Brainstorms from the SHU Scribe

Why are Beautiful Women Bonkers?

So why are beautiful women crazy!?! Blanche is introduced as being delicately beautiful in the first scene. She is also exhibiting some rather crazy behavior. Obviously, by the end of the story we see that she is completely bonkers, but regardless of whether we see the barbaric Stanley as the cause of her eventual total breakdown with reality or not, her grasp at reality has been slipping since the beginning. Now the first Yahoo! Search hit revealed this interesting quote, “What makes beautiful women more likely to be crazy? The simple answer is, that they are given more opportunity to be crazy, and crazy behavior seems to be more readily accepted from them.” While the site isn’t exactly academic in nature I think this is certainly true in Blanche’s case. Blanche is offensive and yet is left of the hook. She calls her sister’s house horrible, drinks Stanley’s liquor, accuses Stella of not being glad to see her, and then calls her fat! We get glimpse of her lunacy in the following statements. “I was so exhausted by all I’d been through my-nerves broke. I was on the verge of lunacy, almost!" "As you must have noticed-I'm not very well..." "And I stayed at Belle Reve and tried to hold it together! …but all the burden descended on my shoulders." Additionally, the habit of voicing inappropriate outbursts and then quickly apologizing or ranting crazily almost in stream of consciousness seems a little more than mere personality. Blanche is obsessed about her appearance, in the beginning fussing all over herself to whoever would listen and later sly refusing to let Mitch see her in the daylight. While Stella does initially confront her sister’s lunacy, saying, “stop this hysterical outburst…” she falls far short of helping her sister until the climax of the story when in desperation she resorts to the last alternative, sending her to the mad house, a mansion full of beautiful women.