Blanche, Stella's older sister, until recently a high school English teacher in
             Laurel, Mississippi. She arrives in New Orleans a loquacious, witty,
             arrogant, fragile, and ultimately crumbling figure. Blanche once was
             married to and passionately in love with a tortured young man. He killed
             himself after she discovered his homosexuality, and she has suffered from
             guilt and regret ever since. Blanche watched parents and relatives, all the
             old guard, die off, and then had to endure foreclosure on the family estate.
             Cracking under the strain, or perhaps yielding to urges so long suppressed
             that they now could no longer be contained, Blanche engages in a series of
             sexual escapades that trigger an expulsion from her community. In New
             Orleans she puts on the airs of a woman who has never known indignity,
             but Stanley sees through her. Her past catches up with her and destroys
             her relationship with Mitch. Stanley, as she fears he might, destroys what's
             left of her. At the end of the play she is led away to an insane asylum.
             This is indeed the story of what happened to Blanche in the play but what
             flaws in her own character were to blame for her subsequent tragedy.
             Blanche is by far the most complex character of the play. An intelligent
             and sensitive woman who values literature and the creativity of the human
             imagination, she is also emotionally traumatised and repressed. This gives
             license for her own imagination to become a haven for her pain. One
             senses that Blanches own view of her real self as opposed to her ideal self
             has been increasingly blurred over the years until it is sometimes difficult
             for her to tell the difference. It is a challenge to find the key to Blanche's
             melancholy but perhaps the roots of her trauma lie in her early marriage.
             She was haunted by her inability to help or understand her young, troubled
             husband and that she has tortured herself for it ever since. Her drive t...