A Streetcar Named Desire: Scenes One–Three

The section is poor but, unlike corresponding sections in other American cities, it has a raffish charm.

The sky that shows around the dim white building is a peculiarly tender blue, almost a turquoise, which invests the scene with a kind of lyricism and gracefully attenuates the atmosphere of decay.

You can almost feel the warm breath of the brown river beyond the river warehouses with their faint redolences of bananas and coffee.

Blanche comes around the corner, carrying a valise.

Her appearance is incongruous to this setting.

Her delicate beauty must avoid a strong light. There is something about her uncertain manner, as well as her white clothes, that suggests a moth.

She begins to speak, with feverish vivacity as if she feared for either of them to stop and think.

And turn that over-light off! Turn that off! I won’t be looked at in this merciless glare!

STELLA: They’re a mixed lot, Blanche.
BLANCHE: Heterogeneous—types?

You seem a little bit nervous or overwrought or something.

Well, Stella—you’re going to reproach me, I know that you’re bound to reproach me—but before you do—take into consideration—you left!

When the men appear, and Blanche realizes it must be Stanley returning, she moves uncertainly from the bathroom door to the dressing table, looking apprehensively towards the front door.

Animal joy in his being is implicit in all his movements and attitudes.

Branching out from this complete and satisfying center are all the auxiliary channels of his life, such as his heartiness with men, his appreciation of rough humor, his love of good drink and food and games, his car, his radio, everything that is his, that bears his emblem of the gaudy seed-bearer.

I’m afraid I’ll strike you as being the unrefined type.

She jumps up and kisses him which he accepts with lordly composure.

She’s been through such an ordeal.

Now let’s have a gander at the bill of sale.

It looks to me like you have been swindled, baby, and when you’re swindled under the Napoleonic code I’m swindled too.

I don’t understand what happened to Belle Reve but you don’t know how ridiculous you are being when you suggest that my sister or I or anyone of our family could have perpetrated a swindle on anyone else.

Look at these feathers and furs that she come here to preen herself in!

I got an acquaintance who deals in this sort of merchandise. I’ll have him in here to appraise it. I’m willing to bet you there’s thousands of dollars invested in this stuff here!

BLANCHE [airily]: Hello, Stanley! Here I am, all freshly bathed and scented, and feeling like a brand new human being!

I understand there’s to be a little card party to which we ladies are cordially not invited!

He crosses through drapes with a smoldering look.

What’s in the back of that little boy’s mind of yours? That I am absconding with something, attempting some kind of treachery on my sister?

What’s in the back of that little boy’s mind of yours? That I am absconding with something, attempting some kind of treachery on my sister?

There are thousands of papers, stretching back over hundreds of years, affecting Belle Reve as, piece by piece, our improvident grandfathers and father and uncles and brothers exchanged the land for their epic fornications—to put it plainly!

Here all of them are, all papers! I hereby endow you with them! Take them, peruse them—commit them to memory, even!

The kitchen now suggests that sort of lurid nocturnal brilliance, the raw colors of childhood's spectrum.

The poker players—Stanley, Steve, Mitch and Pablo—wear colored shirts, solid blues, a purple, a red-and-white check, a light green, and they are men at the peak of their physical manhood, as coarse and direct and powerful as the primary colors.

She raises her arms and stretches, as she moves indolently back to the chair.

BLANCHE: Oh, is there an inscription? I can’t make it out. [He strikes a match and moves closer] Oh! [reading with feigned difficulty]:
“And if God choose,
I shall but love thee better—after—death!”

We are French by extraction. Our first American ancestors were French Huguenots.

Thank you, sir! I appreciate your gallantry!

No, I have the misfortune of being an English instructor. I attempt to instill a bunch of bobby-soxers and drug-store Romeos with reverence for Hawthorne and Whitman and Poe!

The men rush forward and there is grappling and cursing.

Stanley is forced, pinioned by the two men, into the bedroom.

Dissonant brass and piano sounds as the rooms dim out to darkness and the outer walls appear in the night light.

He coughs diffidently.