BLANCHE: Marry me, Mitch.
MITCH: I don’t think I want to marry you any more… You’re not clean enough to bring into the house with my mother.
– Tennessee Williams
A Streetcar Named Desire, Scene 9. For Blanche marriage is a way out of her loneliness and the trap she finds herself in. When Mitch asks to have sex with her, she proposes marriage. But Mitch rejects her proposal, for in his eyes she is tarnished since he learned of her scandalous and promiscuous past in Laurel. As he speaks these words to her he drops his hands from Blanche’s waist. Mitch’s cruel behavior and dismissal of Blanche as unclean and not fit to marry display a certain misogyny and toxic masculinity, not unlike his friend Stanley’s. It is also ironic, for moments before Mitch had his hands on Blanche looking to have sex with her.