Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire Literary Analysis Essay Sample

Imagine placing rocks on a bridge, the more weight you put on it, the sooner it could break. Some people build their bridges large and firm but your bridge is small and feeble. As you stack your rocks your bridge starts to crumble until you put a big rock on top and finally the bridge can’t take anymore. Now all that is left of your bridge is rubble and dust. This is what mental health is like. The more trauma you stack on the sooner your mental health will break. Blanche DuBois from Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire displays the significant impact of trauma on mental health.

Blanche DuBois’s battle with the guilt of her husband’s death and its by-product of laying waste to the rest of her life displays the trauma of death’s weight on mental well-being. After her husband’s death, Blanche was sent into a downwards spiral, as we see in the quote, “After the death of Allan, intimacies with strangers was all I seemed able to fill my empty heart with” (Williams 136). Blanche started having “intimacies” with younger men which ultimately lead to the loss of her job and Belle Reve. After losing everything, she had nowhere else to go other than her sister. In addition to this series of unfortunate events, she developed post-traumatic stress from her husband’s death being that she felt responsible. We see this guilt in these quotes, “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!” “It was because—on the dance floor—unable to stop myself—I’d suddenly said—‘I know! I know! You disgust me!'”(Williams 109). She felt responsible for his death which weighed on her for the rest of the play. The weight of this guilt is best described by Freud in his theory, “Any excitations from the outside which are powerful enough to break through the protective shield there is no longer any possibility of preventing the mental apparatus from being flooded with large amounts of stimulus which have broken in and binding of them”(Freud, 1920). In a journal article, “Trauma, Shame, and Group Psychotherapy: A Self Psychology Perspective” by Emanuel Shapiro, this theory is explained as when trauma—like the death of a spouse—occurs, this disturbs the person’s ability to operate. Shapiro examines the idea of what trauma has this effect on us, and to what scale must the trauma be to have such an effect. He also talks about how anxiety can lead to other mental illnesses such as depression or other disorders (Shapiro, 1999). By this theory, we could infer that in Blanche’s case, she has faced much trauma, therefore, resulting in more effect on her well-being. The post-traumatic stress from this could then have formed her bipolar disorder which then resulted in her mental demise. Blanche DuBois’s guilts from feeling responsible for her husband’s death is what led to her mental break which shows how the trauma can lead to mental illness. 

The effect of Blanche DuBois’s trauma from being raped by her sister’s husband also demonstrates the effect of trauma on mental health. In scene ten of the play, Blanche is raped by Stanley, the husband of Stella. After this point, we see Blanche’s mental health start to plummet. This relates to a concept explored in “Violence Against Women: Mental Health and the United Nations” by Giovanni Caracci, victims of sexual assault have a high chance of developing PTSD and depression. In addition, women experiencing domestic violence commonly lose the ability to cope (Caracci, 2003).  Blanche was not only harmed by Stanley, but it is implied that she has experienced harmful treatment before, “You didn't know Blanche as a girl. Nobody, nobody, was tender and trusting as she was. But people like you abused her, and forced her to change”(Williams, 128). In this quote, Stella, Blanche’s sister, is explaining to Stanley how other men have harmed Blanche and that this is what made Blanche become the was she is. From this, we see how being abused affected Blanche’s welfare. 

Blanche’s loss of her family establishes the importance of family on mental health. Throughout the play, we learn that Blanche has lost many people in her life. We see the effect of this first in the quotes: “All of those deaths! The long parade to the graveyard! Father, mother! Margaret, that dreadful way!” “You just came home in time for the funerals, Stella. And funerals are pretty compared to deaths. Funerals are quiet, but deaths—not always” (Williams 25). Not only did Blanche lose her mother, father, and Margaret, but she loses Stell in the end too. After being raped in scene 10, we can infer that Blanche told Stella. We see that Stella chose to believe Stanley was innocent instead of believing her sister: "I couldn't believe her story and go on living with Stanley"(Williams 154). Because of this decision, Blanche was sent to a mental hospital, she lost everyone in her life who meant something to her. This is what finally broke her and sent her into a mental breakdown.