70 pages • 2 hours read
Tennessee WilliamsA Streetcar Named Desire
Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 1947A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Scenes 10-11Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Scene 10 Summary
A few hours later, Blanche is still drinking. Her trunk is open in the middle of the room, flowery dresses flowing out of it. She has on a “somewhat soiled and crumpled white satin evening gown” (151)with silver slippers and her rhinestone tiara. She is talking to herself, mumbling about diving into the quarry. She lifts a mirror to her face and smashes it down, shattering it.
Stanley rounds the corner and enters the flat, tipsy and carrying a pack of beer. Blanche inquires about her sister and the baby. He tells her the baby will arrive in the morning, so it will be just them two in the flat for the evening. He asks why she is dressed in the gown and tiara, and she begins to explain how she received a wire from Shep Huntleigh inviting her to go on a cruise. Stanley prompts her to explain more.
She explains that he’s an oil-man from Texas. Stanley takes off his shirt and opens a bottle of beer. She declines to join him. He goes into the bedroom and grabs the silk pajamas from his wedding night. He plans to put them on once he gets the phone call that the baby has arrived and says that it’s a celebratory night for them both.
Blanche rhapsodizes about Shep, how he wants her for more than her looks, for her “beauty of mind and richness of spirit and tenderness of the heart” (156). She’s spent too much time around men who cannot appreciate her. For, she explains, she sent Mitch walking tonight after he showed up in his work-clothes, repeating the stories he heard from Stan. He returned with roses, but she felt they were too incompatible.
She gets caught up in her stories when Stanley asked if this all happened before or after she received the telegram. This is when Stanley decides to catch her. He berates her lies, her “worn-out Mardi Gras outfit, rented for fifty cents from some rag-picker” (158). He knew from the start that she was a sham, showing up and drinking all of his liquor.
Shadows appear on the walls, and the atmosphere of the room changes. Blanche picks up the phone to try and reach Shep. Voices fill the air. Outside, a prostitute solicits a drunk, the Negro Woman picks up the prostitute's dropped bag. “Help me! Caught in a trap. Caught in—” (160). Stanley emerges from the bathroom in the silk pajamas. He sets the phone back on the hook, a grin on his face.
Blanche tries to get by him, but he won’t move. She smashes a bottle to defend herself and threatens to slash his face. He catches her, yelling: “We’ve had this date with each other from the beginning” (162). She sinks to her knees and faints, after which Stanley picks her up and carries her to the bed.
Scene 11 Summary
A few weeks later, the men play poker while Stella cries as she packs the flowery dresses into Blanche’s trunk. Eunice enters the apartment.
The men yell and swear as their poker game carries on. Mitch’s odd behavior does not go unnoticed by his friends. Stella has decided to send Blanche away, but Blanche still believes she is going to see Shep Huntleigh. Blanche wants to make sure she’s dressed properly to see him. She mourns:“I couldn’t believe her story and go on living with Stanley” (165).
Blanche has on her red satin robe as the "Varsouviana" plays in the background. The women compliment her beautiful hair. When Mitch hears Blanche’s voice, his “gaze dissolve[s] into space” (167). As she continues speaking, asking what’s going on, he sinks his head toward the table.
Eunice and Stella get her back on track by talking about her vacation and her clothes. She feels self-conscious about passing in front of the men on her way out, so she lets herself be sat in the bedroom chair. She begins raving about how she will spend the rest of her life at sea and will “be buried at sea sewn up in a clean white sack and dropped overboard” (170). The ocean will be the color of her first lover’s eyes.
The Doctor and the Matron appear around the corner of the building, stiff and clinical. Blanche, still delusional, tells the women she’s not quite ready, that she needs to put away her toiletries. She wonders who the woman is, since she was only expecting Shep. Mitch’s gaze remains fixed on the table as Blanche walks through the kitchen to the door.
She is frightened to realize the man is not who she expected and walks back into the flat, confusing the men. The Matron follows her in as the Doctor orders her to collect Blanche. At this point, Blanche panics and says she’s forgotten something inside: “I don’t know you—I don’t know you. I want to be—left alone—please!” (175).
Stanley says they’ll send whatever she forgot with the trunk and rips the paper lantern off the light, thrusting it at Blanche. She screams and tries to break away. All the commotion upsets Stella, who runs into Eunice’s arms crying, “What have I done to my sister?” (176). Inside, Mitch gets up from his chair to walk to the room. Stanley approaches him to block him, and Mitch punches him, and the two men scuffle before Mitch collapses and cries at the table.
The Doctor’s demeanor changes when he takes off his hat, and Blanche allows him to lead her out of the house. Stella calls her name, but she doesn’t turn around.
The dynamic of the scene changes as Stanley walks onto the porch. He kneels beside her as she holds the baby in her arm, lacing his fingers through her blouse. The sobbing and chatter fade away, replaced by the blue piano. Before the curtain falls, Steve says, “This game is seven-card stud” (179).
Scenes 10-11 Analysis
These two scenes depict the final stages of Blanche’s demise, fulfilling the prophecy that Stanley would be Blanche’s “executioner” (111).
Stella goes into labor, creating the circumstances for Blanche and Stanley to be alone at the flat for the evening. It is obvious at this point that Shep Huntleigh is no longer part of Blanche’s life, but Stanley coaxes her to continue spinning lies because, it seems, it amuses him. His mood is as jovial as it has been since meeting Blanche, due to the coming baby. However, the moment Blanche trips over her lies, he unleashes the anger he’s pent-up over the course of the summer. When he shouts: “We’ve had this date with each other from the beginning”(162), it's reminiscent of their very first conversation during which Blanche, as in this scene, faints. Stanley’s brute physical sovereignty is reinforced by brute emotional sovereignty.
Characters’ clothes are a focal point of these chapters. Blanche’s white gown, silver slippers, and tiara become objects of tragedy as Stanley ensnares her. Her blue jacket is the “blue of the robe in the old Madonna pictures” and she asks to wear “that silver and turquoise pin in the shape of a seahorse” (165-169). As the private details of her life have been made increasingly public, she tightens her grip over her physical appearances. Her fussiness over her dress in the final scene also serves as a distraction from the events taking place around her: Mitch and the other men playing poker in the kitchen, and the Doctor and Nurse arriving to take her away. Stanley’s bowling shirt and jacket are intensely colored, harkening back to the mood and atmosphere of bowling night. The moment the Doctor takes off his hat, he is described as “personalized” (177). This seemingly insignificant gesture is what eases Blanche toward leaving the flat and departing Elysian Fields.
Blanche’s outbursts occur during moments of lucidity when she cries: “What’s happened here?” (168) and “I don’t know you—I don’t know you. I want to be—left alone—please!” (175). The emotions tethering her to reality still exist, but she allows herself to be coaxed into euphemistic versions of the truth by Eunice and Stella as she prepares to leave town. It is true, for example, that she is going on a kind of a trip.
A strange vignette takes shape as Blanche walks off. Stanley generously and delicately soothes a sobbing Stella, kneeling and lacing his fingers through the opening of her blouse. This dynamic is previously unseen; it hints at a different kind of life, one that Stella and Stanley have both alluded to during Blanche’s visit. It is a symbolic moment, as if order has been restored to their marriage the minute Blanche stepped away from it.
Steve has the final line of the play: “This game is seven-card stud” (179). He is referring to a particularly intricate version of poker, in which many factors influence an individual’s decision-making strategies. This resonates in the wake of Stella’s own decision to send her sister away. She cries, “Oh, God, what have I done to my sister?” (176).Every element of the characters’ lives can be said to have hindered or helped Blanche: Stanley’s tendency for cruelty, the circumstances of Blanche’s marriage, Stella’s leaving Belle Reve, Mitch’s sick mother, the time and place of the play. It is Blanche’s plunge into madness that reveals the absurdity of the world around her.
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