[posted on behalf of a student]
In A Streetcar Named Desire, Blanche DuBois deals with mental illness. The reader is not told exactly what mental illness(es) she has, but the reader can guess at a few that she may have. The only one the reader is told about is anxiety. As Blanche tells Stanley, “I take hot baths for my nerves. Hydro-therapy, they call it. You healthy Polack, without a nerve in your body, of course you don’t know what anxiety feels like!” (Williams 118) At the end of the play, it becomes clear that she is mentally ill with not just anxiety when Stella decides to send her sister to a mental institution. Blanche had become psychotic with delusions and no sense of reality. She had slowly been going towards this psychotic break throughout the entire play.
When Blanche first arrives at Stella’s apartment, the reader knows that she isn’t well. She tells Stella, “I want to be near you, got to be with somebody, I can’t be alone! Because—as you must have noticed—I’m—not very well….” (Williams 14) Even Blanche recognizes that she is not well at the beginning of the play but most likely has no idea how unwell she really is. The reader learns from Stella that Blanche has always been a “fragile” person as she encourages everyone to give her compliments as that is her “ little weakness” and tries to avoid having Blanche wind up in any type of conflict. As the play goes on, the world that Blanche has constructed for herself to keep her “safe” falls apart and she loses control, leading to her psychotic break.
Throughout the play, the reader knows that her drinking habits are not helping her mental state, but the first action that happens that leads to her psychotic break is Stanley confronting her about the papers of Belle Reve. Stanley starts digging through her trunk and finds the letters from her young husband who is dead. After he grabs them, Blanche yells, “Now that you’ve touched them I’ll burn them!” (Williams 38) She completely falls apart and ends up throwing all the papers she owns at him, yelling that he can do whatever he wants with them.
It is in scene six that the reader learns what really happened to her husband with him committing suicide and where much of the trauma Blanche has comes from. From this, the reader can conclude that Blanche has always been “fragile,” as Stella sees her, but it is the trauma that she has faced that has caused her to go from just being “fragile” to being unwell, leading to her mental illnesses and psychotic break.
In scene ten Blanche has begun to go into her psychotic state after Mitch has left her when he told her he didn’t want to marry her in the scene before. She believes that one of her old lovers has invited her on a cruise to the Caribbean in his yacht. She is all dressed up as if she is going to a ball and seems to believe that she really is at a ball as she is looking in the mirror and whispering as if there are other people there. The end of the scene is what pushes Blanche completely over the edge, with Stanley raping her while Stella is at the hospital having her baby. It is after this point that Stella makes the decision to send Blanche to a mental hospital and feels extremely guilty about it. Stella feels as if she is making the wrong choice but doesn’t know what else to do with her. The play ends with Blanche being taking away by the doctor and Stella sobbing because Blanche is gone.