Mitch Confronts Blanche

Mitch Confronts Blanche is the dramatic climax of the romantic subplot in A Streetcar Named Desire, the scene in which Harold Mitchell, having been informed by Stanley Kowalski of Blanche DuBois's concealed history in Laurel, arrives at the Kowalski apartment to demand the truth. The confrontation strips away the illusions Blanche has carefully constructed—the paper lantern over the naked light bulb, the pretense of primness, the fiction of a gentleman caller from Dallas—and leaves her exposed to a reality she cannot bear. It is the moment when the play's central tension between illusion and reality, between the desire for magic and the brute force of fact, is fought out in a single room, and it ends with Blanche's final, desperate cry of "Fire!" and Mitch's departure, her last hope for rescue extinguished.

The Setting and the State of Blanche

The scene takes place a while after the dismal birthday supper, in the Kowalski apartment on Elysian Fields. The time is late evening, and the atmosphere is heavy with the sense of disaster closing in. Blanche is seated in a tense, hunched position in a bedroom chair that she has recovered with diagonal green and white stripes, wearing her scarlet satin robe. On the table beside the chair is a bottle of liquor and a glass. The rapid, feverish polka tune, the "Varsouviana," is heard—the music is in her mind, and she is drinking to escape it and the sense of disaster closing in on her. An electric fan is turning back and forth across her. When Mitch arrives, he is in work clothes: blue denim shirt and pants, unshaven, and it is obvious that he has had a few drinks on the way over. The polka tune stops when he announces himself, but it will return, a symptom of Blanche's uncontainable trauma.

The Confrontation and the Tearing of the Lantern

Mitch enters the flat with a coldness that Blanche initially tries to ignore with her usual gaiety, calling him "beautiful" and offering her lips, which he ignores. He pushes past her into the bedroom. The core of the confrontation is Mitch's demand to see Blanche in the light. He states, "I don't think I ever seen you in the light," and notes that she never wants to go out until after six, and then always to places that are not well lit. When he tears the paper lantern off the light bulb, Blanche utters a frightened gasp. She cries out, "What did you do that for?" and he replies, "So I can take a look at you good and plain!" This act is the physical destruction of the central symbol of Blanche's self-protective illusion—the paper lantern she had asked Mitch to put over the bulb in Scene Three, saying, "I can't stand a naked light bulb, any more than I can a rude remark or a vulgar action." Now, the naked light bulb exposes her. She declares, "I don't want realism. I want magic!" and explains that she misrepresents things, telling "what ought to be truth." But Mitch, having turned the light on and stared at her, turns it off again and speaks bitterly: "I don't mind you being older than what I thought. But all the rest of it—Christ! 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. But I was a fool enough to believe you was straight."

The Revelation of Blanche's Past

Mitch reveals that he first called Stanley a liar, but then checked on the story. He asked the supply-man who travels through Laurel, and then talked directly over long-distance to a merchant named Kiefaber. Blanche identifies Kiefaber as a man who whistled at her and whom she put in his place, claiming the stories are revenge. But Mitch counters that three people—Kiefaber, Stanley, and Shaw—swore to them. Cornered, Blanche abandons her denials and admits the truth. She corrects the name of the hotel: not the Flamingo, but the Tarantula Arms. "Yes, a big spider! That's where I brought my victims." She confesses that after the death of Allan Grey, she had many intimacies with strangers, driven by panic, hunting for protection in the most unlikely places, even, at last, in a seventeen-year-old boy. Someone wrote the superintendent about it: "This woman is morally unfit for her position!" She admits it is true, that she was played out, that her youth was suddenly gone up the water-spout. She had met Mitch and thanked God for him, seeing him as "a cleft in the rock of the world that I could hide in!" But now, she says, Kiefaber, Stanley, and Shaw have "tied an old tin can to the tail of the kite." Mitch's final verdict is devastating: "You're not clean enough to bring in the house with my mother."

The Aftermath: Blanche's Descent

After Mitch's departure, Blanche is left alone in the apartment. The Mexican Woman appears around the corner, a blind figure in a dark shawl carrying bunches of gaudy tin flowers, calling "Flores para los muertos"—flowers for the dead. Blanche, frightened, slams the door. The polka tune fades in again, and Blanche speaks to herself of crumble and fade, regrets and recriminations, legacies, bloodstained pillow-slips, and death. She recalls that before they lost Belle Reve, there was a camp where young soldiers trained, and on Saturday nights they would stagger onto her lawn and call her name, and sometimes she slipped outside to answer their calls. The Mexican Woman's cry of "Flores" becomes a death knell. Mitch, who had remained staring, now rises and follows her purposefully, placing his hands on her waist and trying to turn her about. He says, "What I been missing all summer." Blanche asks him to marry her, but he refuses. When he says she is not clean enough to bring in the house with his mother, she orders him to go, and when he still stares, she rushes to the big window and cries wildly, "Fire! Fire! Fire!" Mitch, startled, turns and goes out, clattering down the steps. Blanche staggers back from the window and falls to her knees. The distant piano is slow and blue. This scene is the final rupture of Blanche's last hope for a stable, respectable life, and it leaves her utterly alone, her mind already retreating into the protective fantasies that will culminate in her final break with reality.