The purpose of this research is to examine the use of symbolism and imagery in The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams. The plan of the research will be to set forth in general terms the pattern of ideas emerging in the work, and then to discuss the symbolic and imagistic means by which the pattern is elaborated, the ideas are given concrete representation, and the combination of dramatic and thematic content given emotional expression.
The action of The Glass Menagerie is built around Tom Wingfield's memory of a family of sometimes violent and often pathetic emotions, and of the just plain sad fate of his mother Amanda and his sister Laura, who each in her way is doomed when it comes to coping with the realities of the outside world. The difference between them is that Amanda is a survivor and Laura a victim. Tom, for his part, is an escapee from the encased physical universe of the Wingfield apartment. But as he implies while describing the "memory play" (Williams 993). of his life, he cannot escape the reality of that world. Yet that reality is conveyed, as he also explains, by illusion and symbol.
In a broad sense, all of the characters of the play can be seen as symbolic. Now of course this is partly due to the metaphorical nature of drama more generally. But there is an almost programmatically metaphorical quality about The Glass Menagerie. As Brooks Atkinson noted about the play in 1947, two years after it had premiered on Broadway, it was "a quietly woven study of intangibles" (Atkinson 440). The characters themselves can be said to stand for intangibles, and it is possible to see Tom, Laura, Amanda, and the Gentleman Caller as figurations of response to and of coping strategies for the found universe. For the Wingfields, what this comes down to is their entire emotional content, and more particularly their manner of dealing with the tension between illusion and reality. For Jim O'Connor, the symbolism is more direct, i...