A Streetcar Named Desire Madness Quotes

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.

EUNICE [returning, brightly]: Someone is calling for Blanche.
BLANCHE: It is for me, then!
[She looks fearfully from one to the other and then to the portieres. The "Varsouviana" faintly plays]
Is it the gentleman I was expecting from Dallas?

– Tennessee Williams

A Streetcar Named Desire, Scene 11. Blanche’s madness and detachment from reality are apparent when Eunice announces that someone is calling. It is the Doctor and Matron who have come to take Blanche to the mental institution. But Blanche believes her old college boyfriend Shep Huntleigh has arrived to rescue her. The polka tune she and her young husband danced to before he shot himself and has haunted Blanche ever since plays faintly.

[She rushes past him into the bedroom. Lurid reflections appear on the walls in odd, sinuous shapes. The "Varsouviana" is filtered into a weird distortion, accompanied by the cries and noises of the jungle. Blanche seizes the back of a chair as if to defend herself.]

– Tennessee Williams

A Streetcar Named Desire, Scene 11. Blanche’s increasing mental instability is highlighted by the distorted playing of the polka music associated with her husband’s suicide. Her deranged mental state is further suggested by the lurid reflections on the wall and jungle noises, all of which are in Blanche’s troubled mind.

[Blanche turns wildly and scratches at the Matron. The heavy woman pinions her arms. Blanche cries out hoarsely and slips to her knees.]
MATRON: These fingernails have to be trimmed.

– Tennessee Williams

A Streetcar Named Desire, Scene 11. When the Doctor and Matron arrive to take Blanche to the mental asylum she initially violently resists. She lashes out wildly with her fingernails to scratch the Matron, who pins back her arms to restrain her, and Blanche gives up and falls to her knees. In preparation for her incarceration for insanity, the Matron orders the patient’s nails to be trimmed. So Blanche loses one of the outward signs of her beauty and femininity.
    • 1
    • 2
Close