the glass menagerie analysis essay

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Analysis of Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on October 12, 2020 • ( 0 )

Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie (1944) was regarded when first produced as highly unusual; one of the play’s four characters serves as commentator as well as participant; the play itself represents the memories of the commentator years later, and hence, as he says, is not a depiction of actuality; its employment of symbolism is unusual; and in the very effective ending, a scrim descends in front of mother and daughter, so that by stage convention one can see but not hear them, with the result that both, but especially the mother, become much more moving and even archetypal. The play is also almost unique historically, in that it first opened in Chicago, came close to flopping before Chicago newspaper theater critics verbally whipped people into going, and then played successfully for months in Chicago before finally moving to equal success in New York.

The setting is the Wingfield apartment in a shabby tenement building, in Saint Louis, Missouri, in the year 1937. The set has an interior living room area and an exterior fire escape.

Tom Wingfield is in the fire-escape area outside the Wingfield apartment. He explains the concept of a memory play. He enters the interior setting, where his mother, Amanda Wingfield, and his sister, Laura Wingfield, who wears a brace on her leg, are seated at a table, waiting to eat dinner. All aspects of the meal are mimed, and as Tom seats himself, Amanda begins to instruct him on how to eat politely. Tom abruptly leaves the table to have a cigarette. Laura rises to fetch an ashtray, but Amanda tells her to stay seated, for she wishes Laura to remain fresh and pretty for her prospective gentleman callers. Amanda recalls her Sunday afternoons in Blue Mountain, Mississippi, where she received and entertained countless callers. Amanda asks Laura how many callers she expects to have, and Laura explains that she is not expecting any callers.

In the interior of the Wingfield apartment, Laura sits alone, polishing her glass figurines. Hearing her mother approach, Laura quickly hides her collection and resumes her place behind a typewriter. Amanda reveals that she has discovered that Laura has dropped out of secretarial school. Laura explains that she became ill during the first week of school and was too ashamed to return. Amanda pleads with Laura, asking her what she is going to do with her life. Amanda fears that Laura will be dependent on the charity of others for the rest of her life. Amanda warns Laura that there is no future in staying home playing with her glass collection and her father’s phonograph records. She implores Laura to set her sights on marrying. Laura confesses that she had liked a boy named Jim O’Connor in high school, but she is certain that he must be married by now. Laura acknowledges her disability as her primary obstacle in forming relationships. Amanda dismisses this claim and advises Laura to cultivate aspects of her personality to compensate for her disadvantage.

The same location as scene 2. Tom addresses the audience. He explains that Amanda has become obsessed with finding a gentleman caller for Laura and has begun selling magazine subscriptions to generate extra income. Amanda has a telephone conversation with a neighbor, trying to convince her to renew her subscription to The Homemaker’s Companion . Tom and Amanda quarrel about his habits, his writing, and his books. Amanda accuses Tom of being selfish and of engaging in immoral activities. Tom swears at his mother and bemoans his fate of working in a warehouse to support his mother and sister. In the heat of the argument, Tom accidentally crashes into Laura’s glass collection, shattering it to pieces on the floor. Amanda refuses to speak to him until he apologizes. Laura and Tom collect the shattered glass from the floor.

The same location as scene 3. Tom returns home from a movie and talks with Laura. She asks him to apologize to Amanda. Amanda sends Laura out on an errand so that she may speak with Tom alone. She and Tom make peace. Amanda warns Tom of the danger in pursuing an adventurous life. Amanda raises the subject of Laura and the need for Tom to bring a nice young man home to meet Laura. Amanda promises Tom that she will let him do as he pleases and leave after he has provided for Laura’s future. Amanda begs him to secure a nice man for Laura first. Tom grudgingly agrees to try to find someone. Amanda happily returns to soliciting magazine subscriptions.

On the fire escape, the exterior of the Wingfield apartment, Amanda suggests that Tom be more mindful of his appearance. She makes a wish on the new Moon. Tom tells her that he is inviting a gentleman caller for Laura to the apartment the following evening. Amanda inquires about the character of the gentleman caller. Tom describes Jim’s qualities and characteristics, and Amanda determines that he is suitable to call. Tom warns Amanda not to be too excited, because Jim is unaware that he is being invited for Laura’s benefit. Tom expresses concern that Amanda has unrealistic expectations of Laura. Amanda refuses to accept the reality of Laura’s condition. Tom goes to a movie and Amanda calls Laura out onto the fire escape. Amanda urges Laura to make a wish on the new Moon.

On the fire escape and in the interior of the Wingfield apartment, Tom speaks directly to the audience and explains the nature of his friendship with Jim. Tom makes Jim feel important because Tom can recall Jim’s high school glory days. In the living room, Amanda and Laura prepare for the arrival of the gentleman caller. Amanda dresses Laura and discovers one of her own former gowns. At the mention of the name Jim O’Connor, Laura refuses to participate in the evening’s events. Amanda chastises Laura and orders her to answer the door when the doorbell rings. Laura freezes with anxiety as Amanda forces her to welcome Tom and Jim. Laura hides in the kitchen while Amanda converses with Jim O’Connor. Tom goes to the kitchen to check on supper. Amanda summons everyone to the table. Laura maintains that she is sick and lies on the couch for the duration of the dinner.

In the interior of the Wingfield apartment, the lights in the apartment suddenly go out. Amanda quickly lights candles, asking Jim to check the fuses. Finding that the fuses are fine, Amanda asks Tom whether he has paid the electric bill; he has not. After dinner, Amanda asks Jim to keep Laura company. She gives him a candelabrum and a glass of wine to give to Laura. Amanda forces Tom to join her in the kitchen to wash the dishes. Settling down on the floor beside Laura, Jim asks her why she is so shy, and Laura asks whether Jim remembers her. She explains that they had singing class together in high school and reminds him that she was always late because of her disability. Jim confesses that he never noticed her limp and admonishes Laura about being self-conscious. Laura takes out her high school yearbook and Jim autographs it for her.

Laura shows her glass collection to him and Jim marvels over her delicate figurines. Hearing music from the nearby dance hall, Jim asks Laura to dance. She hesitates, but Jim persuades her to join him. They stumble into the coffee table, breaking Laura’s favorite figurine, a unicorn that she has had for 13 years. Jim apologizes, and Laura consoles him. Struck by Laura’s charm and delicacy, Jim kisses her. He chastises himself for his hasty action and informs Laura that he is engaged. Laura gives him the glass unicorn. Amanda gleefully returns to the living room with a pitcher of cherry lemonade. Jim apologizes and announces that he has to leave to collect his fiancée at the train station.

Amanda is horrified by the news and calls Tom out of the kitchen. She accuses him of playing a cruel joke on the family, but Tom explains that he had no knowledge of Jim’s engagement. Amanda again chastises Tom for selfishness and for lack of concern for his abandoned mother or his disabled sister. Tom finally leaves the Wingfield apartment for good. The lights fade on the interior setting, leaving Laura and Amanda in candlelight. Tom appears on the fire escape and offers the audience details of his departure and journey away from his family. He explains that no matter how much distance is between them, he can never forget his sister. He instructs Laura to blow out her candles, and she does.

A scene from The Glass Menagerie /New York Public Library

The Glass Menagerie began its life as a screenplay, The Gentleman Caller . This script was an adaptation of Williams’s short story “Portrait of a Girl in Glass.” The script of “The Gentleman Caller” was submitted to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) in the summer of 1943. Williams had hoped that this script would impress studio executives and ultimately relieve him from other contractual obligations at MGM such as writing what he scathingly termed a “celluloid brassiere” for the actress Lana Turner. MGM was less than amenable to Williams’s idea. They declared that the popular film Gone With the Wind (1939) had served up enough Southern women for a decade (Spoto, 97). In an oddly ironic twist, this response and its implicit preference for fiction over reality resonated with the play’s central theme.

Stylistically, The Glass Menagerie reflects its prehistory. The screenplay-turned-stage-script shows a number of elements more familiar, and perhaps more suited, to the cinema than to the theater. In theatrical terms, Williams’s approach is Brechtian: It uses devices meant to create what the German playwright and dramaturge Bertolt Brecht, a contemporary of Williams’s, called the “alienation effect.” In The Glass Menagerie , these devices constitute a sometimes disjointed sequence of tableaux (or scenes) rather than the more conventionalthree-act structure; a narrator/commentator (Tom) who also is a character in the play and steps in and out of the action; Williams’s scripted suggestions of legends to be projected onto gauze between the dining and front rooms, “to give accent to certain values in each scene”; the very strictly defined music, which assigns specific pieces or themes to certain scenes, especially in relation to Laura; and the lighting, “focused on selected areas or actors, sometimes in contradistinction to what is the apparent center.”

For Brecht, the alienation effect served to remind the audience that what they saw on stage constituted the real world. Williams takes this concept a crucial step further, in that he turns alienation— the conscious or unconscious loss of a person’s feeling of connection with his or her surroundings—into the mainstay of the play: It becomes a way of life for the characters. Brecht tries to prevent his audience from escaping into illusion. Williams forestalls his characters’ conquest of “a world of reality that [they] were somehow set apart from.” None of the characters is truly able to cope with the demands of everyday life; therefore, all seek refuge in their own dream world, to such an extent that illusion itself becomes subjective reality.

In this the characters are not alone. Williams declared this denial of reality symptomatic of an era during which individuals would seek out “dance halls, bars, and movies, and sex that hung in the gloom like a chandelier and flooded the world with brief, deceptive rainbows,” in order briefly to forget about their lives and their troubles. But the diversion cannot last, and the conflict between fact and fiction, reality and make-believe, remains irreconcilable. This is the central theme of The Glass Menagerie . From it emerge two related themes: the impossibility of escape and the trap of memory—or of the past in general.

The play is memory in more than one sense. As is much of Williams’s work, The Glass Menagerie is poignantly autobiographical. However, this is by far his most autobiographical work. In July 1918, Williams’s father, Cornelius Coffin Williams, exchanged his job as a traveling salesman for a managerial post with the International Shoe Company in Saint Louis, Missouri. Cornelius, his wife (Edwina Dakin Williams), and their two children, Rose Isabel Williams and Tom, left Clarksdale, Mississippi, to take up residence in what then was the fourth-largest city in the United States and a major industrial center.

From their initial quarters at a boardinghouse they moved into and out of a succession of apartments, including one at 4633 Winchester Place in downtown Saint Louis. The apartment had “two small windows, in the front and rear rooms, and a fire escape [that] blocked the smoky light from a back alley” (Spoto, 16). The wording may be less poetic than Williams’s stage directions for The Glass Menagerie , but it accurately describes the Wingfield home, and the Williams’s tenement at 4633 Winchester Place in Saint Louis later became known as the “Glass Menagerie Apartments.”

For Rose and Tom, both delicate and accustomed to the rural gentility of Mississippi and the relative stability their maternal grandparents had helped to provide, the relocation and its effects on their home life proved traumatic. Tom was seven years old at the time of the move, old enough to recognize that “there were two kinds of people, the rich and the poor, and that [the Williams family] belonged more to the latter” (Tynan, 456)—with all the ostracism this entailed. Although the play’s references to the Spanish civil war and the bombing of Guernica in April 1937 set The Glass Menagerie nearly two decades later, during the depression, the social and economic context and its bleak inescapability are virtually the same.

The family’s reduced circumstances were due to Cornelius Williams’s compulsive drinking and gambling, and the domestic situation was worsened by a string of illnesses and operations Edwina Williams had after the birth of the Williams’s youngest son, Dakin Williams. Caught between a volatile father and an infirm mother, Rose and Tom each found their own ways of escaping into safer fantasy worlds. Tom fled into literature, at first reading voraciously (much to his father’s distaste), but when his mother gave him a typewriter, he started to write poetry. The consequences for Rose, however, were far bleaker. By the early 1920s mental illness began to manifest itself through psychosomatic stomach problems and an inability to sustain any social contact, which turned her enrollment at Rubicam’s Business College into a debacle. Her condition worsened over the next 15 years, until, in 1937, her parents agreed to a prefrontal lobotomy, which left Rose in a state of childlike, almost autistic detachment. Tom, studying at the State University of Iowa by then, was informed only after the disastrous procedure. From that point on, the spirit of his sister “haunted his life” (Spoto, 60).

It also haunts The Glass Menagerie . Though physically rather than mentally disabled, Laura Wingfield is painfully shy and socially inept, and she wears her physical difference as a stifling protective cloak. Nicknamed “Blue Roses” in a clear reference to Williams’s sister, she has stomach pain caused by nervous self-consciousness when exposed to strangers, and she visits the penguins at the zoo instead of attending classes at Rubicam’s Business College. The focus of her life, to the exclusion of everything else, is her collection of glass animals, which serves as a symbol of her (and Rose’s) fragility. When Jim O’Connor accidentally breaks her glass unicorn, the loss of the horn offers a subtle but nonetheless striking reminder of Rose’s lobotomy. As Laura states, her unicorn “had an operation” to make it “less freakish.”

Rose is not the only member of the Williams family to appear in The Glass Menagerie . With the exception of Dakin, all of the Williamses are cast. Williams himself infuses his namesake Tom, the trapped poet-narrator, who hides in a closet to write and dreams of joining the merchant marine. Tom is a warehouse worker for Continental Shoemakers, and his job fills him with the same desperate frustration that caused Williams to suffer a nervous breakdown after his father withdrew him from college and forced him to work at the International Shoe Company between 1932 and 1935. Cornelius Williams, an alcoholic and a former telephone company employee, is clearly identifiable as the absent head of the Wingfield household, “a telephone man who fell in love with long distances.”

A more oblique and more sinister reference, which plays on Cornelius’s middle name, illustrates Tom’s/Williams’s attempts to break away from the presence of the father. Recounting his nightly exploits to Laura, Tom launches into the tale of Malvolio the Stage Magician and a coffin trick, “the wonderfullest trick of all. . . . We nailed him into a coffin and he got out of the coffin without removing one nail.” For Williams, his father, Cornelius Coffin Williams, was a flesh-and-blood opponent; for the character, Tom Wingfield, he is a photograph over the mantel and the mirror his mother relentlessly holds up to him. This disembodied specter is all the more oppressive because it cannot be fought or escaped. Condemned to stay at home because his father ran away, Tom looks for vicarious adventure, always fancies himself on the brink of moving, but has no idea when or where. When he finally does make a break, it is at the expense of taking the past with him. True escape is as impossible for him as it was for Williams: Laura/Rose constantly haunts him.

Completing the family analogies, Tom and Laura’s mother, Amanda, is a replica of Edwina Dakin Williams. Both have pretensions to be Southern belles, both claim to have been pursued by countless gentleman callers only to marry “this boy,” both are capable of prattling incessantly, and neither can cook or bake anything apart from angel food cake. They also share a dangerously tenuous grasp on reality that materializes in their aspirations for Laura and Rose, respectively. Both mothers are convinced that their daughter’s problem—be it lameness or schizophrenia—will dissolve if only she finds the right man. In the autumn of 1933, Edwina invited a family friend, “the very handsome Jim O’Connor” (Spoto, 43), as a prospective suitor for Rose. The experiment concluded in only one brief visit, which apparently upset Rose greatly. In the same vein, Amanda badgers Tom into inviting his shoe company colleague, and former high school basketball hero Jim O’Connor, as a gentleman caller for Laura. This attempt leads to an equally devastating result. Jim, brimming with self-satisfied optimism and bent on self-improvement, has nothing in common with Laura. He has genuine affection for her and does manage to draw her out, but the relationship cannot go further, because he is engaged to someone else. This revelation occurs just as Laura is beginning to believe that her high school crush on Jim could be fulfilled. In other words, the Gentleman Caller breaks her illusions and her spirit as easily and as casually as he has broken her glass unicorn.

The Glass Menagerie is Tom’s recollection of the events culminating in the visit of the Gentleman Caller. Everything in the play happens in and from memory. Insight and perspective are counterpoised by that peculiar trick of memory that diminishes some things and enlarges others, according to their importance. Such distortion always serves to sharpen and explain. Likewise, Tom’s account, always slightly unreal, always slightly over the top, veers between caricature and canonization.

Reminiscent of the brittle translucency of glass, Laura is imbued with a “pristine clarity” similar to that found in “early religious portraits of female saints or madonnas.” In stark contrast to Laura’s otherworldliness, Amanda and her idealized Southern girlhood—grotesquely laden with jonquils and suitors—clash with the everyday contingencies of cold-calling, mastication, a disabled daughter, and an absconded husband in a way that is both painfully comical and brutally revealing. Even Jim cannot escape from the exaggeration of memory. Having failed “to arrive at nothing short of the White House by the time he was thirty” (53), he is shown to wallow in the sweet smell of former basketball glory, yearbook pictures, and the admiration of a shy, lonely girl. “Try and you will succeed” is the futile battle cry Jim and Amanda share in the face of stagnation.

Because he is an outsider and inhabits the real world, Jim is raised to a symbol of hope, “the longdelayed but always expected something that we live for.” For Amanda expectation does not stop here. Roger B. Stein makes a convincing case that Jim has been cast as a Christ-like savior figure or, at the very least, as Moses about to lead the Wingfield family to the promised land of harmony and happiness (Stein, 141–153). There is no such land, of course, and only Amanda has promised it. The pivotal scene between Jim, the flawed suitor, and Laura exposes this fallacy. “Unicorns, aren’t they extinct in the modern world?” he asks when Laura shows him her favorite glass animal. The unicorn is a mythical animal and an alien even in the unreal world of Laura’s glass menagerie. In fact, it is so strange that Jim cannot recognize it as what it is without being prompted, just as he is unaware of the real reason why he has been invited to dinner. At this point the unicorn stands for the Wingfields’ combined dreams of escape: Amanda’s hope of the miracle cure of marriage for Laura, Tom’s longing for adventure and motion, and Laura’s tentative, naive, and unformed dream of love. The shattering of the glass unicorn heralds the collapse of those dreams as much as it heralds the personal shattering of Laura. Unicorns are extinct in the modern world, Jim is engaged, and escape from reality is impossible. Tom’s last monologue underscores this fact. His own break from home has only succeeded in setting him adrift and the sole guilty resting point he has left are his memories. Ironically, it is precisely those memories that prevent his true escape, because they forever tie him to the past.

With The Glass Menagerie , Williams set out to create a new kind of “Plastic Theatre,” a highly expressionistic language of the stage that would replace what he saw as the stale conventions of realism. He succeeded, thereby revolutionizing American theater. Within two weeks of opening on Broadway in 1945, the play won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award. Claudia Cassidy, present at the Chicago premiere, had predicted The Glass Menagerie ’s success: “It was not only the quality of the work as something so delicate, so fragile. It was also indestructible and you knew right then” (Terkel, 144). Cassidy was correct about the play’s indestructibility, although for a long time, critics either failed to see or attempted to marginalize the play’s achievement. For some, the lyricism of language and expressiveness of theatrical devices obstructed the action. This response was due to the fact that the critics were married to an American theater tradition that demanded realism, which is precisely what Williams denounced in the production notes for the play. Instead of scientific photographic likeness, Williams attempted and conveyed spiritual and emotional truth.

The acid test of audience reception bears this out. Not tied to ideologies and convictions, audiences understood and responded immediately and favorably to The Glass Menagerie . A generation after its Chicago premiere, critical attitudes and opinions had shifted markedly. Many acknowledge The Glass Menagerie as possibly Williams’s greatest achievement because of the breadth of its cataclysmic vision, a vision “not only of individuals who fail to communicate with one another, nor a society temporarily adrift in a depression, but of man abandoned in the universe” (Stein, 153). This is the explanation for the play’s enduring appeal. As are all great works of art, it is not limited by time and space but manages to transcend both by touching on matters shared and universal. Spoto surmised that nothing Williams wrote after The Glass Menagerie possesses the “wholeness of sentiment,” its “breadth of spirit,” or its “quiet voice about the great reach of small lives” (Spoto, 116).

O’Connor, Jim

Jim is a former hero of the high school Tom and Laura Wingfield attended. He is also a colleague of Tom’s at the International Shoe Company. Tom invites Jim for dinner at the Wingfields’ apartment. Jim does not realize that Tom’s mother, Amanda Wingfield, has the ulterior motive of presenting him as a gentleman caller and prospective suitor for Laura. The plan fails, as Jimis already engaged. The character of Jim is based on an actual Jim O’Connor, who was one of Williams’s fellow students at the University of Missouri at Columbia. On one occasion he was invited to the Williams home with the goal that he would become better acquainted with Williams’s sister, Rose Williams.

Wingfield, Amanda

She is the mother of Tom and Laura Wingfield. Living in a dingy, Saint Louis apartment and struggling to make ends meet by selling magazine subscriptions, Amanda finds solace in the romantic memories of her girlhood. Her concern about her children’s future prompts her to bully them to live her ideal life, that of Southern gentility. Her inappropriate sense of propriety makes Tom and Laura miserable. As does Esmeralda Critchfield in Spring Storm , Amanda places importance on the need to have Laura marry a socially suitable young man. This goal causes an unhappy tension in the household and bitter friction, especially between Amanda and Tom. At her insistence, Tom invites Jim O’Connor, a fellow shoe factory worker, to visit the Wingfield home as a prospective gentleman caller for Laura. Amanda Wingfield is based on Williams’s mother, Edwina Estelle Dakin Williams. Mrs. Williams acknowledged the similarity and recalled that in her youth she was always “the belle of the ball,” who proudly “made [her] debut in Vicksburg twice” (Brown, 119). Mrs. Williams also said that she greatly enjoyed the character of Amanda, especially when she was played by Laurette Taylor, a “real genius,” who adequately captured the “pathos” of the character (Brown, 115–116).

Wingfield, Laura

Laura is the daughter of Amanda Wingfield and older sister of Tom Wingfield. A childhood illness has left her with a shortened leg, for which she has to wear a brace. Laura’s self-consciousness about her disability renders her unable to attend business college, and she seeks refuge in her collection of glass animals, the eponymous glass menagerie. Her encounter with Jim O’Connor, with whom she has been secretly infatuated since high school, proves traumatic when she finds out that he is engaged. Laura Wingfield is based on Williams’s sister, Rose  Isabel Williams.

Wingfield, Tom

Tom is the narrator and simultaneously a character in the play. He has ambitions to be a poet, but he is forced to work at a shoe factory warehouse to support his mother, Amanda Wingfield, and his sister, Laura Wingfield. His home life in their Saint Louis apartment is miserable. His mother repeatedly accuses him of being selfish and regularly looks through his possessions. Dreaming of adventure and escape from his depressing job and home life, Tom spends most of his evenings at movies. He becomes a reluctant accomplice in his mother’s plan to secure a gentleman caller for Laura. He invites his workmate and former high school associate Jim O’Connor to the Wingfield apartment for dinner. The evening is a disaster, and his mother blames the negative turn of events on Tom. As a result, he leaves home, abandoning Amanda and Laura to their own resources. Tom is forever haunted by memories of his sister, and the play is his account of events surrounding his departure. Tom Wingfield is Williams’s most autobiographical character. Tom’s leave-taking mirrors Williams’s own departure from his family’s Saint Louis, MISSOURI, apartment and from his emotionally unstable sister, Rose  Isabel Williams.

FURTHER READING Brown, Dennis. Shoptalk: Conversations about Theatre and Film with Twelve Writers, One Producer—and Tennessee Williams’s Mother. New York: Newmarket Press, 1992). Cassidy, Claudia. “Fragile Drama Holds Theatre in Tight Spell,” Chicago Daily Theater Tribune, December 27, 1944, p. 11. Spoto, Donald. The Kindness of Strangers: The Life of Tennessee Williams. Boston: Little, Brown, 1985. Stein, Roger B. “ The Glass Menagerie Revisited: Catastrophe without Violence,” Western Humanities Review 18, no. 2 (spring 1964): 141–153. Terkel, Studs. The Spectator: Talk about Movies and Plays with the People Who Make Them. New York: New Press, 1999. Tynan, Kenneth. “Valentine to Tennessee Williams,” in Drama and the Modern World: Plays and Essays, edited by Samuel Weiss. Lexington, Mass.: D. C. Heath, 1964, pp. 455–461.

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The Glass Menagerie

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The Glass Menagerie

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In his monologue that opens the play, Tom announces, “The play is memory.” The play is Tom's memory of the past, and all of the action takes place in his head. That action is therefore dramatic, sentimental, and emotional, not realistic. As is fitting in a play that is itself a memory of the past, in The Glass Menagerie the past haunts all the characters.

Tom the character (the Tom who Tom is remembering as…

Abandonment

The male characters in the play all abandon Amanda and Laura . The father, whom we never see, has abandoned the family: he worked for the telephone company and “fell in love with long distances.” The traumatic effect of this abandonment on Amanda, and Amanda's resulting fear about her own helplessness, is clear in her relentless quest for Laura to gain business skills and then to marry. Jim ’s abandonment of Laura forms the play’s…

Illusions and Dreams

Tom explains that in creating the play from his memory that he is giving “truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion,” and the stage directions of the play are designed to create a nostalgic, sentimental, non-realistic atmosphere to create the unreal yet heightened effects of a dream. The lighting in each scene adds emphasis and shadows: for example, the electric light that goes out, the candelabra, moonlight, the paper lantern that hides the broken lightbulb…

Escape in the play operate in two directions: from the real world into the world of memory and dreams, as Amanda and Laura demonstrate; or from the world of memory and dreams into the real world, as Tom desires. Amanda and Laura escape reality by retreating into dream worlds. Amanda refuses to see things as they are, insisting on seeing what she wants to see. Amanda still lives as a past version of herself, even…

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The Glass Menagerie

By tennessee williams, the glass menagerie study guide.

The Glass Menagerie was written in 1944, based on reworked material from one of Williams' short stories, "Portrait of a Girl in Glass," and his screenplay, The Gentleman Caller. In the weeks leading up to opening night (December 26, 1944 in Chicago), Williams had deep doubts about the production - the theater did not expect the play to last more than a few nights, and the producers prepared a closing notice in response to the weak advance sales. But two critics loved the show, and returned almost nightly to monitor the production. Meanwhile, they gave the play enthusiastic reviews and continued to praise it daily in their respective papers. By mid-January, tickets to the show were some of the hottest items in Chicago, nearly impossible to obtain. Later in 1945, the play opened in New York with similar success. On opening night in New York, the cast received an unbelievable twenty-five curtain calls.

Tennessee Williams did not express strong admiration for any early American playwrights; his greatest dramatic influence was the brilliant Russian playwright Anton Chekhov. Chekhov, with his elegant juxtaposition of the humorous and the tragic, his lonely characters, and his dark sensibilities, was a powerful inspiration for Tennessee Williams' work. Additionally, the novelist D.H. Lawrence offered Williams a depiction of sexuality as a potent force of life; Lawrence is referenced in The Glass Menagerie as one of the writers favored by Tom. The American poet Hart Crane was another important influence on Williams; with Crane's dramatic life, open homosexuality, and determination to create poetry that did not mimic European sensibilities, Williams found a great source of inspiration. Williams also belongs to the tradition of great Southern writers who have invigorated literary language with the lyricism of Southern English.

Like Eugene O'Neill, Tennessee Williams wanted to challenge some of the conventions of naturalistic theatre. Summer and Smoke (1948), Camino Real (1953), and The Glass Menagerie (1944), among others, provided some of the early testing ground for Williams' innovations. The Glass Menagerie uses music, screen projections, and lighting effects to create the haunting and dream-like atmosphere appropriate for a "memory play." Like Eugene O'Neill's Emperor Jones and Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman , Williams' play explores ways of using the stage to depict the interior life and memories of a character. Tom, as narrator, moves in and out of the action of the play. There are not realistic rules for the convention: we also see events that Tom did not directly witness. The screen projections seem heavy-handed, but at the time their use would have seemed to be a cutting-edge innovation. The projections use film-like effects and the power of photography (art forms that are much younger than drama) in a theatrical setting. In The Glass Menagerie, Williams' skillful use of the narrator and his creation of a dream-like, illusory atmosphere help to create a powerful representation of family, memory, and loss.

The Glass Menagerie is loosely autobiographical. The characters all have some basis in the real-life family of Tennessee Williams: Edwina is the hopeful and demanding Amanda, Rose is the frail and shy Laura (whose nickname, "Blue Roses," refers directly back to Williams' real-life sister), and distant and cold Cornelius is the faithless and absent father. Tom is Williams' surrogate. Williams actually worked in a shoe warehouse in St. Louis, and there actually was a disastrous evening with the only gentleman caller who ever came for Rose. Thomas was also Tennessee Williams' real name, and the name "Thomas" means twin - making Tom the surrogate not only for Williams but also possibly for the audience. He is our eye into the Wingfields' situation. His dilemma forms a central conflict of the play, as he faces an agonizing choice between responsibility for his family and living his own life.

The play is replete with lyrical symbolism. The glass menagerie, in its fragility and delicate beauty, is a symbol for Laura. She is oddly beautiful and, like her glass pieces, easy to destroy. The fire escape is most closely linked to Tom's character and to the theme of escape. Laura stumbles on the escape, while Tom uses it to get out of the apartment and into the outside world. He goes down the fire escape one last time at the end of the play, and he stands on the landing during his monologues. His position there metaphorically illustrates his position between his family and the outside world, between his responsibility and the need to live his own life.

The play is non-naturalistic, playing with stage conventions and making use of special effects like music and slide projections. By writing a "memory play," Tennessee Williams freed himself from the restraints of naturalistic theatre. The theme of memory is important: for Amanda, memory is a kind of escape. For Tom, the older Tom who narrates the events of the play, memory is the thing that cannot be escaped, for he is still haunted by memories of the sister he abandoned years ago.

The Glass Menagerie Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for The Glass Menagerie is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

What is Jim's nickname for Tom?

Jim nicknamed Tom, Shakespeare.

In Scene 6, how does Amanda embarrass Tom?

Tom is embarrassed by his mother because she acts like a teenager in Jim's presence. She talks incessantly (about herself) and presents herself as if she were a young, southern belle in search of a husband.

What would you judge the Wingfield's social status as being?

In context, the family's social status/ financial status has declined. Amanda is described as once having been a Southern belle. She has been abandoned by her husband and is now supported by her son.

Study Guide for The Glass Menagerie

The Glass Menagerie study guide contains a biography of Tennessee Williams, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

• About The Glass Menagerie
• The Glass Menagerie Summary
• Character List

Essays for The Glass Menagerie

The Glass Menagerie literature essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of The Glass Menagerie.

• Chekhov's Influence on the Work of Tennessee Williams
• Entrapment in The Glass Menagerie
• Odets and Williams's Women of the Depression
• Life's Fire Escape
• Symbolism of The Glass Menagerie

Lesson Plan for The Glass Menagerie

• About the Author
• Study Objectives
• Common Core Standards
• Introduction to The Glass Menagerie
• Relationship to Other Books
• Bringing in Technology
• Notes to the Teacher
• Related Links
• The Glass Menagerie Bibliography

Wikipedia Entries for The Glass Menagerie

• Introduction

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The Glass Menagerie Analysis Essay

The Glass Menagerie is a play by Tennessee Williams that was first performed in 1944. The play tells the story of a family living in St. Louis in 1937. The family is made up of Tom, the son, and his mother Amanda, as well as Amanda’s daughter Laura. The play focuses on Laura, who is shy and fragile, and her relationships with her family and her boyfriend.

The Glass Menagerie is often considered to be one of Williams’ best plays. It has been praised for its unique structure and for its portrayal of characters who are often marginalized in society. The play has also been criticized for its melodramatic elements and for its overly sentimental portrayal of life. Nevertheless, The Glass Menagerie remains one of the most popular American plays of the twentieth century.

Tennessee Williams was born in 1911 in Columbus, Mississippi. He grew up in a household with a father who was an alcoholic and a mother who was overbearing. These early experiences would later influence his writing. Williams attended college at the University of Missouri, where he began writing plays. His first successful play was The Glass Menagerie, which was produced on Broadway in 1944.

Being a good mother entails a lot of hard work. To be a great mother, you need certain traits, but these are essential. The mom must be loving and understanding toward her children to deserve the title of “good mother.” She must know when to give up and when to stick it out. She must make numerous concessions in order for her children to have everything they desire. There are many characteristics that a mother should possess. However, Amanda lacked some of them.

In The Glass Menagerie, Amanda is a loving mother to her son Tom but she can be overbearing at times. For example, when Amanda found out that Tom had a job, she was so excited and happy. She hugged and kissed him, which was something she hadn’t done in a long time. Amanda was also happy that Tom had finally become a man and was providing for his family. However, Amanda also has her shortcomings. For instance, she meddles in Tom’s life too much. She wants to control everything he does and this makes it difficult for him to have any independence.

Amanda also doesn’t always understand what her children are going through. For example, when Laura reveals that she has a gentleman caller, Amanda assumes that the two are getting married. She’s doesn’t understand that Laura is just seeing him for social purposes. Even though Amanda has her shortcomings, she does have love for her children.

Overall, Amanda is a good mother but she could use some improvement in the areas of independence and understanding. With a little bit of tweaking, Amanda can be an excellent mother to her children. Mothers come in all shapes and sizes and each one has their own unique qualities. What matters most is that the mother loves her children unconditionally. And this is something that Amanda definitely has.

During the play, Williams uses the fire escape as a metaphor for Tom, Amanda, and Laura’s wish to flee into an illusory fantastic world.

The Wingfields all use different methods to cope with their lives. Amanda, in particular, clings onto the past and tries to force her children into the mold she desires for them rather than accepting them for who they are. Laura is shy and withdrawn, preferring to stay in her own little world where she is safe.

Tom is stuck in the middle, trying to both please his mother and find his own way in life. The menagerie of glass animals that Laura collects serves as a physical embodiment of her own fragile and sensitive world. The glass menagerie is a place where she can hide from the realities of the world around her while still being able to see and interact with it.

The play highlights the importance of family relationships, particularly between mothers and children. The Wingfields are all very close in some ways, but they also have a lot of unresolved issues. The play ends with Tom leaving for the military and Amanda and Laura being left behind. It is unclear what the future holds for them, but it is implied that things will not be easy. The Glass Menagerie is a powerful exploration of the human condition, and it is still relevant today.

Amanda did want the best for her daughter, Laura. She would regale Tom and Laura with tales of gentleman callers over and over. She’d just brag to make herself feel better until she felt better. Laura, unlike most other girls, was quiet, introverted, and physically handicapped. She spent the majority of her time confined to her home playing with her glass menagerie. She was too scared to venture out into the world on her own. Even if she went to school, she became so nervous that she hyperventilated.

The reason Amanda wanted so badly for a gentleman caller to come and sweep her daughter off her feet was because she wanted Laura to have a better life than she did. But, unfortunately, that never happened.

Williams uses The Glass Menagerie as a way of exploring the different dynamics between family members. He also touches on the idea of escape, which is what Laura seems to do throughout the play. She escapes into her own little world where she is in control and nothing bad can happen to her. The menagerie is a safe place for her and it’s where she feels most comfortable. The other characters in the play are used by Williams as a way of exploring different aspects of human nature.

For example, Tom is used as a way of exploring the idea of rebellion and how it can be both positive and negative. Amanda is used as a way of exploring the idea of maternal love and how it can sometimes be suffocating. The characters in The Glass Menagerie are all flawed, but that’s what makes them so interesting.

The Glass Menagerie is a beautifully written play that is full of heart and emotion. It’s a heartbreaking story about a family that is struggling to survive. The characters are all wonderfully written and you can’t help but feel for them. The Glass Menagerie is one of Williams’ most famous plays and it’s easy to see why. It’s a masterpiece that is sure to touch your heart.

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‘The Glass Menagerie’ and ‘A Raisin in the Sun’ Drama Analysis Essay

• To find inspiration for your paper and overcome writer’s block
• As a source of information (ensure proper referencing)
• As a template for you assignment

Introduction

The play analysis: family, family dreams, works cited.

The two plays ‘The Glass Menagerie’ and ‘A Raisin in the Sun’ brings out the features of American society. The two plays bear many similarities in terms of the content. They both have a similar setting in Chicago. In both cases, the idea of racism comes out clearly. For a long time, plays have been used to express real-life concerns.

Poets and play writers have used plays, poems, stories, and songs to express the values and events in society. This is what the two plays are addressing. Both were written in the late forties when the American society was on the verge of changing from a purely patriarchal society to a more liberal society with all members having equal rights.

The plays bring out the American culture in a very systematic way. It is during this time that men started neglecting their duties as breadwinners of their families. Because of this, women were forced to take responsibilities in their families. Because they could not run away from their children, women had no otherwise but to transform themselves to be family heads. The plays bring out the two possibilities that lead to women taking charge of their families during this period.

The first reason that led to this was the world war, which was ending during this time. Many men lost their lives, leaving their families with no proper care. The play ‘A Raisin in the Sun’ brings this out. The father of the family is portrayed as someone who was responsible, but unfortunately, he passed on, leaving the family with little inheritance, without a dream to realize. On the other hand, the play ‘The Glass Menagerie’ portrays the American men who ran away from their families to evade the responsibility that is usually associated with the father of the family.

The two plays are entirely based on family issues. Both are based in Chicago hence expressing the new concern that was on the rise in the region. For a long time, families were intact in the region. In many occasions, both parents would be available for their families and they would take their respective responsibilities in caring for their children unless one or both lost their lives prematurely. However, this was changing during this time.

Men were becoming less responsible as regards to their families. There was a rise in single parenthood, something that was not common before. Both plays express the difficulty that these families had to undergo such new structures. One fact that comes out is that when such families were left without the father, financial problems would be unavoidable.

In Wingfield’s family, Mrs. Amanda is left with the two children to take care of. The family has a big financial challenge and it forces the eldest son of the family to work so that the family can earn a livelihood. However, following the footsteps of his father, Tom runs away from his family in order to keep off from the responsibility left by his father.

This particular play expresses the agony that families would be forced to undergo simply because fathers refuse to take their responsibility as men. Mature men, Tom and his father Mr. Wingfield whom we meet in this play, have this habit of running away from their families when they are needed most.

On the other hand, Younger’s family expresses the agony that families of American soldiers underwent following the Second World War that claimed most of their lives. Most of these individuals were very responsible fathers who cared for their families. Mr. Younger insured his life to ensure that in case of any negative eventuality, the family would have a basis to begin life once more.

The two plays try to express the same family scenario of living without a father. However, both give different reasons for this. In America during this time, a number of men perished during the war. Some men grew irresponsible having realized that even women could take care of the family.

However, both plays share in argument that women still believed that they could not make a decision on their own without the support of a male figure. Amanda believed that the solution to help her daughter Laura to get a suitor lay with her son Tom. Similarly, Mrs. Younger believed that the entire family members, especially the eldest son, would determine the way their inheritance could be spent.

Although she was tough enough and managed to insist that her will had to prevail, it is also evident that she gave in to the son’s poor decision of investing in the liquor business. She allowed him to have some amount. Beneatha, Walters’s sister, lays no claim on the money, leaving all decision-making processes to the mother who believed that it was hard to make a decision on her own.

This trait is also seen in Laura who left her life to fate. She was completely despaired believing that one day, she would come to meet a suitable man to marry her and take her away from the confines of her house. Although Beneath was a little more social and was able to identify a Nigerian suitor, she was more less the same as Laura when it came to issues of decision-making.

This is a real expression of the American culture by then (Aragón 54). American culture has dramatically changed over the past half-century. The society by then was patriarchal and men were very responsible to their families. This has changed and the current American society has women playing important roles as those of their male counterparts.

Both plays express dreams that families had as they started out or as they were about to start. This was in line with what came to be popularly referred to as the American dream. Immediately after the Second World War, there was a spirit to reconstruct America. The American dream was the driving force that encouraged people to work hard in the nation by the time the war was nearing its end.

The American dream was a summation of the dreams of American families (Angelo 46). Each family had a dream that it wished to realize within a specific period. This dream helped America to come up with a national dream that would see to it that the state remains the super power and self-sufficient.

In both plays, family dreams are expressed. In Wingfield’s family, we see Amanda recalling the illusions she had as a young girl. She was thinking about the kind of the family she wanted in her life. She yearned for comfort that she imagined she would get in her family. Upon realizing that she could not achieve this comfort, she was heartbroken. However, as is evident in this play, she is still hopeful that one day this dream would be realized.

Since she was parted ways with her husband, she saw herself realizing this dream through her son Tom and the daughter Laura. Although the daughter seemed to be a little shy to achieve the objectives set by the mother, Amanda still believed that she could make it if given little support. She therefore exerted pressure on Tom to help her sister find a suitor who would make her life comfortable. She also had a dream of finding her long lost husband. This would help her live a comfortable that she had admired for years.

Not all American dreams were successful. Some failed and their failure could be traced at the family level. Wingfield’s family was a symbol of this failure. Within this period, some Americans set targets that were too high to be achieved or some just did nothing to ensure that their dreams were realized (Irvine 2008).

As would be expected, such dreams failed. Amanda expecting Laura, who was too shy and physically and mentally impaired to find a suitor in their house, was a dream that was unrealistic. The expectations she had towards the son were also unachievable given the prevailing state of affairs. It was also not easy to find her loving lost husband. Therefore, with this illusion of happiness, she would most certainly live without fulfilling her dreams under normal circumstances.

On the other hand, Younger’s family is a symbol of America’s realized dreams. During this time, America was a strong powerhouse in terms of the economy, military, technology and world politics. It had an influence in the international system, forcing other states to respect its decisions and actions. Mr. Younger and his wife shared a dream of owning a house in a rich neighborhood.

He worked hard to realize this dream but unfortunately, he passed on before seeing its realization. However, because he had planned for any eventuality and insured his life, his family was still able to live in the dream house. Unlike Amanda who never had a shared dream, the Younger family shared their dream, a fact that ensured that in case one was not available, the other would be there to realize the dream.

The American dream was also realized because it was a shared vision, with each individual American having the feeling that he or she had a role to play in the realization of the dream. Younger’s daughter, though not very aggressive in life, had a bright future with her Nigerian fiancée. She had struggled to ensure that she was successful in her medical school but due to financial constrains, she had to cut short her studies.

However, good things were in store for her because her fiancée was ready to pay for her studies. In such successful families, there would not miss elements that would be destined to failure. Younger’s son, Walter, was a symbol of this. His dream of starting a liquor firm was peculiar in the first case. His style of investment was also poor and therefore his failure was easy to predict. Therefore, the two plays converge and diverge at some points but their main agenda was to bring into focus the nature of American character in the 20th century.

Angelo, Timothy. “A vision worth working towards: Assessment in support of learning communities”. Assessment updates 12.2 (2012): 3-5. Print

Aragón, Francisco. The wind shifts: new Latino poetry, Chicago: University of Arizona Press, 2007. Print.

Irvine, Colin. Teaching the Novel across the Curriculum: A Handbook for Educators , New York: ABC-CLIO, 2008. Print.

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Bibliography

IvyPanda . "‘The Glass Menagerie’ and ‘A Raisin in the Sun’ Drama Analysis." April 23, 2020. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-glass-menagerie-and-a-raisin-in-the-sun-drama-analysis/.