Tennessee Williams was once quoted as saying "Symbols are nothing but the natural speech of drama
...in the first scene "suggests a moth" (Williams 96). In literature a moth represents the soul. So it is possible to see her entire voyage as the journey of her soul (Quirino 63). Later in the same scene she describes her voyage: "They told me to take a streetcar named Desire, and then transfer to one called Cemeteries and ride six blocks and get off at Elysian Fields" (Quirino 63). Taken literally this does not seam to add much to the story. However, if one investigate Blanche's past one can truly understand what this quotation symbolizes. Blanche left her home to join her sister, because her life was a miserable wreck in her former place of residence. She admits, at one point in the story, that "after the death of Allan (her husband) intimacies with strangers was all I seemed able to fill my empty heart with" (Williams, 178). She had sexual relations with anyone who would agree to it. This is the first step in her voyage-"Desire". She said that she was forced into this situation because death was immanent and "The opposite (of death) is desire" (Williams, 179). She escaped death in her use of desire. However, she could not escape "death" for long. She was a teacher at a high school, and at one point she had intimacies with a seventeen year old student. The superintendent, "Mr. Graves", found out about this and she was fired from her job. Her image was totally destroyed and she could no longe...