“I couldn’t go on believing her story and live with Stanley” (Stella, 1232)
Stella admits that she has entered a world of illusion when she expresses that she cannot believe Blanche’s story about the rape and continue to live with Stanley. Stella is perplexed by the decision of sending Blanche to a mental asylum. Stella cannot believe Blanche’s story, but she cannot completely deny it either. She had only two options, either to believe Blanche’s story or consider it a delusion. If she accepts the truth, she also has to accept Stanley’s brutality, which would definitely hinder her survival. Consequently, Stella had to deny the truth and enter the world of illusion, in order to continue living the life she always dreamt of.
On every level, most humans will have difficulty accepting things. There is always an element that one does not want to accept. And this is where fantasy comes into play. One of the major themes of the play is “Fantasy vs. Reality”. Fantasy is a coping mechanism that people create in order to dodge the truth. This theme seems to be inspired from human beings. The nature of humans to create illusions in the time of difficulty exists irrespective of age. When an adopted child gets to know the reality of his maternity, he goes through a huge emotional trauma. To combat this emotional stress, adopted children tend to create an illusion wherein the fact of adoption is defeated. For example, the adopted son of one of my professors, in spite of knowing that he is adopted, strongly believes that he can grow really tall like his father even though they have no biological connections. This tends to show that the human mind creates a fantasy in order to idealize the reality.
Illusion revolves around the characters of the play. It is the major factor that drives the play and is responsible for all the activities that follow. In the play, the author tries to show that every character creates an illusion to cope up with his or her own problems. From the beginning, Blanche was creating an illusion about her youth and happiness to avoid all the problems in her life. But in the climax it is seen that, Stella has burst her own bubble and stuck between reality and fantasy. This is where she passes the statement to Eunice, “I couldn’t go on believing her story and live with Stanley” (Stella, 1232).
Poor Blanche
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