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Scene 9 - Coggle Diagram
Scene 9
Dramatic Impact
Decisive stage in Blanche's disintegration
- Melodrama -> Mitch's hostility & Blanche's half hearted protestations lead up to violent ending
- Mitch trying to get what he has 'been missing all summer' -> sex that she has withheld -> old fashioned
- Tearing the lantern away -> symbolism of the stripping away of Blanche's pretensions -> exposes her
- Her lies is an attempt for her to to present herself as a reality she wishes for
- Mitch incapable of grasping this, when she says 'I didn't lie in my heart'
Death Foreshadowing
- Varsouviana music is heard repeatedly
- Blanche admits her awareness of it is reminder of her Husband's suicide -> comes to stop with a gunshot
- Scene 9, polka music stops with Mitch's attempt to have sex with her
- replaced after his flight with melancholy sound of blue piano
- Visual reminder of death in figure of Mexican Woman selling flowers for dead, whose cry of 'Flores para los muertos' accompanies Blanche's distressing, incoherent description of deaths at Belle Reve
Mitch's Incomprehension
Mitch surprised that woman as promiscuous as Blanche should object to his advances
- Underlines the lack of understanding between them
- Clear at beginning of scene when he ignored her girlish chatter & pretence of not knowing 'Southern Comfort' was alcohol
- Audience & reader grasp the hopelessness of Blanche's efforts to find contentment with Mitch
Blanche's identification of desire as the 'opposite' of death fits with the Freudian view that we are driven by psychic urges of Eros & Thanatos
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Scene reveals more of Blanche's character
- First time we are given insights into her behaviour in Laurel
- Admits her lies
- Tells truth about herself for the first time
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- Disjointed trivia of conversation prepares audience for reality of Blanche's 'vacation' (mental hospital)
- Dramatic irony revealed gradually
- Mitch's use of word pitch compares Blanche's explanation to a salesman's patter and shows that her motives are lost on him.
- She is deceitful to him; a liar pretending to be virtuous
- The fact Mitch doesn't remotely understand Blanche underlines the lack of empathy between them
- Their relationship is doomed to fail sooner or later
- The way they speak again stresses the gulf between them
- Blanche's artificial language is set against Mitch's short, contemptuous, grammatically flawed replies
- Rhetoric against grunts, soft darkness against harsh light - message that the relationship would've failed anyway
- Blanche presents herself as innocent to Mitch because that is what he is looking for
- More importantly it is how she wants to be herself
- Her flirtation with the young man in scene 5
- Blanche is unusually clear about her preference for illusion, declares 'I misinterpret things... I don't tell the truth, I tell what ought to be the truth'
- She admits in scene 5 to Stella that she has had to pretend to be seductive 'put a - paper lantern over the light'. Show Blanche is aware of her need to camouflage reality
- Metaphors used to disguise the truth
Symbolism -> light & dark, truth & illusion
- For Blanche the light is cruel enemy & darkness is kind
- Darkness hides the ugliness of real world, enables her to maintain her illusions
- When illusions are lost her sanity is too
- Williams uses the lantern as a function to be used in metaphor for Mitch's desire to force himself on Blanche
- Exposing her in light is him attempting to hurt & humiliate her
- Mitch complains the room is dark, Blanche states the 'dark is comforting to me'
- Mitch violently tears down lantern
- Blanche chatters & 'laughs breathlessly' - nervous
- Mitch gives monosyllabic answers while Blanche gives speeches
- Blanche's flirtatiousness jars & adds to dramatic tension
- Polka music displays how Blanche is with the premonition of disaster
- she has been drinking and is confused
- Mitch shows his now lack of respect for Blanche -> turns up in work clothes, unshaven, drunk
- Begins with Mitch putting Blanche into light, ends with that he was a 'fool enough to believe' that B;anche was honest
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