This is evident in the first scene when Blanche says, "Only Poe! Only Mr. Edgar Allen Poe - Could do it justice!" of her sister's neighborhood(20). The shabby, unrefined buildings instantly repulse her. What Blanche calls "years of epic fornications" have eaten what was left of the old aristocratic family that the sisters belonged to. Stella is being forced to play intermediary of the two sides as kin to the old South and wife to the new South. Although she does seem to sway to Stanley's side when conflict arises, Stella does not abandon morals completely. She tells Eunice, "I couldn't believe [Blanche's] story and go on living with Stanley"(133). The battle is also symbolized through Stanley's occupation in a factory of the new, industrial South and Blanche's former life in the old, agricultural South. The new South brings upon (symbolic) fatalities to the Old, and Blanche is one of them.
In his essay "The Tragic Downfall of Blanche DuBois," Leonard Berkman determines the catalyst of Blanche DuBois's eventual psychological downfall to the asylum as her constant desire for sex while trying to preserve her dignity, self-regard, and upper class image. Berkman attributes her lust for sex, intimacy, and romance as a result of her failed marriage with Allan. The essay then blames Blanche's troubles on her fear that eventually having sex will prevent future intimacy. Blanche believes that once she and a man have sex, he will no longer want to share the same level of intimacy with her again. He focuses on Blanche DuBois's epic tragedies as centers for her mental wreck. Although she frowns upon "fornications" of any sort, she tempts Mitch, in Berkman's words, "with the intermingling of sex with compassion that Blanche longs for; sex without compassion, that she cannot accept." More specifically Berkman says, "the point of Blanche's downfall [is] the finding herself turned by impulses towards truth in intimacy into the whore-image from which, through truth, she struggles to escape.