Set in the French Quarter of New Orleans during the restless years following World War Two A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE is the story of Blanche DuBois a fragile and neurotic woman on a desperate prowl for someplace in the world to call her own. After being exiled from her hometown of Laurel Mississippi for seducing a seventeen-year-old boy at the school where she taught English Blanche explains her unexpected appearance on Stanley and Stella`s (Blanche`s sister) doorstep as nervous exhaustion. This she claims is the result of a series of financial calamities which have recently claimed the family plantation Belle Reve. Suspicious Stanley points out that "under Louisiana`s Napoleonic code what belongs to the wife belongs to the husband." Stanley a sinewy and brutish man is as territorial as a panther. He tells Blanche he doesn`t like to be swindled and demands to see the bill of sale. This encounter defines Stanley and Blanche`s relationship. They are opposing camps and Stella is caught in no-man`s-land. But Stanley and Stella are deeply in love. Blanche`s efforts to impose herself between them only enrages the animal inside Stanley. When Mitch -- a card-playing buddy of Stanley`s -- arrives on the scene Blanche begins to see a way out of her predicament. Mitch himself alone in the world reveres Blanche as a beautiful and refined woman. Yet as rumors of Blanche`s past in Auriol begin to catch up to her her circumstances become unbearable.