Sexual desires and behaviors, along with death are major concerns of nearly everyone in American society.
Because they are so incrementally important to Americans, the possibilities, disappointments, and fears surrounding sex and death evoke strong emotions, including anxiety, despair, anger, and joy. Tennessee Williams, in A Streetcar Named Desire, presents sex and death together in such as way as to maximize the emotional power of both. In this post WWII story, Blanche Dubois is a phony who pretends to have a sense of morals, propriety, and modesty.In actuality, she is dependent upon men for her support and uses sex as a means to livelihood and, especially with younger men, as a means to avoid facing the reality of her own aging and eventual death. Her fear of death appears in numerous neuroses about aging and lost beauty, to the extent that Blanche refuses to tell her real age and avoids bright lights that will make her look old.
In doing these things, she creates a mental fantasy world where she is a flirtatious, teenaged virgin.In Scene One, Williams shows that Blanche’s sexual escapades are her demise. She arrives at Stella Kowalski’s home and says she took a streetcar named Desire, transferred to one called Cemeteries, and disembarked at Elysian Fields. This trip is metaphorically the journey Blanche’s life, because the Elysian Fields are Greek mythology’s land of the dead.
Blanche’s sexual behaviors led to her eviction from Belle Reve, her mental breakdown in New Orleans, her rape by Stanley Kowalski, and finally, her permanent removal from society into a mental sanitarium.Thus, her mind and soul 2 died as a result of her sexual promiscuity. The images of rape, abuse, promiscuity, and mental decline evoke strong emotions that link sex and death in fear, panic, and despair. Relatives whose deaths she attributes to their sexual promiscuity also haunt Blanche. Her husband’s own suicide results from her disapproval of his homosexuality.
In Scene Nine, when a Mexican flower seller hawks flowers for the dead, Blanche is terrified when the woman predicts Blanche’s death.Her insanity full of inappropriate sexual behaviors and death phobias have thus linked sex and death throughout Blanche’s life to its conclusion on the street called Elysian Fields, the land of the dead. Blanche’s husband, Allen Grey, haunts her overpoweringly. Previously, she discovered him in bed with a gay lover, but the three of them went out dancing, as if nothing had happened.
Overwrought with emotion, Blanche turned to Allen and stated that he disgusted her, at which point he ran out and shot himself in the head.This suicide triggered her psychological downward spiral that ended on Elysian Fields. Although it is post WWII and a modern era, Blanche and Stella still see males as their only means of livelihood and positive self-image. Blanche tells Stella that she would be better off without a physically abusive husband. However, Stella remains with Stanley and relies on love to help her survive. Blanche thinks marriage to the character Mitch will be her meal ticket, but her sexual exploitation by men hurt her reputation and this makes Mitch eventually shun her.
Although her reputation makes Blanche an impossible marriage prospect, she feels marriage is her only survival. No other man in the context of this play will have her, Stanley rapes her, and she goes mad, because she cannot support herself or accept the reality of her behaviors and their 3 consequences. This hopeless situation evokes strong emotions of sadness, despair, and fear by joining the actions of sexual desires and behaviors with death in A Streetcar Named Desire. Ironically, that streetcar traveled only to the land of the dead.
