Blanche. […] Do you remeber Shep Huntleigh?
Stella. No.
There is an overarching theme in A Streetcar Named Desire of men we never get to see but are named and talked about often. The most obvious one is Blanche’s dead husband Mr Allen Grey who committed suicide after Blanche confronts him about being gay. This incident traumatizes Blanche so much that she is constantly reliving the moment during her everyday life, shown by the repeated playing of the Varsuviana, and causes her to decent more and more into madness. We could go on and on about Allen’s death and how Blanche is effect in more detail but that is a common theme already explored.
However, this theme pops up again with the mention of Mr Shep Huntleigh. The absence of Blanche mentioning Shep until the end of the movie is bothering, like her drinking (another element more or less glossed over in the movie) I believe to also be a sign of her deteriorating mental health. Back in February, I was a part of a production of this play, during our rehearsal process the director, my self, and our actress playing Blanche had a conversation about her development of the character. During this conversation, we continuously came back to the subject of Shep, more specifically if Shep was even a real person.
For one, it’s hard to believe that Blanche who is so traumatized by her young husband’s death would jump into a serious enough relationship to “[wear] his ATO pin” while she was in college. She even says that after Allen’s death “intimacies with strangers was all [she] seemed able to fill [her] empty heart with.” (p. 81) Stella also does not remember this man, shown in the quote above, and towards the end of the play Blanche believes to have gotten a “wire” from this man but it turns out she was lying.