A Streetcar Named Desire: Scenes Eight–Eleven

The three people are completing a dismal birthday supper. Stanley looks sullen. Stella is embarrassed and sad.

Is it because I’ve been stood up by my beau?

I must run through my repertoire! Oh, yes—I love parrot stories!

She throws back her head and laughs. Stella also makes an ineffectual effort to seem amused.

Then he speaks slowly and with false amiability.

Mitch!—Y’know, I really shouldn’t let you in after the treatment I have received from you this evening! So utterly uncavalier!

And such uncouth apparel! Why, you haven’t even shaved!

MITCH: I don’t like fans.
BLANCHE: Then let’s turn it off, honey. I’m not partial to them!

Everything here isn’t Stan’s. Some things on the premises are actually mine!

There is some obscure meaning in this but I fail to catch it.

That pitch about your ideals being so old-fashioned and all the malarkey that you’ve dished out all summer. Oh, I knew you weren’t sixteen any more.

She throws back her head with convulsive, sobbing laughter.

Crumble and fade and—regrets—recriminations... ‘If you’d done this, it wouldn’t’ve cost me that!'

As the drinking and packing went on, a mood of hysterical exhilaration came into her and she has decked herself out in a somewhat soiled and crumpled white satin evening gown and a pair of scuffed silver slippers with brilliants set in their heels.

Now she is placing the rhinestone tiara on her head before the mirror of the dressing-table and murmuring excitedly as if to a group of spectral admirers.

How about taking a swim, a moonlight swim at the old rock- quarry?

Physical beauty is passing. A transitory possession.

But beauty of the mind and richness of the spirit and tenderness of the heart—and I have all of those things—aren’t taken away, but grow! Increase with the years! How strange that I should be called a destitute woman! When I have all of these treasures locked in my heart.

But I have been foolish—casting my pearls before swine!

And to repeat slander to me, vicious stories that he had gotten from you!

He returned with a box of roses to beg my forgiveness! He implored my forgiveness.

Our ways of life are too different. Our attitudes and our backgrounds are incompatible.

She sets the phone down and crosses warily into the kitchen.

The shadows and lurid reflections move sinuously as flames along the wall spaces.

He picks up her inert figure and carries her to the bed.

STANLEY [prodigiously elated]: You know what luck is? Luck is believing you’re lucky.

I always did say that men are callous things with no feelings, but this does beat anything.

“Poor lady,” they’ll say, “the quinine did her no good. That unwashed grape has transported her soul to heaven.”

The gravity of their profession is exaggerated—the unmistakable aura of the state institution with its cynical detachment.

A whispered colloquy takes place at the door.

STANLEY [sotto voce]: Doc, you better go in.

Divested of all the softer properties of womanhood, the Matron is a peculiarly sinister figure in her severe dress.

The greeting is echoed and re-echoed by other mysterious voices behind the walls, as if reverberated through a canyon of rock.

She sobs with inhuman abandon. There is something luxurious in her complete surrender to crying now that her sister is gone.

STANLEY [voluptuously, soothingly]: Now, honey. Now, love. Now, now, love.