Character Sketch: Blanche Dubois

Outline:

1st paragraph: Blanche has a younger sister named Stella, she used to be a English teacher. she seemed to be pure and innocent.

2nd paragraph: Blanche is a sensitive, clever women.

3rd paragraph: Stanley is standing in the opposite site of Blanche. Stella thinks Blanche is is being too sensitive and paranoid.

4th paragraph: Blanche always hide herself.

Rough draft

Blanche Dubois is Stella’s older sister. She comes from Old South, Mississippi, where she was a high school English teacher until she was forced to leave her position. Blanche appears in the first scene in a white dress with bodice, white gloves and hat, which makes her so incongruous with New Orleans’ chaos and noise. She is pure and innocent.

Blanche is a sensitive woman. She is cultured and well educated. She cannot stand vulgar remarks and vulgar actions. She does not want realism. She prefers magic and dreams. In scene three, Blanche says, “I can't stand a naked light bulb, any more than I can a rude remark or a vulgar action” (p.60). This line sets up the key theme of illusion vs. reality. She wants to decorate the light bulb just the same as she wants to dress up prettily to make everyone like her and hide her past.

If Blanche represents illusions and dreams, then Stanley represents the brutality of reality. He is a man living in a basic, fundamental world, who always likes to lay his cards on the table. To a person who is over sensitive, such as Blanche, he is like a savage from the Stone Age. With the appearance of Blanche, Stanley feels uncomfortable and threatened. Blanche is a foreign element, a hostile force, a superior woman that he cannot understand. He feels that Blanche is a challenge and threat to his life and his marriage. He firstly feels the threat when he is told about the loss of Belle Reve. He does not care about that place as an ancestral property, but, instead, he regards that as part of his property: “It looks to me like you have been swindled, baby, and when you’re swindled under the Napoleonic code I’m swindled too. And I don’t like to be swindled” (p.33). He feels like he has been cheated. Then he feels the threat to his marriage after the big fight with Stella after the poker game. He realizes it is Blanche’s presence that is causing all the arguing between him and his wife. The following morning when he overhears that he is described as animal, ape, the survivor of the Stone Age, he is enraged against Blanche: “He laughs and clasps her head to him. Over her head he grins through the curtains at Blanche” (p.84). This act at the end of scene four indicates that the battle over Stella between Blanche and him begins.