Passion, Sex and Death
The audience is given an early clue to the theme of sex and death when Blanche in scene 1 describes the directions she was given to reach her sister’s house. She was told to take a streetcar named Desire, and then take another called Cemeteries.
The theme is stated again in scene 9, when Blanche says that the opposite of death is desire. Blanche means love as well as sexual desire— the need for connection with another person. She does not admire the raw desire embodied by Stanley, even though it is sexual passion that makes Stella and Stanley (as well, in a lesser way, as Steve and Eunice) so fully alive in a way that Blanche is not. Stanley and Stella know how to keep the “colored lights” going, which is their term for rewarding sexual relations. Everything about Stanley suggests that sexual fulfillment is the center of his life. The playwright emphasizes this in the stage direction that accompanies Stanley’s first appearance: “Animal joy in his being is implicit in all his movements and attitudes.” His sexuality is the “complete and satisfying center” of his life.
Blanche, on the other hand, finds that her desires are continually frustrated. She is associated with death—the death of her relatives at Belle Reve, and the death by suicide of her husband, which still haunts her. Reminders of death keep popping up to torment Blanche—the inscription on Mitch’s cigarette case, the Mexican woman who sells flowers for funerals. It was to stave off this death-impulse that Blanche indulged in promiscuous sex after her husband’s death. This was simply an attempt to keep life going, to stop her from withering inside, and to try to rekindle the transforming love and desire she had felt for her husband. But sensitive Blanche is no healthy animal like Stanley, which is why she is bound for failure and madness, while the final sight of Stanley is of him comforting Stella and reaching inside her blouse.