Belle Reve

Question 1

The name

Answer 1

• ‘beautiful dream’ suggests the sense of a dream which faded
• a sense of a facade, dark undertones reflect a sense of the faded grandeur and legacy
• grammatical mistake reinforces the sense that it was a dream which crumbled

Question 2

Context

Answer 2

• associated with the dark pst of old America and the old south’s association with slavery
• its loss represents the socioeconomic decay of the south after the civil ear
• mcRae: the papers associated with it represent ‘the dead hand of the past catching up with the future’

Question 3

horrors of belle rêve - blanche

Answer 3

‘You left! I stayed and struggled… I stayed and fought for it, bled for it, almost died for it’ - suffering, old America clings on
- at this point, when they fight about losing belle Reve, the music of the blue piano grows louder, representing both melancholy loneliness but also the death of southern plantations and this aristocratic way of life - but also, Stella’s movement onwards and New Orleans
- Williams here establishes a contrast between an America in mourning for a lost way of life, and one moving on
- ‘I let the place go? where were you? in bed with your Polack’ - death versus sexual imagery suggests thrusting future of new American

Question 4

Stella’s dismissal

Answer 4

‘Oh it had to be - sacrificed, or something’ - Stella’s dismissal and plain diction contrasts with Blanche’s melodramatic language

Question 5

The papers

Answer 5

• the carelessness of the papers and the ‘love letters… yellowing with antiquity’ juxtaposes with the Napoleonic code - ‘when you’re swindled under the napoleonic code baby I’m swindled too, and I don’t like to be swindled’ - it establishes him as a grasping new Money man

Question 6

culture

Answer 6

• all white aristocraticracy juxtaposes with the multicultural, bustling spirit of New Orleans

Question 7

Stanley’s rejection of it

Answer 7

‘I pulled you down off them columns and how you loved it… having those coloured light going’ - rejection of belle Reve for new, sexual life. deliberate use of non-standard diction emphasises his rejection of the old American haughty gentility blanche represents

Question 8

Fantasy

Answer 8

• it reflects her fantasy of the Southern Belle
• ‘daintily dressed in a white suit… looking as if she were arriving at a summer tea or cocktail party in the garden district’
• her white outfit reflects her attempts at maintaining this facade of virginal innocence and purity
• it also establishes her delicate nature - emphasising that her fantasy is not durable to the roughness of reality

Question 9

Blanche funeral speech

Answer 9

‘funerals are pretty compared to deaths. Funerals are quiet, but deaths - not always…’
- this melodramatic speech emphasises the past traumas and unspoken horrors of the last years at belle Reve

Question 10

facade

Answer 10

‘costume jewellery’ and ‘fanning herself with a palm leaf’
- Blanche firmly belongs to the chivalric tradition of the past - Stanley brutally crushes it, ‘nobody;s going to get up, so don’t be worried’ - he subverts it

Question 11

the lantern

Answer 11

’ I bought this adorable little coloured paper lantern at a Chinese shop on bourbon’ the l;ightshades dim the light in the same way that blanche dims the truth - a temporary, fragile facade

Question 12

Shep Huntleigh

Answer 12

• Illusory saviour and figment of her imagination
  ‘she laughs nervously and brightly, touching her throat as if actually talking to Shep’ - the extent of her delusion
• emphasises the seductive balance between fantasy and reality

Question 13

Stanley unpicks her time at Belle Reve

Answer 13

• it is marred with sexual promiscuity
• ‘sister blanche is no lily’
• as he unpicks it she is singing in the bath a song about the paper moon ‘oh its only a paper moon, sailing over a cardboard sea… but it wouldn’t be make believe if you believed in me’
• he calls her a ‘school of sharks’ - juxtaposes with the childlike innocence of the image of her frolicking in the bathtub
• feminist reading might consider how she is forced into these ‘intimacies with strangers’ - it is a tragic portrait of a woman with little to no choices left

Question 14

the Mexican woman

Answer 14

‘flores. flores, flores para los muertos’ - it serves as a harbinger of doom as her living death approaches
- they interrupt her stories of Blanche’s ;life with images of death, serving as a microcosm for the final years at belle Reve
‘I used to sit here and she used to sit over there and death was as close as you are’