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A Beautiful Dream Lost In A Streetcar Named Desire, Tennessee Williams depicts the death of the old southern lifestyle at the hands of the callous modern world. The main character, Blanche DuBois, is a southern belle who has lived on a plantation in Laurel, Belle Reve, her whole life. Blanche leaves Laurel and arrives in New Orleans to find her sister, Stella, married and living in a small apartment. Stella and Blanche are the last living members of their family. This symbolizes that the two sisters are the last members of a dying world, the Old South. The first evidence that the old southern lifestyle is dying is when Blanche reveals to Stella, her sister, that Belle Reve has been lost. The loss also marks one of the play's major concerns that, "The hallowed things of the sensitive are cheapened and destroyed by contact with the new world whose brutish instinct can neither understand nor sustain what is fragile" (Spoto 139). The name of Belle Reve is French for ''beautiful dream'' and suggests the nostalgia Williams has for the old southern lifestyle. "Williams himself admitted: 'I write out of love for the south…. It once had a way of life that I am just old enough to remember- a culture that had grace, elegance, an i