Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie

The Wingfield family in Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie is one that is held together by the bonds of illusion, dysfunction, and entrapment. Amanda Wingfield lives in a lower middle-class apartment that Williams tells us is "symptomatic of the impulse of this largest and fundamentally enslaved section of American society to avoid fluidity and differentiation and to exist and function as one interfused mass of automatism" (Williams, 1945, 400). Amanda and her two children, Laura and Tom, are enslaved in different ways. Amanda is a slave to a past when the bloom was not off the rose, so-to-speak. Tom is enslaved by pity for his mother and sister that keeps him working in a warehouse job he hates as he is a poet. Laura is enslaved by her illusions. There is a constant struggle between reality and illusion in this "memory" play, something ironic in light of the fact that Williams attempted to avoid realism. As Downer (1960) notes: "As a writer he is basically a poet, and he has done much to develop the possibilities of poetic expression in a theater that was created as a home for relentless realism" (222). Laura's development through the play influences the evolution of the thesis of the play, that one must escape enslavement to have the chance for a fulfilling existence.

Laura's development over the course of the play is one that moves from illusion towards reality and then swings back into illusion at th

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ind a nice young man at work to bring home for Laura since any social outing she has tried to embark upon with her has ended up a fiasco. Tom is pressured into saying he will and informs his mother that he is bringing home a coworker named James D. O'Connor. When Amanda becomes overjoyed at the news and begins planning O'Connor's future as Laura's husband, Tom warns her she is overreacting and should not expect much of Laura. When his mother says why not, Tom says because they love her they do not notice she is crippled. His mother again, like she did with Laura, tells him never to mention that word. He then tells her Laura is different from other girls and she says that difference is all to Laura's advantage. Tom disagrees: "Not quite all - in the eyes of others - strangers - she's terribly shy and lives in a world of her own and those things make her seem little peculiar to people outside the house...She lives in a world of her own - a world of - little glass ornaments...She plays old phonograph records and - that's about all" (Williams, 1945, 423). The big evening occurs in the scene following this one. In contrast to Laura's painful shyness in the beginning of the play, her presentation is now lit by a certain glow but

Category: Literature - T