In Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire, what happened to the plantation Belle Reve?

The
arrival of Stanley Kowalskis wifes troubled sister, Blanche, presages dramatic revelations and
conflict between the characters in. Stanley and Stella live a simple
existence, he working and bowling, she taking care of their apartment while expecting a baby.
Stanley is crude, but loves his wife; Stella is happy with her life and is clearly still very
sexually attracted to her husband. When Blanche enters the picture, Stanley and Stellas
existence is immediately and dramatically altered. Blanche is not only an unwanted adult
presence in this tiny apartment; she is a condescending, snobbish critic of everything about
Stanley. Details about her background, however, begin to reveal a woman who is not just running
away from her past, but from reality as well. And, this is where the fate of Belle Reve comes
in. Belle Reve is the palatial estate, a classic southern plantation, on which Blanche and
Stella were raised. Stella and Stanleys socioeconomic plight is obvious by Williams setting
descriptions. The full extent of Stella and Blanches fall from grace, as least with respect to
their financial status, comes out when Stanley is questioning Blanche about the latters papers,
which this insensitive, uneducated man has deemed his right to investigate:

STANLEY: I don't want no ifs, ands or butsl What's all the rest of
them papers? and

[She hands him the entire box. He carries it to
·the table starts to examine the papers.]

BLANCHE [picking up a
large envelope containing more papers]: There are thousands of papers, stretching back over
hundreds of years, affecting Belle Reve as, piece by piece, our improvident grandfathers and
father and uncles and brothers exchanged the land for their epic fornications--to put it
plainly! [She removes her glasses with an exhausted Iaugh] The four-letter
word deprived us of our plantation, till was finally all that was left-and Stella can verify
that!- -was the house itself and about twenty acres of ground, including a graveyard, to which
now all but Stella and I have retreated. [She pours the contents at the envelope on
the with table] Here all of them are, all papers! I hereby endow you them! Take them,
peruse them-commit memory, them to even! I think it's wonderfully fitting that Belle Reve should
finally be this bunch of old papers in your big, capable my hands!

Belle Reve has been shuttered; Blanche and Stellas family lost everything, and Blanche
only continues, unsuccessfully, to present a veneer of the respectability her family once
enjoyed. The loss of the plantation and Blanches descent into alcoholism and extreme promiscuity
has condemned her to a life of moral and emotional degradation. Blanche uses the loss of Belle
Reve to try and impose guilt on her sister, but she is a pathetic creature the final demise of
whom is brought about by Stanley's viciousness.