle Reve." She comes to New Orleans to live with her sister Stella, and to try, finally, as best she can, to face reality. She is older, she has been a prostitute, and now she needs to find a husband. She can no long afford to be picky, and is willing to marry "down," as her sister has done.

She finds a reasonable choice for a husband in the sweet, old-fashioned Mitch, and he is willing to marry her. Unfortunately, she has to continue to live in a certain realm of unreality to "catch" him, such as downplaying her age and leaving out the more sordid details of her past.

Her tragedy comes in the form of Stanley, so brutally fixed in reality that he will allow her no illusions. He destroys her dreams by exposing her completely and driving her would-be husband away. She is driven into madness. We pity her because she seems so very fragile and vulnerable, unfitted to withstand the brutality that Stanley represents.

In Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Name Desire the character of Blanche is a self-centered, hysterical and wild-natured woman who has lost every possible chance of respectability and, as a result, has fled to her sister's house in New Orleans to, perhaps, create a new life for herself.

However disparate and immoral Blanche's life is, there is an element of pathos in it. All through her life, Blanche has been trying to escape suffering. When she loses her father's estate of Belle Reve after his death Blanche makes it clear that it was she who had to stay behind trying to bring normality back while Stella had already eloped with Stanley.

The reason why she uses her body as a method of obtaining benefit is not necessarily because she is a cheap woman but because, being brought up as a Southern Belle in a much safer environment, Blanche is raised with the understanding that it is perfectly fine to flirt and to use charm to obtain benefits from it. Now, away from the safety and old South charm of Belle Reve, Stella and her mannerisms are thrown into the lion's den of a very superficial and materialistic society. She has to survive the heartbreak that comes as a result of finding out how different the world is outside of Belle Reve.

Moreover, Blanche is very protective of her sister, Stella. She does hope for a better life for the two of them. She simply has reached the end of her rope and there is no way for her to fix anything.

Therefore, Blanche's story is meant to cause pity and not anger. The audience will, at some point, identify with a moment in time with her main problem: That society takes away the world, as she knows it, and throws her into a world that she is simply not prepared to live in.

Throughout A Streetcar Named Desire, Blanche has been waging a war on reality. She lies about her age. She lies about why she needs to stay with Stella and Stanley. She lies about her values and sexual behavior. She never does this with malicious intent, but because reality has been harsh and painful for her. She hopes by lying about reality she can make living in it more bearable. During the climax, she faces off against Stanley, who represents cold reality. Her lies have all fallen apart, alienating her boyfriend, Mitch, and her sister, Stella. Stanley mocks Blanche about her constant delusions and then rapes her, sending Blanche into a full mental break from the real world.

In the play's final scene, Stanley and Stella choose to send Blanche to a psychiatric institution. Stella cannot bring herself to believe Stanley raped Blanche. The doctor and a nurse appear at the house to collect Blanche. Blanche initially resists and the nurse wrestles her down. She wants to put Blanche in a straightjacket, but the doctor instead chooses to play into Blanche's fantasies about Southern gentility, offering her his arm. Blanche takes his arm and willingly goes with him, an illustration of how she has fully succumbed to her fantasy world.

Blanche DuBois represents a desire to cling to a romanticized past—her own and that of the aristocratic South. She was raised on a plantation called Belle Reve, but she has come down in the world so much that she needs to rely on her sister, Stella, who lives in a run-down apartment in New Orleans. When Blanche first arrives at Stella's apartment, Blanche says the following:

Oh, I'm not going to be hypocritical, I'm going to be honestly critical about it! Never, never, never in my worst dreams could I picture—Only Poe! Only Mr. Edgar Allan Poe!—could do it justice!

Blanche finds her straightened circumstances as horrific as living in a Poe story. Later, she finds Stella's husband, Stanley, repellent for his crude, working-class ways. Instead of adjusting herself to reality, she continues to look for a romantic ideal. She searches for these ideals in part by trying to seduce men, and she also lives in a world of pretense and daydreams.

By trying to dominate her situation this way and by trying to ineffectively control reality, she finds herself helpless. In the end, she is reduced to mental illness after Stanley rapes her. In part from failing to deal effectively with the reality in which she finds herself, she loses her mind.

Blanche, one of the main characters in Tennessee Williams' play A Streetcar Named Desire, is certainly desperate to be dominant. Throughout the play, Blanche continually tries to control Stella, Stanley, and Mitch.

She tries to control Stella by trying to force her to reconsider her relationship with Stanley. Blanche also tries to control both Stanley and Mitch through her sexuality.

In the end, her inability to be the dominate character in the play leads to her downfall. By not being able to control anything going on around her, Blanche's already unstable mind begins to deteriorate further. It is the rape which pushes her into complete insanity.

By pushing against Stanley's strong character, Blanche forces him to do the one thing that she could not overcome--physical strength. It is the rape, therefore, which is the end for Blanche. Her inability to control, or dominate Stanly, was the one thing which led to her ultimate demise.

If "fate" can be defined as external conditions outside the control of the individual, I think that there is much out in the world that conspires to ensure that Blanche finds difficulty in being happy.  One of the external and fated events that helps to bring about her own downfall is the fact that Blanche is clinging to a time that is no longer evident.  Blanche's belief in the chivalry and "honor" of Belle Reve is something that animates her being. It is something that is so ingrained in who she is that she is not really in control of acting upon it.  Rather, it is something that is embedded in her and reveals itself to be almost like a force of fate that controls her.  Additionally, I think that Blanche can be seen as a victim of fate in how fundamentally different she is from the world around her.  Blanche is fated to be emotionally destroyed and physically imprisoned by a world that treats difference as not something to be treasured or even tolerated, but rather manipulated.  The ending in which Blanche walks past the men playing cards, one in which she says that she has "always depended on the kindness of strangers," is a moment in which her fated condition of being different plays itself out to its logical conclusion.  In these moments, Blanche can be seen as a victim of fate, or external reality being too strong of a force on her own consciousness.

Blanche is a complex character. On the one hand, she does have obvious faults. She is untruthful (she lies outrageously about her age, for one thing), promiscuous, drinks quite heavily and is hypocritical in the way that she pretends to be demure and chaste. She is also rather bossy; she tries to re-arrange Stella and Stanley's home to her own liking, oblivious of the fact that they might not like her interfering. However, we are given glimpses into her past which help explain why she acts the way she does. We learn that she was married very young to a boy who turned out to be homosexual and who committed suicide in despair. We learn further that she was left to cope with the death of many relatives and the loss of the family home, Belle Reve.

Blanche is essentially a very lonely person who has been cast adrift in a new, strange, raw world. Her romantic ideals and affectation of genteel aristocratic values are her way of trying to cling onto better things. She denies reality because she cannot cope. Although she does provoke other people, notably Stanley, we can also pity her as she is so lost. And Stanley's brutality towards her at the end, coupled with the fact that she is committed to a mental home by her own sister, increases our pity for her. She has had to cope with much tragedy in her life, and her character has become somewhat warped as a result, but we feel sorry for her in all that she has to endure. There is really no-one that she can rely on. Had the circumstances of her life been different, she could simply have been a sweet, charming, well-read and attractive woman; we feel for the tragic waste of her character and potential.

The tragic flaw which brings Blanche low is her unwillingness to face reality. Blanche has had a hard life, losing her young husband to suicide, losing Belle Reve, and losing most of her family. However, Blanche's method of dealing with the pain does more harm than good, only adding to her misery. She drinks often and engages in promiscuous behavior, both coping mechanisms meant to make her forget her troubles. She fears old age and death, so she lies about her age (famously avoiding harsh light that would only reveal she is no longer a very young woman) and flirts with underage teenage boys, at one point even seducing a student.

Blanche's detachment from reality most often manifests in lies. She never tells the truth but rather "what ought to be the truth" in order to make her life seem more glamorous and romantic. Unfortunately, this undermines her attempts to repair her circumstances, as in the case of Mitch, the one man willing to marry her. Once he learns about her lies, Mitch retracts his marriage proposal and leaves her. Her brother-in-law Stanley ends up uncovering the truth about Blanche's sordid past before raping her, thereby causing her full retreat into fantasy by the end of the play.

This is a very interesting prompt. In order to do justice to it, you need to be able to put yourself in Blanche's shoes. She's just come out of the mental asylum, so naturally, she's had a pretty rough time of it. Being sent to a psychiatric facility would be a stressful ordeal for most people, especially in Blanche's day, when the treatment of mental illness was nowhere near as advanced as it is today. That said, if the authorities have deemed her fit for release, chances are that her mental health has improved.

In writing an extension to A Streetcar Named Desire, you could perhaps develop the theme of Blanche's loneliness. She was lonely before she was sent to the asylum, but now, upon release, she doesn't have anyone to turn to. She can't very well go back to her sister; she tried that once, and it turned out to be a complete disaster. With no family, no friends, and her reputation in ruins, Blanche is about as lonely as it's possible for someone to get.

However, it's possible that Blanche made a friend while she was inside the asylum—either another patient or a member of staff. Or perhaps someone wrote to her while she was institutionalized, offering her a chance to start over once she was released. Drawing on this possibility allows you to use your imagination and construct an interesting story.