Jim's appearance as a gentleman caller apparently affects Laura's behavior positively. She is now able to talk and dance with him. She acquires self-confidence when he clarifies that he has never noticed her defect. She even trusts him with the unicorn of her glass collection, a symbol of herself. Now she asks him to handle it with care because, "if you breathe it breaks! ". But he breaks it and Laura as well. When she discovers that Jim, her old love who gives her a hope for a new life, is engaged to another girl, she is totally destroyed. She cannot withstand the shock of what the past has become in the present, so she retreats within herself forever.
Blanche DuBois, in A Streetcar Named Desire, is one of Williams's heroines who live under a cover of illusion. She refuses to accept the reality of her life and attempts to live totally in illusion. The crisis that leads to her disappointment and so to her illusion is her responsibility for her husband's death. Before action started, she was married to a young man, Allan, who turned to be a homosexual. At a moment of disgust, she drives him to suicide by revealing that she knows the truth about him. In Theatre Arts Magazine, Rosamond Gilda describes Blanche's discovery that Allan preferred sex with men as a "chattering experience when her most intimate happiness was destroyed at its source" (Jones 174). Being unable to accept her harsh reality drives her into illusion.
Blanche has lost everything; her husband and even herself. She has also lost Belle Reve, the place she used to live in with her aristocratic family. Losing Belle Reve stands for losing her aristocratic past. It stands in contrast with Vieux Carre, the apartment she is now living in.
Belle Reve the plantation, symbolizes the past, both personal and collective, that is now onlya beautiful illusion; likewise, Vieux Carre, the cramped apartment of the present, stands for the threatening reality in which Blanche feels cornered.
