A Streetcar Named Desire Bathing Quotes

She’s soaking in a hot tub to quiet her nerves. She’s terribly upset.

– Tennessee Williams

A Streetcar Named Desire, Scene 1. Stella tells Stanley and Stella that Blanche is having a hot bath to soothe her "nerves." This is the first of a number of baths Blanche takes in the play. She feels the need to constantly physically clean herself. But she also wants to cleanse herself of past sins we later learn about – guilt over her husband’s suicide, a promiscuous past and affair with a teenage student while she was his teacher. Her compulsive bathing is akin to the mad Lady Macbeth’s attempts to wash Duncan’s imaginary blood off her hands after his murder: "Out, damned spot! out, I say!" The fact that Blanche must take a bath to quieten her nerves suggests a mental vulnerability that will ultimately lead to her madness.

[Stanley comes out of the bathroom dripping water and still in his clinging wet polka dot drawers.] STANLEY: Stella! [There is a pause] My baby doll’s left me! [He breaks into sobs. Then he goes to the phone and dials, still shuddering with sobs.] Eunice? I want my baby. [He waits a moment; then he hangs up and dials again] Eunice! I’ll keep on ringin’ until I talk with my baby!

– Tennessee Williams

A Streetcar Named Desire, Scene 3. While Blanche takes baths to escape from reality, Stanley’s shower sobers him up and snaps him back to the real world. After his pregnant Stella takes refuge upstairs with Eunice following Stanley’s brutality, he sobs and screams out his wife’s name over and over from the foot of the stairs. He phones Eunice and pleads for his wife to return to him. Stanley the wife-beater is now become the vulnerable and pathetic male without his Stella.

[Blanche is singing in the bathroom a saccharine popular ballad which is used contrapuntally with Stanley’s speech.]

– Tennessee Williams

A Streetcar Named Desire, Scene 7. While Stanley spills the beans to Stella about her sister’s sexually permissive past, an oblivious Blanche is in the bath singing a popular ballad described as saccharine – meaning too sweet or sentimental. So the bathroom becomes Blanche’s refuge from reality. Dramatic irony is used to show that she is not aware of her sordid past being exposed while she sings.

Yes, I do, so refreshed. [She tinkles her highball glass.] A hot bath and a long, cold drink always give me a new outlook on life!

– Tennessee Williams

A Streetcar Named Desire, Scene 7. It’s clear from Blanche’s words to Stella that bathing serves as a cleansing ritual and tool for her. Dramatic irony is created here when she says that a hot bath and cool drink gives her a "new outlook." For we know that outlook has just been destroyed by Stanley, when he uncovered Blanche’s sordid past in Laurel.

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!

– Tennessee Williams

A Streetcar Named Desire, Scene 8. Blanche tells Stanley that her frequent bathing is for her nerves and anxiety, linking to the theme of madness and mental illness. She insults Stanley by calling him a Polack, a derogatory term for a person of Polish origin. Displaying her elitism, she talks down to him as if he was from an inferior class.

I can smell the sea air. The rest of my time I’m going to spend on the sea. And when I die, I’m going to die on the sea. You know what I shall die of? [She plucks a grape] I shall die of eating an unwashed grape one day out on the ocean. I will die – with my hand in the hand of some nice-looking ship’s doctor, a very young one with a small blond mustache and a big silver watch. "Poor lady," they’ll say, "the quinine did her no good. That unwashed grape has transported her soul to heaven."

– Tennessee Williams

A Streetcar Named Desire, Scene 11. After worrying about whether the grapes Eunice offers are washed and cleansed, Blanche goes off on a flight of fancy about dying at sea from eating an unwashed grape. She romanticizing her death by imagining her final moments immersed in love and desire, as a handsome young doctor holds her hand. About to be taken away by the Doctor and Matron to a mental asylum, Blanche has lost touch with reality and her sanity. She is now completely immersed in her fantasy world.

And I’ll be buried at sea sewn up in a clean white sack and dropped overboard – at noon – in the blaze of summer – and into an ocean as blue as my first lover’s eyes!

– Tennessee Williams

A Streetcar Named Desire, Scene 11. As she descends further into madness and is about to be sent to a mental institution, Blanche romanticizes her own death. In this idealized version of her passing, we see the motif of bathing in the imagery and colors – she speaks of "clean" and "white" and "sea." In a simile she compares the blue of the sea to that of her first lover’s eyes. The passage echoes Blanche’s obsession with washing throughout the play as a need to seek purification of her sins and escape harsh reality.
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