[Blanche sits in a chair very stiffly with her shoulders slightly hunched and her legs pressed close together and her hands tightly clutching her purse as if she were quite cold. After a while the blind look goes out of her eyes and she begins to look slowly around. A cat screeches. She catches her breath with a startled gesture. Suddenly she notices something in a half opened closet. She springs up and crosses to it, and removes a whiskey bottle. She pours a half tumbler of whiskey and tosses it down. She carefully replaces the bottle and washes out the tumbler at the sink. Then she resumes her seat in front of the table.]

Blanche [faintly to herself]:
I've got to keep hold of myself! (Scene 1)

Basic set up:

At the beginning of A Streetcar Named Desire, Blanche DuBois arrives at her sister's apartment in New Orleans, where she's come to stay for a while after being fired from her job as a teacher back in Mississippi.

The threat of decay and disintegration is there from the first sentence of these stage directions. The directions read: "Blanche sits in a chair very stiffly with her shoulders slightly hunched and her legs pressed close together and her hands tightly clutching her purse as if she were quite cold." Blanche's whole body is tense: she is physically trying to hold herself together.

But she can't: she's an alcoholic, and the minute she catches sight of alcohol, she pounces on it. Clearly, it's something she wants to keep a secret. She knows it's wrong, and that's why she tells herself: "I've got to keep hold of myself!"

Blanche is a decaying Southern belle; she's trying to keep up appearances, but beneath the veneer is a woman who is falling apart. The rest of the play shows us just how broken she is—and how quickly she can disintegrate once and for all.

It's easy to overlook the stage directions when you're reading a play. After all, what matters in a play is the dialogue, right?

But stage directions can convey a lot of information to us readers, and even if we're watching the play performed, we would be able to tell a whole lot by the way that the actress acts out these directions. By describing Blanche's body language, the directions give us a strong sense of Blanche as a person who is disintegrating, but who's trying really, really hard to keep it all together.