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Symbols represented in the glass menagerie
Symbols represented in the glass menagerie
Symbols represented in the glass menagerie
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The Glass Menagerie
Final Questions
1. How does the fire escape function as a symbol to reveal each character’s personality?
The fire escape speaks to precisely what the name mentions an emergency exit from the dissatisfaction and brokenness that torment Wingfield's home. Laura slides down the fire exit in Scene Four, featuring her failure to get away from her bind. Tom, then again, regularly leaves for the smoking floor, reckoning his inevitable escape.
2. Discuss the symbolism of Laura’s unicorn.
Glass unicorn features Laura's delicacy and additionally indicates her interior shine. Her inner brightness is represented over the glass capacity to emanate light. The Glass Unicorn is one depicts the Laura’s temperament and denotes the image
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When Tom escapes at the end, he realizes that as far as he goes, he can never abandon Laura.
4. Choose either Tom, Amanda or Laura and argue that the character is the main character in the story.
Laura is the character that has never hurt any other individual. Regardless of her own problems, she shows affection for the rest of the family. Laura additionally has the quality of benevolence, however, she is the pivot which the story revolves, and all the images in some sense talk about her. She recognizes her leg damage and her shyness without feeling inferior to other people.
5. Which character lives life more realistically?
Laura
In actuality, Laura is gentle and unconnected from reality; she has the most quality and self-control of anybody in the play
6. Discuss the following symbols
Glass Unicorn
Laura's preferred figure which shapes her eccentricity. The unicorn is not the same as the others since it has a horn, it is delightful and valuable in its own particular unique way. The same thing happens in relation to Laura, she is rare, isolated and does not adapt to her lifestyle.
Blue Roses
The blue roses transforms Laura’s imperfection into a benefit: her abnormal supernatural characteristics are viewed as unique instead of
Laura unable to survive in the outside world - retreating into their apartment and her glass collection and victrola. There is one specific time when she appears to be progressing when Jim is there and she is feeling comfortable with being around him. This stands out because in all other scenes of the play Laura has never been able to even consider conversation with a "Gentleman Caller."
It is said in the character description that Laura “[has] failed to establish contact with reality” (Glass 83). This illustrates how Laura is childlike and naive, in that, Williams literally says that she has not established contact with reality. Laura is naive because she refuses to face life and all that comes with it, she is also childlike because she has sheltered herself and is unaware of her surroundings much as a child would be. Early on in the play the reader discovers that Laura had affections towards Jim when they were in high school. This, of course, will prove to be part of Jim’s easy manipulation of Laura. Shortly after this discovery, Laura’s gentleman caller, Jim, is invited over for dinner with the family. After having completed their evening meal, Laura and Jim go to another room and being
Tom is a character that is constantly looking for individuality and adventure. Unfortunately, his everyday life cannot provide those for him. The apartment building he lives in is comparable to a bee hive. Every member's identity is lost not intentionally, but because it is second in importance to labor. He wants time to retire in thought every now and then and express himself somehow. All this labor supresses his creative nature whose persistency will eventually win over his practical side. In this scene, we see Tom searching for a key in his pocket. The contents of his pocket, one can argue, are filled with ways to escape his everyday life. The movies he attends are like therapy sessions that are crucial to his health. The empty bottle suggests that he was drinking that night. Tom abuses alcohol to alleviate some of the pain caused by other people abusing him. The key he is looking for cannot be found readily; not because it fell through the crack, but because he cannot escape his fait. Circumstances incarcerate him in and endless cycle of work, abuse, and supression of thought. There is no apparent way out of such a predicament, but Tom has to keep looking for the key.
In Laura's new life, she works at a library and starts to date again. As Sara, she is able to enjoy life and be free. Sara rebuilds her self-esteem, is able to spend more time with her mother, and can relax without being afraid of whether the shelves in the kitchen will meet her husband's standards. The escape seemed foolproof, until Martin found a piece of evidence that proves Laura is still alive. (Laura had thrown her wedding ring in the toilet and Martin finally sees it.) After weeks of searching, Martin is able to hunt down his wife. He feels that if he cannot have her, then no one will. Sara does not want to return to the terrible oppressive lifestyle she was trapped in before. Instead of giving up her new life, she shoots the "intruder" in her house and puts an end to her husband's reign of terror over her....
When he asks what she gives it to him for, she replies, “A—souvenir.” Then she hands it to him, almost as if to show him that he had shattered her unique beauty. This incident changed her in the way that a piece of her innocence that made her so different is now gone. She is still beautiful and fragile like the menagerie, but just as she gives a piece of her collection to Jim, she also gives him a piece of her heart that she would never be able to regain. Laura and her menagerie are both at risk of being crushed when exposed to the uncaring reality of the world.
Laura Wingfield, Tom's sister, hides from the world by magnifying her illness. In her own secure world, Laura sees herself as crippled. She stays in their apartment and her only way of escape is through her collection of glass figurines. Laura keeps herself safe and marks the fire escape as a border that crosses danger.
A second critic, Joseph K. Davis, takes the stance that Laura's weakness overpowers her ability to be sensitive. Davis divides the dramatic pattern of The Glass Menagerie into two parts. Part of the pattern is "the dramatization of men and women by a display of their fragmented, tortured psychologies" (Davis 192). He states in his analysis of The Glass Menagerie: "His [Tom's] sister Laura tries to live in the present, but her crippled body and grim prospects in the secretarial school overcame her fragile sensibilities" (194). Davis implies that, like Amanda, Laura's weakness consumes her ability to live in reality and her sensibility, her one strength.
Confident, powerful, and wealthy would be the words that anyone would use to describe the haunting portrait of Laura. The artist created this cold image of Laura through the precise strokes of his brush. The dark eyes seemed to follow the other characters each moves, making it a centerpiece of most scenes. The portrait seems to have a much more powerful effect on others than Laura, herself. For instance, the portrait is what seems to be in between Waldo and McPherson when McPherson is staying in Laura’s apartment, and between McPherson and Laura when she returns from her weekend at her country house. It’s as if the image has the strength to cast a love spell on possible men of interest. As seen in Laura, Jacoby began to fall in love with her
Let us first examine Laura. Walter seems to fall in love with Laura at first sight. She is the image of the perfect Victorian woman. She is beautiful, rich, and pliant. She is willing to do whatever it takes to make other people happy. She has a dee...
She is a piece of glass in her glass collection, too fragile to survive in the real world. Laura is just as rare as a blue rose, which was Jim’s nickname for her in high school. Jim O’Connor seems like an ordinary guy, who just happens to be interested in Laura. Laura and Jim went to high school together. Jim breaks down what has left Laura “crippled” in the audience.
Laura learned that people in different social classes treat eachother differently to a point where neither of them care about the other at all. The people in the higher classes give themselves the mentality that anyone with less money and/or class is inferior to them and they feel so much greater than they that they turn their backs to them. On the same token, the lower class feels they aren't worthy of conversing with anyone above them. They just stick with the people around them and try to maneuver around the higher class. Both sides treat the other as a different race. They totally forget that without wealth, they are all the same.
Laura is the elder of Amanda's children. She is a slightly crippled, shy and nervous individual. Laura lives in her world of glass animals and feels as though she is ill-equipped to face the world.
Through Laura, one can see just how difficult it is to challenge the society in which a person live in. Jose displays the difference between the upper and lower class when the narrator says, “Jose loved giving orders
Laura, Amanda's daughter in the play is the character who has the most significance in what the play is all about she explains why William's gave the play its title. `The Glass Menagerie' is Laura's collection of glass animals and is the play's central symbol. Laura's collection of glass animal figurines represents a number of different sides to her personality. Like the figurines, Laura is delicate, dreamy and somehow old-fashioned. The message I got from the glass is that glass is transparent, but, when the light is shined upon it a rainbow of colours shines through this is mentioned as the screen images showing there is more to Laura than meets the eye. Similarly, Laura, though quiet around strangers, is lovely to those who choose to look at her in the right light. The menagerie is a dream world to Laura; a world that has colour and depth but is based on fantasy, `She is washing and polishing her collection of glass. Amanda appears...At the sound of her ascent, Laura catches her breath,...' Laura is a very fragile and innocent girl who gets nervous easily and tries to do right by her mother.
As Laura faces her inner conflict of class differences, she seeks comfort through her brother Laurie. But what life was she couldn’t explain. No matter what the reason. He quite understood.’ The protagonist of the story is Laura, who is the youngest daughter of the Sheridan family.