To what extent does Williams make the audience sympathise with Blanche?

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In his play ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’, Tennessee Williams encourages the audience to gradually feel sympathy for the character of Blanche. Initially the audience’s reactions to Blanche would be negative because of her judgemental nature towards others. However, as Williams reveals more details about her past the audience start to feel that events in her life beyond her control have lead her to be this way and, while not agreeing with the way she deals with disappointments in life, would certainly feel sympathy for her. The way other characters treat Blanche throughout the play also gives the audience an idea of how people play upon her insecurities and this also provokes sympathy.

The introduction of Blanche to the play is meant to provoke the audience into disliking of her. She arrives at her sister Stella’s house early and Eunice, the landlord, takes it upon herself to get Blanche settled. Eunice’s open questions are met with short, mostly ‘yes’ or ‘no’, answers from Blanche who obviously feels Eunice is too familiar and common. This distaste comes through after Eunice lets Blanche in and she quickly dismisses her with, “If you will excuse me, I’m just about to drop” and follows this up with “I would like to be alone”. These responses to Eunice’s attempts to be hospitable single Blanche out as a snob. It is obvious by Blanche being ‘daintily dressed in a white suit’ that she is used to a more refined environment but this does not excuse her rudeness. Her hypocritical nature is then revealed when the first thing she “tosses down” a half a tumbler of whisky which marks her as having dubious drinking habits.  The audience at this stage only feel contempt for a woman who seems to make no effort to fit into her new surroundings and looks at everything with distaste.This need to create a dislike of Blanche is, however, a dramatic device used by Williams to point out the fact that all humans are merely a product of the challenges life throws at them.

Williams makes it clear that Blanche’s reactions are just defence mechanisms used to help her survive in a changing world. This becomes clear when she shares the news with Stella that Belle Reve, their family homestead, has been ‘lost’. Blanche has obviously worked hard to maintain the property without any help. She describes how the struggle to look after their family and their eventual deaths were, “blows in my face and body”. This suggests the mental anguish that Blanche has gone through and also the physical toll the stress has taken on her body. The choice of the word ‘blows’ suggests the extreme magnitude of the tough times she has been through. This phrase shows the audience that Blanche is to be pitied because she has worked to maintain a lifestyle, not just for herself, but for others. Blanche’s struggle to survive in a changing world is symbolic of the decline of white-ruled gentile South and while the audience probably supports the rise of equality they can still feel sympathy for Blanche because she can be seen as a relic of a bygone era and she does not have the skills to adapt to this new world in which Stanley symbolises success.

Sympathy for Blanche grows when the details of her fated early marriage are brought up. Feeling that he has been ‘swindled’ out of what he sees as his share of Belle Reve, Stanley goes in search of legal documents and instead grabs old love letters from Blanche’s belongings. It is obvious from the way she explains they are “Poems a dead boy wrote. I hurt him they way you want to hurt me”, that she still grieves for him. The use of the word ‘boy’ suggests he is part of her idealised youth and also show she saw him as an innocent who has suffered at her hands. There is the also a sense of guilt that comes out in the words ‘hurt’; she obviously blames herself for his death. The quote also shows the audience that Blanche can already sense the physical danger that she is in from Stanley. This foreshadows her eventual rape when Stanley claims they have had “a date from the very beginning”. This is perhaps when this date is made. The audience feels sympathy because they start to understand that Blanche’s callous nature is a cover for deep and profound grief.

It becomes clear that Blanche lives in a fantasy world to hide her disillusionment with life and the audience pity her for being weak minded. The audience find out this when she is talking with Mitch about the possibility of them being together. Blanche is for the first time very open about her feelings when she tells Mitch her ‘understands what’ loneliness is. She then reveals the full details of how her husband died and how it felt to have her “searchlight’ of love “turned off’. We can see that Mitch is her last chance to have a little light back: her relationship with Mitch can be likened to the comforting candle she lights earlier in the scene. It is easy to feel sympathy for her plain admission of loneliness and her need for companionship. It seems at this point that Williams is making the point that to unburden yourself of your past is the way to move forward in life and for a while the audience can almost feel that Blanche will have a second chance in life.

Unfortunately subsequent scenes point to a more fatalist view of the past and the audience realises that they are watching the inevitable decline of Blanche . The audience feel a great amount of sympathy for Blanche when Stanley takes her future away by using her past indiscretions with men against her.  Upon hearing this information Mitch turns up drunk determined to finish the relationship. He says “Let’s turn the light on here”. He then rips the Chinese lantern covering a naked light bulb and exposes Blanche to harsh lighting. The Chinese lantern is a symbol of Blanche’s illusionary world that she inhabits; the act of ripping it symbolises the crushing of her world and her lies being exposed. With her illusionary world gone and no one who will accept her in this world Blanche has nowhere to go. This marks her decline into madness. This turn of events suggests that a person’s past will always travel with them and that there is no escaping fate.

By the time Blanche is raped in Scene 10 it is clear that she has lost her mind. The audience feels great sympathy for Blanche because she is now seen for what she really is; a person who has been brought up ill-prepared for the realities of this new world. She is trying to reconstruct her illusionary world by claiming Shep Huntington, a rich man from her past, wants to see her. This is because she has only ever been taught to rely on men for ‘salvation’. Stanley plays along at first but becomes angry when she alludes to Mitch as a ‘swine’. The rape symbolizes the final destruction of the Old South’s genteel fantasy world, symbolized by Blanche, by the cruel but vibrant present, symbolized by Stanley. In the New South, animal instinct and common sense win out over lofty ideals and romantic notions. Williams depicts unmarried, fallen, Southern women such as Blanche who are victims to society’s rules and the audience’s sympathy for Blanche comes from identifying her as victim.

Sympathy for Blanche in the end is great. Her sister publicly refuses to believe her about the rape and watches Blanche to be taken off to a mental institution. This sympathy is heightened by the knowledge that Stella may secretly believe some of what Blanche has claimed but realises “I couldn’t believe her story and go on living with Stanley”. She has sacrificed her sister’s life to maintain her own. Williams makes a clear point about the necessity of illusions here: Stella needs to believe Stanley is innocent and Blanche needs to believe she has a date with Shep Huntington.

Overall, Williams prejudices the audience against Blanche in the early stages as a way of pointing out the futility illusions in this new world. Ultimately he wishes the audience to view Blanche as a tragic figure who is a victim of change and deserves sympathy.