Mitch

Key Quotations:

Scene 3:

• "You may teach school but you're certainly not an old maid."
• [with awkward courtesy] "How do you do Miss DuBois."
• "Kind of on your high horse, ain't you?"
• "Anyone want a shot?"
• "Poker shouldn't be played in a house with women."
• [Sadly but firmly] "Poker should not be played in a house with women."
• "The girl’s dead now."
• "I gotta sick mother. She don't go to sleep until I come in  at night."
• "She says to go out, so I do, but I don’t enjoy it. All the while I keep wondering how she
  is."
• "There's a story connected with that inscription"
• [Mitch laughs uncomfortably.]
• "I guess that some of them are more interested in other things"
• "I guess we strike you as being a pretty rough bunch."

Scene 6:

• "Just give me a slap whenever I step out of bounds."
• "You are light as a feather."
• "I like you to be exactly the way that you are, because in all my - experience - I have never known anyone like you."
• “You need somebody. And I need somebody, too. Could it be –
  you and me, Blanche?”
• "Why did you try if you didn't feel like it, Blanche?"

Scene 9:

• [MITCH comes around the corner in work clothes: blue denim shirt and pants. He is unshaven. He climbs the step to the door and rings.]
• "I wasn't going to see you anymore."
• "I don't think I want to marry you anymore."
• "No, just realistic."
• "I don't want Stan's liquor."
• "Are you boxed out of your mind?"
• "I don’t think I ever seen you in the light. That’s a fact!"
• Mitch [slowly and bitterly]: ‘I don’t mind you being older than what I thought. But all the rest of it - God! That pitch about your ideals being so old-fashioned and all the malarkey that you’ve dished out all summer. Oh I knew you weren’t sixteen any more. But I was a fool enough to believe you was straight’
• “Lies, lies, inside and out, all lies.”
• "You lied to me, Blanche."

Scene 11:

• “You! You done this…”
• “I’ll kill you! [He lunges and strikes at Stanley.]
• "You…you…you…Brag…brag…bull…bull."

Character Analysis:

Perhaps because he lives with his dying mother, Mitch is noticeably more sensitive than Stanley’s other poker friends. The other men pick on him for being a mama’s boy. Even in his first, brief line in Scene One, Mitch’s gentlemanly behavior stands out. Mitch appears to be a kind, decent human being who, we learn in Scene Six, hopes to marry so that he will have a woman to bring home to his dying mother.

Mitch doesn’t fit the bill of the chivalric hero of whom Blanche dreams. He is clumsy, sweaty, and has unrefined interests like muscle building. Though sensitive, he lacks Blanche’s romantic perspective and spirituality, as well as her understanding of poetry and literature. She toys with his lack of intelligence—for example, when she teases him in French because she knows he won’t understand—duping him into playing along with her self-flattering charades.

Though they come from completely different worlds, Mitch and Blanche are drawn together by their mutual need of companionship and support, and they therefore believe themselves right for one another. They also discover that they have both experienced the death of a loved one. The snare in their relationship is sexual. As part of her prim-and-proper act, Blanche repeatedly rejects Mitch’s physical affections, refusing to sleep with him. Once he discovers the truth about Blanche’s sordid sexual past, Mitch is both angry and embarrassed about the way Blanche has treated him. When he arrives to chastise her, he states that he feels he deserves to have sex with her, even though he no longer respects her enough to think her fit to be his wife.

The difference in Stanley’s and Mitch’s treatment of Blanche at the play’s end underscores Mitch’s fundamental gentlemanliness. Though he desires and makes clear that he wants to sleep with Blanche, Mitch does not rape her and leaves when she cries out. Also, the tears Mitch sheds after Blanche struggles to escape the fate Stanley has arranged for her show that he genuinely cares for her. In fact, Mitch is the only person other than Stella who seems to understand the tragedy of Blanche’s madness.

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