Blanche DuBois is the elder sister of Stella.

She comes from Mississippi to stay at the apartment of her sister and brother-in-law in New Orleans. Blanche is a sensitive, highly-strung woman of about thirty. She is aware that she is getting older and worries about losing her beauty. To assuage her anxiety, she seeks out compliments on her appearance. In the decaying environment in which she finds herself, she is very aware of her more refined, aristocratic background. She objects to Stanley because he is common. As the play develops, it transpires that she has had a very troubled history. The family fortune vested in the plantation at Belle Reve, in Mississippi, was squandered and the house has been taken over by creditors. Blanche married young and the marriage had a disastrous outcome when her husband, whom she discovered in a homosexual act, shot himself. Blanche then developed a local reputation for being promiscuous and she was forced to leave the high school where she taught English because of an affair with a seventeen-year-old boy. Blanche is like a ship without an rudder. She hopes to find safe harbor with Mitch, but the budding romance fails when Stanley reveals her past to him. She is then devastated when Stanley presents her with a bus ticket home. Her gradual mental deterioration culminates in the final scene where she is committed to an institution. She is lost in some kind of fantasy world in which she does not know the difference between reality and illusion. No longer a young girl in her twenties, Blanche Dubois has suffered through the deaths of all of her loved ones, save Stella, and the loss of her old way of life. When Blanche was a teenager, she married a young boy whom she worshipped; the boy turned out to be depressive and homosexual, and not long after their marriage he committed suicide. While Stella left Belle Reve, the Dubois ancestral home, to try and make her own life, Blanche stayed behind and cared for a generation of dying relatives. She saw the deaths of the elder generation and the end of the Dubois family fortune. In her grief, Blanche looked for comfort in amorous encounters with near-strangers. Eventually, her reputation ruined and her job lost, she was forced to leave the town of Laurel. She has come to the Kowalski apartment seeking protection and shelter. When the play begins, Blanche is already a fallen woman in societys eyes. Her family fortune and estate are gone, she lost her young husband to suicide years earlier, and she is a social pariah due to her indiscrete sexual behavior. She also has a bad drinking problem, which she covers up poorly. Behind her veneer of social snobbery and sexual propriety, Blanche is an insecure, dislocated individual. She is an aging Southern belle who lives in a state of perpetual panic about her fading beauty. Her manner is dainty and frail, and she sports a wardrobe of showy but cheap evening clothes. Stanley quickly sees through Blanches act and seeks out information about her past. In the Kowalski household, Blanche pretends to be a woman who has never known indignity. Her false propriety is not simply snobbery, however; it constitutes a calculated attempt to make herself appear attractive to new male suitors. Blanche depends on male sexual admiration for her sense of self-esteem, which means that she has often succumbed to passion. By marrying, Blanche hopes to escape poverty and the bad reputation that haunts her. But because the chivalric Southern gentleman savior and caretaker (represented by Shep Huntleigh) she hopes will rescue her is extinct, Blanche is left with no realistic possibility of future happiness. As Blanche sees it, Mitch is her only chance for contentment, even though he is far from her ideal. Stanleys relentless persecution of Blanche foils her pursuit of Mitch as well as her attempts to shield herself from the harsh truth of her situation. The play chronicles the subsequent crumbling of Blanches self-image and sanity. Stanley himself takes the final stabs at Blanche, destroying the remainder of her sexual and mental esteem by raping her and then committing her to an insane asylum. In the end, Blanche blindly allows herself to be led away by a kind doctor, ignoring her sisters cries. This final image is the sad culmination of Blanches vanity and total dependence upon men for happiness.