The main character, Blanche DuBois, is a southern belle who has lived on a plantation in Laurel, Belle Reve, her whole life. Blanche leaves Laurel and arrives in New Orleans to find her sister, Stella, married and living in a small apartment. Stella and Blanche are the last living members of their family. This symbolizes that the two sisters are the last members of a dying world, the Old South.

The first evidence that the old southern lifestyle is dying is when Blanche reveals to Stella, her sister, that Belle Reve has been lost. The loss also marks one of the play's major concerns that, "The hallowed things of the sensitive are cheapened and destroyed by contact with the new world whose brutish instinct can neither understand nor sustain what is fragile" (Spoto 139).

The name of Belle Reve is French for ''beautiful dream'' and suggests the nostalgia Williams has for the old southern lifestyle. "Williams himself admitted: 'I write out of love for the south…. It once had a way of life that I am just old enough to remember- a culture that had grace, elegance, an i

The image of Belle Reve's beauty is also expressed through imagery. "Showing Blanche inside [the apartment] at the opening of the play, Eunice [Stella's neighbor] contrasts the small apartment [Elysian Fields] to the 'home-place' Blanche has come from a 'great big place with white columns'" (Bloom 102). Showing the contrast between Blanche's new surroundings and her old home hints at the decay of the old southern ways.

nbred culture, not a society based on money" (Spoto 139).

The apartment where Blanche is staying, Elysian Fields, is considerably smaller than her old home in Belle Reve. "In Elysian Fields this opportunity for solitude is gone" (Bloom 102). It is apparent Blanche is out of her natural environment from the moment she steps out of the streetcar. "Blanche, dressed in a fluttering white garden party outfit, jars against the shabbiness and menace of the neighborhood from her first appearance" (Magill 5023).

Some topics in this essay:
Elysian Fields, Mitch Blanche, Belle Reve, Contributing Blanche's, Stella Blanche, Belle Reve's, Reve French, Ironically Blanche, Named Desire, Tennessee Williams, belle reve, modern world, southern lifestyle, elysian fields, blanche's dream-like, streetcar named desire, stella blanche, spoto 139, bloom 102, blanche afraid, throughout play, death southern lifestyle,