To escape from these brutalities and to escape from the lonely void created by her young husband's death, Blanche turned to alcohol and sexual promiscuity. The alcohol helped her to forget. When troubled, the dance tune that was playing when Allan committed suicide haunts her until she drinks enough so as to hear the shot which then signals the end of the music.
Blanche gives herself to men for other reasons. She feels that she had failed her young husband in some way. Therefore, she tries to alleviate her guilt by giving herself at random to other young men. And by sleeping with others, she is trying to fill the void left by Allan's death — "intimacies with strangers was all I seemed able to fill my empty heart with." And she was particularly drawn to very young men who would remind her of her young husband. During these years of promiscuity, Blanche has never been able to find anyone to fill the emptiness. Thus Blanche's imagined failure to her young husband and her constant encounter with the ugliness of death forced the delicate young girl to seek distraction by and forgetfulness through intimacies with strangers and through alcohol which could make the tune in her head stop.
But throughout all of these episodes, Blanche has still retained a degree of innocence and purity. She still plays the role of the ideal type of person she would like to be. She refuses to see herself as she is but instead creates the illusion of what ought to be. Thus, in her first encounters, she fails with Stanley, because she attempts to be what she thinks a lady should be rather than being frank, open, and honest as Stanley would have liked it.
