Blanche doesn't know Shaw. Does she "really" know Shep Huntleigh?
The people who really know her have let her down. Her family has squandered her inheritance through their "epic fornications" and their misguided ideals, which she has so mistakenly internalized. Her sister, to whom she has come for help, abandons her sister in favor of her rapist husband. Her brother-in-law rapes her. Her husband kills himself after he can't live up to her idea of him (which obviously did not include his being gay, due to the way she has been brought up). Nobody who is close to her helps her. Where does Blanche seek comfort? In the arms of young men (like her dead husband). In the young army men who call to her from her yard. With traveling salesman who come and go, but offer her a quick moment of comfort, since she is always fighting the split between her "proper" Southern Belle attitude and her internal desire.
Nobody she knows helps her. In perhaps one moment of self-recognition in play of illusions, she says that she has always depended on the kindness of strangers. I have always read that line as a biting indictment of her family and a sad but true self-assessment. |
