Scene Nine

Question 1

Plot summary for scene 9

Answer 1

• Mitch confronts BD about her shady past whilst the polka plays
• BD continues to take shots of whiskey
• BD reveals the truth about the rumours and explains the relationship with the student
• The Mexican lady is heard in the background
• The polka fades away and Blanche kicks Mitch out

Question 2

Key quotes for scene 9

Answer 2

• “The music is in her mind”
• “Mitch comes around the corner in work clothes…He is unshaven”
• “She rushes about frantically, hiding the bottle in the closet, crouching at the mirror dabbing her face with cologne and makeup”
• “So utterly uncavalier”
• “She looks fearfully after him as he stalks into the bedroom”
• “There now, the shot! It always stops after that.”
• “Are you boxed out of your mind”
• “He says you’ve been lapping it up all summer like a wild-cat”
• “He tears the paper lantern off the light-bulb. She utters a frightened gasp”
• “I don’t want realism”
• “I’ll tell you what I want. Magic! [Mitch laughs] Yes, yes, magic! I try to give that to people. I misrepresent things to them. I don’t tell the truth. I tell what ought to be the truth. And if that is sinful let me be dammed for it”
• “Oh I knew you weren’t 16 anymore. But I was fool enough to believe you was straight”
• “Yes, a big spider! That’s where I brought my victims. [She pours herself another drink] Yes, I had many intimacies with strangers”
• “Flores para los muertos”
• “I lived in a house where dying old women remembered their dead men”
• “What I been missing all summer”
• “The opposite is desire”

Question 3

What does John McCrae have to say about scene 9?

Answer 3

• Mitch is getting closer and closer to the truth
• More self awareness coming across
• Layers of Blanche represented different from actress to actress
• Flamingo is brought up, colloquial for whore - shows as the totel is actually called the tarantula arms (where she brings her victims)
• “Intimacies with strangers” link to kindness from strangers, use of sexual promiscuity in panic
• She’s lost her youth through the death of Alan, “Old dying women who remember their dead men”
• Mitch offers Blanche a little peace
• Death and love represented through the Mexican florist
• Death and desire are described to be total opposites, eros and Thanatos
• Blanche revealed to be not just a whore, yet a nymphomaniac. Hysterical woman trope
• Blanche as a new kind of heroine
• Mitch returns to his mother, Freudian?

Question 4

Contextual notes on scene 9

Answer 4

• Mitch’s rejection of Blanche reflects society’s harsh judgment of women who don’t conform to ideals of purity, especially in a time when female sexuality was increasingly policed but also feared.
• His sister, Rose Williams, suffered from schizophrenia and was institutionalized—Blanche’s mental unravelling echoes Rose’s tragic story.
• Blanche, like many of his characters, is sensitive and poetic but unable to survive in a brutal, pragmatic world (Laura within the glass menagerie and her social anxiety).
• In 1940s America, women were judged harshly for expressing sexuality. Blanche’s desire is used against her, while Stanley (and even Mitch) face no consequences for their actions. Scene 9 captures this gendered double standard, where Mitch denies Blanche love but still feels entitled to her body.

Question 5

Notes on stagecraft and structure in scene 9

Answer 5

• Scene 9 serves as a turning point in the play’s dramatic arc. It’s where Blanche’s hopes of salvation (through Mitch) are definitively crushed.
• Mitch rips off the paper lantern to expose the “naked light bulb.”
  Symbolizes harsh truth vs. Blanche’s protective illusions. Lighting is a visual metaphor for exposure, vulnerability, and loss of fantasy. Blanche constantly avoids light throughout the play—so this act is devastating and symbolic.
• The music builds to a gunshot in her mind (a stage direction), which only she hears. This auditory hallucination marks a blurring of reality, showing her slipping into delusion.
  For the audience, it’s haunting and signals the growing fragility of her mental state.
• Mitch’s physical presence dominates the stage—he’s drunk, agitated, and unkind. The stage directions emphasize his movements (e.g., standing between Blanche and the door, touching her), which create a sense of threat.
• Through sound, light, and movement, Williams makes internal suffering external and theatrical—bringing us uncomfortably close to Blanche’s unravelling. The stagecraft heightens the emotional stakes without relying on spectacle; instead, it uses symbolism, subtlety, and sensory cues to evoke tragedy.

Question 6

Links across literature in scene 9

Answer 6

• Blanche recounts the story of her young husband’s suicide in a confessional tone that feels deeply literary—almost like a Southern Gothic tale.
• The entire structure of Scene 9 plays like a Shakespearean inversion of a romantic rescue—Mitch is no longer the “knight” but the one who exposes and abandons Blanche. This subversion can be read as a critique of romantic ideals, a theme present in the works of Ibsen, Chekhov, and other modern dramatists who influenced Williams.
• “And then the searchlight which had been turned on the world was turned off again…” This image of the “searchlight” extinguishing with her husband’s death is metaphoric and literary—a Romantic loss of innocence or light in the world. It could also echo John Milton’s “darkness visible” from Paradise Lost—an intense poetic way of describing grief and inner torment.