The character of Blanche in A Streetcar Named DesireBlanche, Stella's older sister, until recently a high school English teacher in Laurel, Mississippi. He arrives in New Orleans as a talkative, witty, arrogant, fragile, and ultimately dilapidated figure. Blanche was once married and passionately in love with a tortured young man. He killed himself after she discovered his homosexuality and she has suffered from guilt and regret ever since. Blanche saw her parents and relatives die, all the old guard, and then had to suffer the foreclosure of the family estate. Collapsing under the strain, or perhaps giving in to impulses so long repressed that they could now no longer be contained, Blanche engages in a series of sexual escapades that trigger expulsion from her community. In New Orleans she gives herself the air of a woman who has never known humiliation, but Stanley sees through her. Her past catches up with her and destroys her relationship with Mitch. Stanley, as she fears, destroys what remains of her. At the end of the show she is taken to a mental asylum. This is really the story of what happened to Blanche in the play, but what flaws in her character were responsible for her subsequent tragedy. Blanche is by far the most complex character in the play. An intelligent, sensitive woman who appreciates literature and the creativity of the human imagination, she is also emotionally traumatized and repressed. This gives license to his imagination to become a refuge for his pain. One gets the sense that Blanche's vision of her real self versus her ideal self has been increasingly blurred over the years until it is sometimes difficult for her to tell the difference. It is a challenge to find the key to Blanche's melancholy, but perhaps the roots of her trauma lie in her early marriage. She was haunted by her inability to help or understand her troubled young husband and has tortured herself about it ever since. Her drive to lose herself in the "kindness of strangers" might also be understood from this period in that her sense of confidence in her own feminine attraction has been shaken by the awareness of her husband's homosexuality and she is driven to use his sexual allure to attract men again and again. Yet, beneath it all, there is the desire to find a mate, to find fulfillment in love.