The Moral Complexity of Blanche Devereaux

The most forthrightly sexual of the four lead characters of “The Golden Girls” exhibits a surprisingly complicated morality.

It’s probably safe to say that there’s never been a television character quite like Blanche Devereaux, the slutty Southern belle of the classic sitcom The Golden Girls. Played with inimitable panache by the late, great Rue McClanahan, Blanche strutted and sashayed her way into the hearts of millions of viewers, where she’s stayed ever since.

However, beneath her confident and liberated exterior, Blanche is actually quite complicated, and often contradictory, when it comes to issues of gender, sexuality, and maternity. In some ways, she’s the most complex of the four main characters of The Golden Girls, and she’s often the one that has the most difficulty dealing with changing social mores, whether that’s her daughter Becky’s decision to get artificially inseminated (no Devereaux has ever had to pay for it, as she remarks at the sperm bank) or her brother Clayton’s homosexuality (more on that in a moment). What’s more, as scholars such as Kate Browne have noted, she also has a deeply conflicted relationship with her own status as a mother, an ambivalence that has deep roots.