r to the landscape of nineteenth-century American society, "the fragile, almost unearthly ego brutalized by life in the industrialized, depersonalized cities of the Western world." As a Romantic, however, she fails the test of the real-world gentleman caller in large part because she cannot keep from investing this particular man and this particular visit so much with Romanticism itself, in particular a dream of transformed life. Once having failed that test, she cannot conceive of attempting to cope with a new man, a new evening, an predictable world outside. One feels she will never extend herself out the doorway into the alley and will remain confined to the delicate and ephemeral world of the glass menagerie, as vulnerable to the real pressure of one disappointment as the glass animals are to one sharp blow.
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