STELLA!!!

In A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams, the main focus tends to be on the characters Stanley and Blanche, and not much gets said about Stella. Today, I want to discuss Stella’s character since she’s so underappreciated in most analyses.

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Stella is the wife of Stanley and the sister of Blanche.  I’ll give you a quick recap of her backstory.  Stella grew up on a plantation and was raised, along with her sister, to be very proper and refined young ladies. She moved away from home to New Orleans and married Stanley. Now she is pregnant and her sister has to come to stay with her and her husband because she lost the family plantation after all their relatives died. 

Now that you’re up to speed, let's focus more on Stella now that her sister is staying with her. From the start of the play, Stella was caught in the middle of her husband and her sister. Both Stanley and Blanche were manipulating her in different ways.  Stanley was obviously abusive both physically and mentally, and Blanche was arguably mentally unstable because of the trauma she had experienced in the past, which caused her to lie and seem like she needed to be taken care of by Stella.  Since Stanley and Blanche were at odds with each other, Stella was stuck in-between them, having to choose which loved one she would side with. 

Early on in the play, Stella chooses Blanche over Stanley by agreeing with her that Stanley is lower class than they are because she felt bad for leaving her to deal with their family member’s death and the strain of the plantation. This only infuriated Stanley, causing him to act more childish than he already was, to begin with, because he wanted to “win” Stella back over to his side.  His behavior only provoked her to get closer to Blanche and even leave the house-though only for a few minutes, until he came crawling back, showing enough remorse to lure her back in.

At the end of the play, however, Stella chooses Stanley over her sister, after Blanche tries to tell her that he had raped her.  Many would say that Stella was wrong to do so, but you can’t cast the blame all on her.  In her defense, Blanche was caught lying to her previously with how she had been “sleeping around.” Now, because Blanche was lying so much and pretending, she was in a different reality so much, Stella didn’t know what was true anymore.  She thought that her sister had made up the story about her rape because she was trying to convince Stella to leave Stanley.  

This is a common occurrence with people caught in an abusive relationship, they are being pulled away from their friends and loved ones and lied to constantly to the point that they don’t know who to trust anymore except the one who’s abusing them. Blanche was seen guilting Stella into helping her and making fun of her at the beginning of the play which led to Stella “siding” with her at first.  Stanley was dominating Stella throughout the play and was trying to use the money his made and the “swindling” Blanche did as a way to make her side with him.  

Stella was a victim of abuse from both her husband and her sister, but that doesn’t make her completely innocent.  She did still choose to go back to Stanley after he hit her and again at the end of the play, according to the script. She was given those opportunities to leave him, but she never did.  She kept running back to the abuse.  With her sister, she kept enabling her and defending her behavior which only kept that abuse around longer.  Granted, she was the only one that Blanche had left and she was clearly becoming more unstable.  I understand that she just wanted to help her sister, but the best way to help her was to get her in some sort of counseling.  While therapy was around in the 1940s when the play was written and set, it was not the same as it is now since it focused on the mentally insane over general counseling and working through trauma like therapy is now. Choices like these make Stella less of a victim, not completely taking that title away from her, only lessen it.

What did you think about Stella’s character? Let me know in the comments.