A Streetcar Named Desire Mortality Quotes

They told me to take a street-car named Desire, and transfer to one called Cemeteries, and ride six blocks and get off at – Elysian Fields!

– Tennessee Williams

A Streetcar Named Desire, Scene 1. There is much situational irony, symbolism and classical allusion in Blanche DuBois’s description of the journey she takes to get to Stella and Stanley’s apartment in New Orleans. Important themes of mortality and sexual desire are contained in her words to Eunice. Foreshadowed is her tragic journey to her eventual mental destruction and the fatal desire that drives her actions and those of the other characters. The streetcars Desire and Cemeteries referred to by Blanche are real and Elysian Fields is also an actual street. There is important metaphorical meaning in the three names used. In Greek mythology Elysian Fields was the final resting place for heroes and the virtuous, a heavenly reward from the gods after they died. But for Blanche it will bring no such comfort and will be the place of her emotional and mental downfall. Her trip on the streetcars symbolizes the journey of her own life to her degradation and ruin.

I was so exhausted by all I’d been through my – nerves broke. [Nervously tamping cigarette] I was on the verge of – lunacy, almost! So Mr. Graves – Mr. Graves is the high school superintendent – he suggested I take a leave of absence.

– Tennessee Williams

A Streetcar Named Desire, Scene 1. Blanche explains to Stella why she is no longer working as a teacher. She speaks about being on the edge of lunacy, foreshadowing the end of the play when she is committed to an insane asylum. There is also death imagery here with her school superintendent being named Graves.

I, I, I took the blows in my face and body! All of those deaths! The long parade to the graveyard! Father, mother! Margaret, that dreadful way! So big with it, it couldn’t be put in a coffin! But had to be burned like rubbish! You just came home in time for the funerals, Stella. And funerals are pretty compared to deaths. Funerals are quiet, but deaths – not always. Sometimes their breathing is hoarse, and sometimes it rattles, and sometimes they even cry out to you, "Don’t let me go!"

– Tennessee Williams

A Streetcar Named Desire, Scene 1. Blanche’s mental deterioration has clearly been triggered by the deaths in her family, including the loss of her parents and her husband’s suicide. Using the metaphor of physical injury, she describes to Stella how she took these blows to her body. We get the sense that all of these deaths triggered Blanche’s descent into madness.

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.

There are thousands of papers, stretching back over hundreds of years, affecting Belle Reve as, piece by piece, our improvident grandfathers and father and uncles and brothers exchanged the land for their epic fornications – to put it plainly! The four-letter word deprived us of our plantation, till finally all that was left – and Stella can verify that! – was the house itself and about twenty acres of ground, including a graveyard, to which now all but Stella and I have retreated.

– Tennessee Williams

A Streetcar Named Desire, Scene 2. When Stanley accuses Blanche of swindling Stella out of her inheritance, Blanche blames the loss of Belle Reve on the debauchery of her male ancestors. She creates the illusion that it was destroyed by the out of control sexual behavior of the men in the family. But it is later revealed that Blanche herself has been guilty of the same "epic fornications" she complains about in others. We see the theme of death here with the reference to the plantation being reduced to a few acres of land, including a graveyard.

The girl’s dead now… She knew she was dying when she gave me this. A very strange girl, very sweet – very!

– Tennessee Williams

A Streetcar Named Desire, Scene 3. In his first conversation with Blanche, Mitch speaks about the silver cigarette case she has admired, giving to him by a dying girl. It has the inscription from a Browning poem, "And if God choose, I shall but love thee better – after – death!" Already Mitch and Blanche have a connection, both have suffered the pain of loving a loved one.

The first time I laid eyes on him I thought to myself, that man is my executioner! That man will destroy me.

– Tennessee Williams

A Streetcar Named Desire, Scene 6. Blanche reveals to Mitch what she thought when she first saw Stanley. Straight away she sensed his destructive nature, metaphorically comparing him to her executioner. This foreshadows the play’s tragic climax, when Stanley brings about Blanche’s downfall. He rapes her and causes her to have a complete mental breakdown – the "execution" of her sanity.

[Polka music sounds. In a minor key faint with distance.]
We danced the Varsouviana! Suddenly in the middle of the dance the boy I had married broke away from me and ran out of the casino. A few moments later – a shot!
[The polka stops abruptly.]
[Blanche rises stiffly. Then, the polka resumes in a major key.]

– Tennessee Williams

A Streetcar Named Desire, Scene 6. The polka music of the Varsouviana often comes back to haunt Blanche, reminding her of the night she danced to it with her young husband before he shot himself. It represent the guilt she feels over Allan Gray’s suicide.

He’d stuck the revolver into his mouth, and fired – so that the back of his head had been – blown away! [She sways and covers her face.] It was because – on the dance-floor – unable to stop myself – I’d suddenly said – "I saw! I know! You disgust me…"

– Tennessee Williams

A Streetcar Named Desire, Scene 6. Blanche recounts to Mitch the events of the terrible night her young husband Allan shot himself after she told him he disgusted her. She said this to him because she found him in bed with another man. Blanche carries a great weight of guilt over the death and feels like she was the one who pushed Allan to kill himself.

Yes, I had many intimacies with strangers. After the death of Allan – intimacies with strangers was all I seemed able to fill my empty heart with… I think it was panic, just panic, that drove me from one to another, hunting for some protection – here and there, in the most – unlikely places – even, at last, in a seventeen-year-old boy but – somebody wrote the superintendent about it – "This woman is morally unfit for her position!"
[She throws back her head with convulsive, sobbing laughter. Then she repeats the statement, gasps, and drinks.]

– Tennessee Williams

A Streetcar Named Desire, Scene 9. In order to feel alive and desired after her husband’s suicide, Blanche admits to sleeping with strangers. She confesses to having sex with a teenage student, which results in her losing her teaching job. Blanche’s deteriorating mental state shows here as stage directions describe her throwing back her head with "convulsive, sobbing laughter" and consuming more alcohol.

[A Vendor comes around the corner. She is a blind Mexican woman in a dark shawl, carrying bunches of those gaudy tin flowers that lower class Mexicans display at funerals and other festive occasions. She is calling barely audibly. Her figure is only faintly visible outside the building.]
MEXICAN WOMAN: Flores. Flores. Flores para los muertos…
BLANCHE [frightened]: No, no! Not now! Not now!

– Tennessee Williams

A Streetcar Named Desire, Scene 9. Tennessee Williams’ play is haunted by death. An old lady dressed in a black shawl appears before Blanche offering her flowers for the dead – "Flores para los muertos." The lady represents all the people Blanche loved who have died, including parents and husband, and left her alone. The flower vendor is sometimes seen as another hallucination and creation of Blanche’s mind.

Death… the opposite is desire.

– Tennessee Williams

A Streetcar Named Desire, Scene 9. Blanche believes that desire is the opposite of death. After her parents pass and her husband commits suicide, she chooses a life of uncontrolled sexual desire in order to feel alive. She seeks "intimacies with strangers" as a refuge from all the death that has haunted her life. Ironically, instead of saving her, this leads to her own metaphorical death and self-destruction of her character. Blanche suffers ostracization, her reputation is destroyed and she eventually loses her sanity.

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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