Paper Moon

Paper Moon is a popular song that Blanche DuBois sings in the bathroom during Scene Seven of A Streetcar Named Desire, its lyrics about make-believe and belief serving as a poignant counterpoint to Stanley Kowalski's simultaneous exposure of her past lies to Stella. The song, whose full title is "It's Only a Paper Moon," functions as a piece of ironic diegetic music, its cheerful, saccharine melody and lyrics about a world that is "phony" and "make-believe" directly contrasting with the brutal reality of Stanley's revelations. Blanche's singing, which she performs blithely while soaking in a hot bath, becomes a dramatic tool that underscores her psychological state and the thematic tension between illusion and reality that runs throughout the play.

Appearance and Context

Blanche sings "Paper Moon" in Scene Seven, which takes place in late afternoon in mid-September, on her birthday. The stage directions indicate that she sings the song "contrapuntally" with Stanley's speech, as he systematically reveals to Stella the truth about Blanche's past: her stay at the Flamingo Hotel, her reputation in Laurel, and her dismissal from her teaching job after an affair with a seventeen-year-old boy. The song is the first thing Blanche sings as she bathes, and she continues it in fragments as Stanley details his discoveries. The lyrics she vocalizes include the lines "Say, it's only a paper moon, Sailing over a cardboard sea—But it wouldn't be make-believe If you believed in me!" and "It's a Barnum and Bailey world, Just as phony as it can be—But it wouldn't be make-believe If you believed in me!"

Thematic Significance

The song's central conceit—that a paper moon, a cardboard sea, and a Barnum and Bailey world become real only if someone believes in them—directly mirrors Blanche's own philosophy. Throughout the play, Blanche consistently rejects "realism" in favor of "magic," telling Mitch, "I don't want realism. I want magic! ... I misrepresent things to them. I don't tell truth, I tell what ought to be truth." The song thus becomes an anthem for her entire approach to life: she creates a world of illusion—soft lighting, paper lanterns, flattery, and invented stories—and desperately seeks someone who will believe in it, thereby making it real for her. The irony is devastating: at the very moment she sings about the transformative power of belief, Stanley is systematically destroying any possibility that Stella or Mitch will continue to believe in her fabrications.

Dramatic Function

Stanley's exposure of Blanche's past is structured as a series of "Lies" he enumerates to Stella, and Blanche's singing provides a continuous, oblivious soundtrack to this dismantling. Her voice, described as being lifted "serenely as a bell" at one point, creates a stark dramatic irony: the audience and Stella know that Blanche's world is collapsing, but Blanche herself remains momentarily unaware, cocooned in her bath and her song. The song also connects to the play's broader musical landscape, which includes the "blue piano" that "expresses the spirit of the life which goes on here" in the French Quarter, and the "Varsouviana" polka that haunts Blanche's memory of her husband Allan Grey's suicide. Unlike those more atmospheric or traumatic musical motifs, "Paper Moon" is a specific, recognizable popular tune that Blanche actively chooses to sing, making it a conscious performance of her own desired reality. The song's final appearance in the play is not sung but referenced: in Scene Eleven, as Blanche prepares to leave, she speaks of dying at sea, sewn up in a clean white sack, and being dropped overboard "into an ocean as blue as my first lover's eyes!"—a poetic image that echoes the song's theme of transforming a cardboard world into something beautiful through belief.