Stella and Blanche are two important female characters in Tennessee Williams' "poetic tragedy", A Streetcar Named Desire. Although they are sisters, their blood relationship suggests other similarities between the two women. They are both part of the last generation of a once aristocratic but now moribund family. Both display a great deal of culture and sensitivity and, as a result, both seem out of place in the Elysian Fields. As Miller notes (45), "beauty is shipwrecked on the rock of the world's vulgarity." Blanche, in particular, is much more anachronistic than Stella, who has, for the most part, adapted to Stanley Kowalski's environment. Finally, both Stella and Blanche are or have been married. It is in their respective marriages that we can begin to trace the profound differences between these two sisters. Where Blanche's marriage, to a man she loved dearly (Miller 43), proved catastrophic for her, Stella's marriage seems to fulfill her as a woman. Blanche's marriage to a young homosexual and the subsequent tragedy resulting from the discovery of her husband's degeneracy and her inability to help him, were responsible for much of the perversity of her life..