A Streetcar Named Desire: Scene 1 Summary & Analysis

The play is set in a two-story, white-frame, faded corner building on a street called Elysian Fields, which runs between the train tracks and the river in New Orleans. The neighborhood is poor but has a “raffish charm.” Stanley and Stella Kowalski live in the downstairs flat, and Steve and Eunice live upstairs. The stage is set such that the audience can see both the interior and the exterior of the building. Music from a “blue piano” is heard offstage.

Eunice and a Negro Woman are sitting on the front stoop when Stanley and Mitch come around the corner. Stanley bellows for Stella, and when she comes out on the first-floor landing, he tosses her a package of bloody meat from the butcher. Stanley and Mitch leave to go bowling, and Stella soon follows them. Eunice and the Negro Women crow delightedly over the sexual innuendo of the meat-tossing.

Blanche DuBois comes around the corner, looking distinctly out of place: dressed in white and fluttering uncertainly like a moth, she stares uneasily at a slip of paper at her hands. She is looking for her sister, Stella, and she has been told to take “a street-car named Desire” and transfer to Cemeteries to arrive at Elysian Fields. Eunice assures Blanche that she is in the right place, and the Negro Woman goes to the bowling alley to fetch Stella.

Eunice lets Blanche into the Kowalskis’ flat and tries to make small talk about what Stella has mentioned about Blanche––that the latter is a teacher from Mississippi, and that they grew up together on a plantation called Belle Reve. Blanche tells Eunice that she’d like to be left alone.

Blanche perches uncomfortably as she looks around the dim, messy apartment. There are two rooms in the apartment: the kitchen/dining room, which also contains a fold-out bed for Blanche, and the bedroom. Suddenly, Blanche springs up to the closet, finds a whiskey bottle, and quickly takes a drink. After replacing the bottle and washing the glass, she resumes her original seat.

Stella bursts into the apartment, and she and Blanche embrace excitedly. Blanche speaks with a feverish hysteria and lets her criticism about the dingy state of the physical and social surroundings slip into her effusive greetings. She asks Stella for a drink to calm her nerves, though simultaneously insisting that she’s not a drunk. Once the drink is poured, she again laments Stella’s living conditions, calling the place something out of an Edgar Allan Poe story.

Stella’s quietness makes Blanche anxious that Stella isn’t glad to see her, but Stella reassures her to the contrary. Blanche tells Stella that she is taking a leave of absence from her job as a schoolteacher due to her nerves. She comments that Stella is looking plump and draws attention to her own girlish figure, saying that she hasn’t changed a bit since Stella left and their father died. Blanche is shocked to find that Stella does not have a maid in the two-room flat, and she takes another drink.

Blanche worries that Stanley will not like her and that she will have no privacy from him in the apartment. She makes disapproving comments about Stanley’s lower-class status and his friends (“Heterogeneous––types”). Stella is very much in love with Stanley, and she tells Blanche not to compare him to the boys they knew at Belle Reve.

Blanche bursts out that she has lost Belle Reve, and, with steadily mounting hysteria, she recalls how she suffered through the deaths of their parents and relatives. She accuses Stella of abandoning the family and the estate to jump into bed with her “Polack.” Stella springs up and rushes into the bathroom, crying.

Outside, the men return from bowling and discuss their plans for poker the following evening. Blanche nervously flutters around the apartment as they speak. Stanley enters, exuding raw, animalistic, sexual energy, and he sizes Blanche up at a glance. Stanley casually makes small talk with Blanche, who is stiff and a little hectic. Stanley pulls the whiskey bottle out to take a drink, noting its depletion.

Stanley pulls off his sweaty shirt in front of Blanche, asking her about being an English teacher in Mississippi. Stella is still in the bathroom. When Stanley asks Blanche about her marriage, polka music plays faintly in the background. Blanche tells Stanley that “the boy died” and sinks down, saying she feels sick.