Blue Truth vs. White Deception

In Tennessee William’s play, A Streetcar Named Desire, the colors white and blue are used to reflect the sincerity of a situation. Blanche consistently clothes herself in the color white in a frantic attempt to make herself look and feel pure, even though her purity has long been absent; this associates the color white with deception and fantasy. Conversely, Stanley is associated with the color blue, which is used throughout the play when harsh truth is exposed. Stanley forces a cruel reality upon Blanche’s deceitful fantasies; as Blanche battles between the colors of white and blue, she cannot maintain her purely white image and ultimately succumbs to the struggle.

Blanche often veils herself in the color white in order to convince others of her sexual purity, while simultaneously attempting to convince herself of this lie. When Blanche first appears, she is described as dressing in a white suit with a white hat (5). A bit later, while scrutinizing her sister Stella’s appearance, she tells her, “You messy child, you, you’ve spilt something on that pretty white lace collar!” (15). Blanche is immediately drawn to the white in Stella’s collar, and scolds her for allowing dirt to ruin the purity of its color; this exposes her infatuation with the color white and her obsession with the purifying powers she believes it to have.

Stanley, with his harsh candor, is often associated with the color blue; he constantly tries to expose Blanche’s lies by replacing her fake whiteness with his own blue truth. In the opening scene, Stanley is “roughly dressed in blue denim work clothes” (4). Although Stanley is regularly cruel, he is depicted as consistently honest. Furthermore, the “blue piano” often starts playing during his scenes, and is occasionally sparked by his presence (29, 44, 84). Stanley’s blue clothing, as well as his correlation to the blue piano, establishes an association between his harsh truthfulness and the color blue. Furthermore, Stanley often tries to eliminate the color white in an attempt to expose the truth. During the card party scene, Stanley “crosses to the small white radio and snatches it off the table. With a shouted oath, he tosses the instrument out the window” (62). Stanley cannot stand the thought of the deceptive noise from the white radio blocking out the sound of the truth. He also exposes Blanche’s “white” act as a lie, when he exposes her dirty history and says, “But sister Blanche is no lily!” (119). By saying this in relation to a lily, Stanley ignites the imagery of whiteness; Stanley is stripping the false “white” image from Blanche in order to expose the harsh reality she cannot bear to face.

Blanche perpetually struggles with the competing colors of white and blue, as she attempts to cover up the dirty truth and replace it with fantasy. When the truth is thrown in her face, the color blue overwhelms her to the point of panic. In the scene where Mitch tells Blanche he will not marry her, Blanche “rushes to the big window with its pale blue square of the soft summer light and cries wildly” (150). In the same moment, the stage direction says that “The distant piano is slow and blue” (150). Because Mitch has exposed her lies, the truth prevails; despite her attempts to avoid reality, Blanche cannot escape the blue.

Blanch ultimately cannot maintain her pure white image, and willingly acknowledges the inevitable exposure of the truth. In the last scene where her mounting insanity is uncovered and punished, Blanche clothes herself in a blue dress; this prepares her to face the reality of an insane asylum in which she can no longer carry on her fantasies. She tells Stella, “I’ll be buried at sea sewn up in a clean white sack and dropped overboard—at noon—in the blaze of summer—and into an ocean as blue as my first lover’s eyes!” (170). Blanche recognizes her struggle between truth and deception in this moment; she knows that even in death, she will not be able to escape her struggle to balance the two, as she’ll be buried in a white sack in the blue sea and the colors will forever be at odds.