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As the Browning reference suggests, Streetcar's protagonist, Blanche DuBois, is deeply concerned with death. It is a characteristic she shares with Victorian writers such as Robert Browning and Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Haunted by memories of her deceased husband - a sensitive young poet who committed suicide because of his sexual orientation (vi, 108)- Blanche is unable to function in the world of the living. This is evident from the way in which her perceptions of reality are overshadowed by aspects of death. From the streetcar -- "one called Cemeteries" (i, 11) -- that transports her to her brother-in-law's home in "Elysian Fields" (i, 11) to the "A&L tracks" that she mistakes for the "ghoul-haunted woodlands of Weir" (i,17) to her encounter with the Mexican woman selling "flores para los muertos," flowers for the dead (ix, 138), Blanche finds herself immersed - indeed, buried - in images of mortality and the afterlife. In this respect, she is similar to the speaker in Alfred, Lord Tennyson's "In Memoriam A.H.H." who lives "with an awful sense / [o]f one mute Shadow [of the dead] watching all" (Damrosch, 1225). For this speaker, the stimuli of everyday life - e.g., the ringing of a church bell or a game of tableaux-vants (Damrosch, 1230) - evoke painful recollections of his deceased friend. Blanche, in turn, is reminded of her late husband every time she hears the "blue piano" playing at the bar across from Elysian Fields (i, 9).
