These are love-letters, yellowing with antiquity, all from one boy…Poems a dead boy wrote. I hurt him the way that you would like to hurt me, but you can’t! I’m not young and vulnerable anymore. But my young husband was and I – never mind about that! Just give them back to me!
– Tennessee Williams
A Streetcar Named Desire, Scene 2. Blanche is horrified when Stanley grabs personal papers from her trunk, including her late husband Allan Gray’s love letters, and rifles through them. What is evident here is Blanche’s guilt over the death of her husband, who shot himself. She is also aware of the danger Stanley poses to her when she observes that he would like to hurt her. This is foreshadowing of Stanley’s mental destruction and rape of Blanche later in the play.