A Streetcar Named Desire: Scene 9 Summary & Analysis

It is later that night. Blanche is sitting in her red satin robe in the bedroom. The Varsouviana polka music can be heard from offstage. The stage directions say that the music is playing in Blanche’s mind and that she is drinking to escape it.

Mitch, unshaven and disheveled, rings the doorbell. The polka stops. Blanche hurriedly puts on powder and perfume and hides the liquor before letting Mitch in. She greets him with a hectic and excited chiding and offers a kiss, but he refuses and stalks past her into the bedroom.

Mitch asks Blanche to turn off the fan. She offers him a drink. Mitch says that he doesn’t want Stanley’s liquor, but Blanche replies that she has her own. She wants to know what is the matter, but says she won’t press Mitch about it. The polka music begins again, and she is agitated. Blanche says that the music always stops when she hears a gunshot. Blanche and the audience hear a shot, and the music stops. Mitch doesn’t hear anything.

Blanche pretends to happen upon the liquor bottle in the closet and pretends that she doesn’t know what Southern Comfort is. Mitch again refuses a drink, saying that Stanley says she has been drinking his liquor all summer.

Blanche asks Mitch what’s on his mind. Mitch says that he’s never seen Blanche in the daytime or in the light. He rips the paper lantern off the light bulb. Blanche gasps, crying, “I don’t want realism. I want magic!”

Mitch stares Blanche in the face. He says that he doesn’t mind her being older than he’d thought, but he does mind all the lying. Blanche begins to deny it, but Mitch says he’s heard the stories about her from three sources: Stanley, Shaw, and a merchant in Laurel.

At first, Blanche declares that all three men made up the stories out of revenge. But as she takes another drink, she breaks down into sobs. She admits that after her husband’s death, the only solace and sense of protection she found was in “intimacies with strangers.” She says that she didn’t know what she was doing and that she acted out of panic. Mitch, she says, was the first man who gave her hope. After a pause, Mitch says that Blanche lied to him “inside and out,” but Blanche says that she never lied in her heart.

A Mexican Woman comes to the door, selling “flores para los muertos” (flowers for the dead). Blanche is frightened and slams the door. The polka music begins again, and the Mexican Woman’s voice can still be heard from outside.

Blanche gives a tortured, almost hallucinatory soliloquy about Belle Reve and the camp of soldiers stationed near the plantation. Blanche says that she would solace herself with the soldiers occasionally. She says that the opposite of death is desire.

Mitch begins to embrace Blanche, but Blanche insists that he marry her first. Mitch drops his hands, saying that she is not clean enough to bring home to his mother. Blanche yells at Mitch, insisting that he leave before she screams fire. When he doesn’t leave, she indeed begins to scream, “Fire! Fire! Fire!” Mitch clumsily clatters out the door and around the corner. Blanche falls to her knees as a piano plays in the distance.