A Streetcar Named Desire

The ocean and images of water often come up in relation to Blanche. As Blanche prepares to go to dinner with Stella, she sings, “’From the land of the sky blue water,/ They brought a captive maid!’” (30). The song was composed by Charles Wakefield Cadman and written by Nelle Richmond Eberhart and depicts a brave young mermaid being serenaded and held against her will by a sailor on a ship. 

Blanche spends hours soaking in the bathtub each night, even on hot evenings, claiming that she takes “hydro-therapy” (134)for her nerves. After Mitch breaks up with her, she babbles to no one in particular about diving into a quarry where, “if you hit a rock you don’t come up till tomorrow” (151). Blanche tells Stanley that Shep has invited her on a “cruise of the Caribbean” (153) and calls for her seahorse pin as she dresses to leave Elysian Fields. She tells the women how she will spend the rest of her days at sea and “be buried at sea and sewn up in a clean white sack and dropped overboard […] into an ocean as blue as [her] first lover’s eyes” (170). Images of water and the color blue lace the play.