Blanche Devereaux - Relationship With Her Roommates

Relationship With Her Roommates

Blanche acts as co-roommate and landlord (until a housing inspection caused her to sell shares of the house) to Rose Nylund, Dorothy Zbornak, and Sophia Petrillo. Throughout the series, she and Rose are often involved in the same activities, be it auditioning for a play or doing community service projects. Though she, like Dorothy and Sophia, is annoyed at times by Rose's constant storytelling, she saw her as both her best friend and a surrogate sister. To be sure, Blanche had her own collection of strange stories which she also shared from time to time, often tales of her rivalry with sisters Virginia and Charmaine or of the promiscuous stunts she pulled as a teenager.

Her relationship with Dorothy is mixed with envy and condemnation and sisterhood on both parts: Dorothy envies and condemns Blanche's sexual comfortability, while Blanche envies Dorothy's intelligence and condemns her fashion sense, among other things. And yet, both she and Dorothy at times isolate themselves from Rose, ganging up on her when the latter said anything particularly foolish, and taking turns hitting her on the head with a newspaper or magazine. Their relationship is also symbiotic: in one of the last episodes in the series, Dorothy admitted that Blanche has helped her be comfortable with her own sexuality, while Dorothy herself has always served as Blanche's other voice of reason. Although Blanche is only three years younger than Dorothy (born 1929) and one or two years younger than Rose (born 1930 or 1931), she frequently rubs in the fact that she is the youngest roommate in the house.

Blanche's relationship with Sophia is also interesting: Blanche sees her both as a mother figure and as a mean old lady, and Sophia sees her as one of her daughters and, very vocally, a streetwalker. (In the very first episode of the series, Sophia bluntly tells Blanche, "You look like a prostitute.")

In the Season Four episode "Yes, We Have no Havanas", Sophia and Blanche became rivals for the affections of an elderly Cuban gentleman named Fidel Santiago (Henry Darrow), and the two women traded particularly nasty insults with each other: Sophia called Blanche a "50-year-old mattress," and Blanche referred to Sophia as a "raisin in sneakers" and a "wrinkled old crow". The rivalry came to an abrupt end when Fidel died suddenly. As it turned out, Fidel was even more promiscuous than Blanche - the congregation at his funeral consisted entirely of women he had been romancing (except for Dorothy and Rose), causing Blanche to say "He had his burro hitched to every bed post in town!"

It was revealed in the episode "Love Under the Big Top" that Blanche didn't like tuna fish which was inconsistent with at least two other instances in the series. In the episode "Dorothy's Prized Pupil", Rose became her "wiedenfrugen" (personal assistant) to make up for losing Blanche's earrings (which Blanche actually lost herself while on a romantic date), and she stated that she hated making Blanche's "stinking tuna fish sandwiches" as a part of her daily task. Later, in the episode "What a Difference a Day Makes", Blanche decided to go on a diet and became agitated when Rose ate her "sensible meal," a tuna quiche.