The setting of The Glass Menagerie

An important part of the setting is the collection of glass figures. The fragile glass creatures are just like Laura, the sister, and yet it is when the Gentleman Caller accidentally breaks one of the figures when he is dancing with Laura that Laura is contradictorily set free from her dream world. In a larger sense, this sets Tom free, allowing him to escape from the home after he has a fight with Amanda because the Gentleman Caller is already engaged. Escape is in fact a recurring motif, from the escape effected by the father years before to Tom's escape, never to return. Escape as a theme is always bittersweet, and in addition it is never complete--Tom carries his memories with him and cannot truly escape from Amanda and his sister and the room in which they live. He carries the setting with him.

The picture of the father is prominent on the set of the play, and this picture symbolizes escape. This picture is given added prominence as Tom refers to the father as a fifth

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into Joy, but the greater one was that she had been able to turn herself into Hulga (O'Connor 2284). Hulga is searching for an identity she can call her own. What little she achieves in this direction is challenged once more by the arrival of the Bible salesman, a hypocritical man, and he is the embodiment of the perverted Christianity Joy-Hulga sees all around her. O'Connor brings out in this story the wide disparity between what the Christian should be and what the average Christian is in her view. There is also a disparity between the promise of love and the reality, which adds to Hulga's disillusionment. In "The Enormous Radio," the character of Irene Westcott is average and seems to be in something of a rut, for she and her husband are described by Cheever as if they were statistics, married so long, with so many children, and defined by where they live. Irene is a bored and lonely woman who turns to the seemingly magical radio for some alleviation of the sameness of her life. In a sense, Irene is an empty shell into which the radio pours the ills of the surrounding world, and soon Irene is fighting with her husband over the same sorts of issues she hears her neighbors fighting about. It is less like she is a puppet
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Some common words found in the essay are:
Gentleman Caller, George Grebe, Irene Westcott, Hunting Green, Finding Green, Freeman Joy, Tennessee Williams, Enormous Radio, Hulga O'Connor, Joy-Hulga O'Connor, enormous radio, country people, fire escape, real world, cheever john, john cheever, dream world, bible salesman, looking green, excel excel,
Approximate Word count = 1758
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)

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