•
Blanche admits the truth. After Alan, she had intimacies with strangers, looking for protection;
until she became involved with a seventeen-year-old boy, and lost her job. She had nowhere to
go; her youth, beauty and innocence were gone.
•
Mitch repeats simply, "You lied to me, Blanche." She tells him she never lied in her heart.
•
Outside, a Mexican woman comes by, selling flowers for the dead. As the vendor cries outside,
Blanche remembers the terrible days caring for her dying relatives. Changing the blood-stained
sheets, when in her youth servants had waited on her. Lonely, abandoned by her sister. Near
Belle Reve, there was a training camp for young soldiers; weekends, they would get drunk in
town. On their way back, they would come back to the lawn of the mansion and call for Blanche.
The only relative left was an old deaf woman, who suspected nothing. Sometimes, she slipped
out of the house and went to the boys.
•
Mitch comes to her, wanting "what I've been missing all summer." Blanche asks him to marry her.
He tells her that she's not clean enough to be in the same house as his mother. Blanche tells him
to get out, or she'll scream. When he doesn't comply, she starts to scream. He leaves quickly.
Scene 9 – Analysis
•
Blanche has a difficult time relinquishing illusion. Chaotic colors and the polka music show her
chaotic mental state. Even as Mitch begins to confront her with the truth, she seeks to brush
aside anything that is bothersome. She wants to pretend everything is fine.
•
When Mitch arrives, the polka music she has been hearing stops – it snaps her back to reality,
but could also be that he is still her hope for the future, her rescue.
•
She is not a malicious liar; she lies from weakness, from immaturity, from a fear of reality. She
tells Mitch that she speaks of the world as it ought to be, and as people would prefer it to be. She
lies because she has a taste for a fantasy life better than her reality.
•
Blanche tries to recreate the old routine, desperate to find some form of conversation. Painfully
awkward ‘how is your mother?’.
•
But Mitch continues to insist on the truth, and when Blanche finally gives up her lies, the effect is
like a dam breaking. He tears down the paper lantern that represented the start of their
relationship, and protected Blanche’s need to hide in the illusion that she is young.
•
We hear, in chilling and lurid detail, about her escapades in Laurel. The description of the
soldiers calling out her name from the lawn of Belle Reve is Williams at his lurid best. The story
shows the depths of Blanche's loneliness and depravity; she sought comfort and protection in
impossible places, with men who were only interested in one thing.
•
She might as well have been alone at Belle Reve, and in all the beds she frequented. Blanche is
terrifyingly isolated. In her loneliness, her desires became more and more difficult to control, and
more and more unhealthy. The Polka music is taking over by this point in time.
