Have you taken your bath…?

Sounds familiar? I did hear a lot of it when I was a small kid; mom ran around to catch me because I prefer to go naturally unperfumed without those sweet smell of Carrie Junior. Throughout the play A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams, Blanche bathes herself. Several times in many scenes she is seen bathing. Blanche is known as a fallen woman in society’s eyes because of her family’s fortune and estate are gone, lost her young husband to suicide years earlier and her promiscuity. Her sexual experiences have made her a hysterical woman, but according to her, the baths calm her nerves. These baths represent her efforts to cleanse herself of those dirty memories in the past. As long as cannot erase the past, then her bathing would never done. Besides Blanche, Stanley also is taken into shower to calm him after his misdeed of beating Stella. The shower serves to soothe his violent and animalistic temper when, afterwards, he goes out from shower feeling guilty of his actions and looks naïve searching for his wife. Any moral of the story…? Think about it yourself.