Mitch Tears Off the Paper Lantern

Mitch Tears Off the Paper Lantern is a decisive act of exposure in Scene Nine of Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire, the moment when the fragile, dimmed world Blanche DuBois has built around herself is violently stripped away. After Stanley Kowalski has revealed the truth of Blanche's past to Mitch, the latter arrives at the Kowalski apartment unshaven and in work clothes, having been drinking. He confronts Blanche in the bedroom, where she sits in a tense, hunched position wearing her scarlet satin robe, the rapid, feverish polka tune of the "Varsouviana" playing in her mind as she drinks to escape the sense of disaster closing in. Mitch, who has never seen her in full daylight, declares, "I don't think I ever seen you in the light," and then, with a single, brutal motion, tears the paper lantern off the light bulb. Blanche utters a frightened gasp. The lantern, which she had asked him to put up during their first meeting on the poker night, had been her emblem of transformation—a device to soften, to beautify, to create the magic she insists she needs. Its removal exposes her not only to the unsparing electric glare but to the truth of her own deterioration and deceit.

The Destruction of Illusion

Blanche's response to the tearing of the lantern is immediate and desperate. She cries out, "What did you do that for?" and when Mitch replies that he is "just realistic," she makes her most famous declaration: "I don't want realism. I want magic! Yes, yes, magic! I try to give that to people. I misrepresent things to them. I don't tell truth, I tell what ought to be truth. And if that is sinful, then let me be damned for it!—Don't turn the light on!" But Mitch has already crossed to the switch. He turns the light on and stares at her; she cries out and covers her face. He turns it off again, but the damage is done. The lantern had been a physical manifestation of her entire strategy for survival—the soft colors, the dimmed lights, the paper moon of her self-invention. Its destruction is the moment when the world she has fabricated can no longer hold.

The Confrontation and the Unraveling of Truth

The tearing of the lantern is not an isolated act of cruelty but the culmination of a scene built on accumulated revelations. Mitch, speaking slowly and bitterly, tells her, "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." Blanche, cornered, admits the truth she has been fleeing: after the death of her young husband Allan Grey—who shot himself after she told him, "I saw! I know! You disgust me"—she sought "intimacies with strangers" to fill her empty heart, driven by "panic, just panic." She confesses that she was eventually asked to leave the Flamingo Hotel, and that a seventeen-year-old boy led to her dismissal from her teaching position in Laurel. "True? Yes, I suppose—unfit somehow—anyway. . . . So I came here. There was nowhere else I could go. I was played out." The lantern's removal thus forces into the open the entire history of loss, shame, and desperation she had tried to keep in shadow.

Aftermath and Thematic Significance

After the lantern is torn and the truth is spoken, the scene descends further into degradation. A blind Mexican Woman appears outside, calling "Flores para los muertos"—flowers for the dead—an aural symbol of the death that now pervades Blanche's world. Mitch, having stripped her of her illusions, then attempts to embrace her, saying he wants "what I been missing all summer." When Blanche asks him to marry her, he replies, "You're not clean enough to bring in the house with my mother." She orders him out, and when he hesitates, she rushes to the window and screams "Fire! Fire! Fire!" until he flees. The tearing of the paper lantern is thus the hinge on which the entire scene turns: it is the moment when Mitch, who had once seemed a "cleft in the rock of the world" where she could hide, becomes another agent of her destruction. The lantern, a cheap object bought at a Chinese shop on Bourbon Street, becomes a symbol of the fragile, beautiful lie that cannot survive the light of truth. Its destruction prefigures the final, more violent assault of Scene Ten, when Stanley will tear away the last of Blanche's defenses.