Symbolism & Imagery in The Glass Menagerie

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 i

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on of former days with him is really a fairly calculated, though abortive, effort at encouraging the match. It is because of that practicality that she abandons her silliness for "dignity and tragic beauty" (Williams 1017) in the service of comforting Laura after her dream is crushed. Therefore the idea that Amanda's clinging to the past is what defines her character is surely wrong, repeatedly and programmatically not confirmed by the text. Jim O'Connor functions in the unfolding events of the play much as a real-life telephone caller does, not a conventional (i.e., real) visitor or suitor per se but rather a consumer and user of communication, not permanently present in the Wingfields' lives, but rather temporary in the life of the household. This is a function that a telephone call has in the life of everyone on the outside. The (Telephone/Gentleman) Caller has been the residual dream of Laura, and the fact that he arrives in her life more or less as casually as a typical telephone call, to say chiefly that he is vanishing into a solid Catholic marriage, shows that he is something that cannot be grasped. He is as unreal, impermanent, and fragile to Laura's personal experience of the world as her assertion of reality in connect
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Some common words found in the essay are:
Gentleman Caller, Telephone/Gentleman Caller, Menagerie Kerr, Jim O'Connor, Glass Menagerie, Tom Wingfield's, Laura Romantic, Tom Mother, Laura Laura, Indeed Caller's, glass menagerie, gentleman caller, outside world, stage directions, blue roses, stage directions glass, set apart, fire escape, jim o'connor, directions glass, directions glass menagerie, illusory world inside, laura doomed, called blue roses, blue roses gentleman,
Approximate Word count = 2657
Approximate Pages = 11 (250 words per page)