Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire: Blanche DuBois, her ex-husband, and Stanley Kowalski reflect the author’s multiple personality

In the last scene, when Blanche is being taken away to a mental hospital—to cover up the fact that her brother-in-law, Stanley, had raped her while her sister was in the hospital to give birth, and that her sister, Stella, had taken her husband’s side in the cover-up—and the nurse asks the doctor if they should put Blanche in a straitjacket, the doctor says that it won’t be necessary, because he correctly senses that Blanche will respond appropriately to simple kindness. Blanche, in turn, sensing the doctor’s kindness, says, in the play’s most famous line: “Whoever you are—I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.”

But, the fact is, nothing we have learned about Blanche’s history supports the idea that she has ever depended on the kindness of strangers. So the significance of that famous line is that it reflects Blanche’s intact interpersonal skills, which, in turn, suggests that her psychological problems, however severe, are probably not psychotic.

So, then, what is Blanche’s psychological problem? She certainly has a much more serious problem than just a histrionic personality. We learn that she had been driven out of the town where she had been working as a school teacher for having had sexual contact with a seventeen-year-old student; not to mention her notorious sexual promiscuity. And all that is in gross contradiction to her usual attitude of good manners and propriety. This degree of self-contradiction is suggestive of multiple personality.

The play’s purported explanation for Blanche’s psychological problems is that she was once married to a man who turned out to be gay, and that her insensitive response to finding him out prompted him to literally blow his brains out. But multiple personality starts in childhood, not in marriage, and we are told very little about Blanche’s childhood.

However, Tennessee Williams’s own childhood is better known, and his multiple personality is reflected in the play. Three of his personalities appear to be the basis for Blanche DuBois, Blanche’s ex-husband, and Stanley Kowalski.

In his autobiography, the author says that prior to his severe illness at age eight (diagnosed as diphtheria), “I had been a little boy with a robust, aggressive, almost bullying nature,” which sounds like Stanley Kowalski.

As a result of the year-long illness and his mother’s overly solicitous attention, he added “sissy” personalities (1, pp. 11-12), which involved both a gay male personality and a female personality. He says, “I don’t think I had effeminate mannerisms but somewhere deep in my nerves was imprisoned a young girl, a sort of blushing school maiden” (1, p. 17). In the play (scene six), when Blanche recalls her tragically deceased gay husband, she recalls that “he wasn’t the least bit effeminate looking” (2, p. 114).

According to Williams, both his sister and mother were psychotic, and his experience with them inevitably adds some psychotic coloring to Blanche. But the character and the play mostly reflect his own multiple personality.

1. Tennessee Williams. Memoirs. Garden City NY, Doubleday, 1975.

2. Tennessee Williams. A Streetcar Named Desire [1947]. New York, New Directions, 2004.