Throughout The Glass Menagerie Laura is presented as an extremely shy and sensitive person. This play also describes her personal fears, hopes, and dreams. Her shyness is emphasized even more by being contrasted with her mother Amanda's forceful and almost brutal nature and actions towards Laura.We clearly are made aware almost immediately of Laura's overly sensitive nature. Laura can be characterized by her loneliness, sensitivity, trapped feelings, and outcast.
Laura has no gentlemen callers and feels very isolated from the rest of the world in many ways. In her childhood, she walked through school trying to escape the reality of being “ disabled.” Horrified of people and their thoughts of her, she made her way to her classes, “ And everybody was seated before I came in. I had to walk in front of all those people. My seat was in the back row. I had to go clumping all the way up the aisle with everybody watching!”(VII.104). The other characters within the play seem to think of Laura as some kind of rare animal due to her actions and fear of people. Laura removes herself from school when she makes bad grades, “I made bad grades on my final examinations.”(VII.166). She also refuses to properly open the door and makes excuses so she will not have to face Jim when he comes to visit and have dinner, “ I can’t . . .I’m sick . . .Oh, Oh, Oh . . .” (VI.55,56,59). The loneliness Laura has is carried out through the play, especially when she comes to find out that Jim is engaged to another woman and cannot be with her. She goes back to her own little world so that no one can hurt her and she can protect her glass menagerie.
Laura’s physical and emotional sensitivity can be seen throughout the play of The Glass Menagerie. One example ...
... middle of paper ...
...tepping out of her comfort zone, may seem harmful she can be normal is she really tries.
Despite the fact that Laura has her own problems, she exhibits pure compassion towards others. Laura has the least amount of lines in the play which presents her selflessness. Characters with The Glass Menagerie seem to assume that, like a piece of gossamer glass, which is colorless until light shines upon it, Laura can take on whatever color they would like her to. Other view her as an exotic creature, rather quaintly foreign and secluded to the rest of the society. In the end of the play She is left in her own little unique world with her glass menagerie to be take care of and that she feels accepts her. Laura goes back to what is now "normal" for her - the world she has created with her glass menagerie of unique animals.
Works Cited
The Glass Menagerie
Sparknotes
Cliffnotes
The Glass Menagerie represents Laura' hypersensitive nature and fragility. Laura is just as easily broken as a glass unicorn and just as unique. When Jim accidentally bumps into the unicorn and breaks it, the unicorn is no longer unique. When Jim kisses Laura and then shatters her hopes by telling her he is engaged, she becomes broken-hearted and less unique. The innocence that made Laura so unique is now lost. Both Laura and the glass menagerie break when they are exposed to the outside world. When Laura gives Jim her broken unicorn, it symbolizes her broken heart that Jim will take with him when he leaves. She gives Jim a little bit of herself to take with him and he leaves behind a little bit of himself with her shattered horses.
"The Glass Menagerie" is a play about intense human emotions; frustration, desperation, sadness, anger, shyness, and regret. Perhaps the most intense scene in the play is when a gentleman caller, Jim O'Connor, finally does come. All of their futures hang in the balance during this scene. Laura is actually drawn out of her shyness with someone besides her family, and she actually begins to feel good about herself.
The Glass Menagerie is a play about the character Tom trying to escape his living situation that traps him. He is doing to best to cope with his dependent, demanding mother Amanda and take care of his quiet sister Laura. Amanda and Laura solely depend on Tom’s income from his warehouse job, but Tom is desperately wanting to leave both his mother and sister to lead his own adventurous life. Laura is mainly embodied by her precious glass menagerie and Jim O’Connor’s nickname for her, “Blue Roses.” Her livelihood revolves around taking care of her glass animals and protecting them, and in doing so, she isolates herself from the normal world around her. In Tennessee William’s play The Glass Menagerie, symbolism is use to uncover the unearthly beauty and delicacy of Laura and to portray Tom’s need to escape from his oppressive responsibilities.
The Glass Menagerie is a play written by Tennessee Williams. It involves a mother, Amanda, and her two children, Tom and Laura. They are faced with many problems throughout the play. Some of these problems involve: Amanda, the mother, only wants to see her kids succeed and do well for themselves. How does her drive for success lead the book?
Laura is the owner and caretaker of the glass menagerie. In her own little fantasy world, playing with the glass animals is how she escapes from the real world in order to get away from the realities and hardships she endures. Though she is crippled only to a very slight degree physically, her mind is very disabled on an emotional level. Over time, she has become very fragile, much like the glass, which shatters easily, as one of the animals lost its horn; she can lose control of herself. Laura is very weak and open to attack, unable to defend herself from the truths of life. The glass menagerie is an unmistakable metaphor in representing Laura’s physical and mental states.
In Tennessee William's play, The Glass Menagerie, the character of Laura is like a fragile piece of glass. The play is based around a fragile family and their difficulties coping with life.
The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams is a loosely autobiographical memory play this is enriched with symbolism. The play itself is symbolic and parallels with much of Williams own unhappy family background. The symbolism used by the playwright is used to represent the desire to escape or to distinguish the difference between illusion and reality. Much of the symbolism used is specific to each character, but the most important symbol is Laura’s glass menagerie.
The family in Tennessee Williams’ play, The Glass Menagerie, faces various dilemmas. One of the most prominent is the issue of anxiety. Throughout the play, the family focuses their attention mainly on Laura and her struggle with both her physical disability and social anxiety. However, closer analysis reveals that Laura is not the only character suffering, each family member displays signs of being affected by anxiety. Their interactions with one another trigger feelings of nervousness, unhappiness, and anger. The issue of anxiety extends beyond Laura, affecting the whole family, and ultimately leads to tragedy.
The glass menagerie continually signifies Laura’s unique personality throughout the play. One of the first people outside the family to see the more vibrant side of Laura is Jim, a friend of her brother’s as well as an old high school crush of hers. While having dinner at their house, Jim takes an interest in Laura’s collection of glass animals and records. They reminisce about high school and when Jim begins to understand why she is so shy, he says, “You know what I judge is the trouble with you?
Symbolism plays an integral part in Williams’s play, The Glass Menagerie. Examples of the use of symbolism include the fire escape, as an escape from the family, the phonograph, as an escape from reality, the unicorn, as a symbol for Laura's uniqueness and the father’s photograph, representing something different to each character. Through regonition of these symbols, a greater understanding of the play’s theme is achieved.
In Williams, Tennessee’s play The Glass Menagerie, Amanda’s image of the southern lady is a very impressive. Facing the cruel reality, she depends on ever memories of the past as a powerful spiritual to look forward to the future, although her glory and beautiful time had become the past, she was the victim of the social change and the Great Depression, but she was a faithful of wife and a great mother’s image cannot be denied.
Tennessee Williams's brilliant use of symbols adds life to the play. The title itself, The Glass Menagerie, reveals one of the most important symbols. Laura's collection of glass animals represents her fragile state. When Jim, the gentleman caller, breaks the horn off her favorite unicorn, this represents Laura's break from her unique innocence.
Laura Wingfield, a physically and emotionally crippled character, is also the lone character in the production that never does anything to upset someone else. Notwithstanding the encumbrance of her own complications, she exhibits an untainted kindness that stands in plain contrast to the arrogance and resentful sacrifices that characterize the Wingfield family. Laura also has the least amount of lines in the production, which in turn confirms her quality of selflessness. However, she is the axis around which the storyline changes, and the blatant symbols—blue roses, the glass unicorn, and her full glass menagerie—all in some degree characterize her. Laura, like the blue rose or the unicorn, is rare and unconventional, and her disposition is as tender as the glass figurine which she is known so prominently for throughout the production.
Laura has a physical handicap with one leg being shorter than the other. With this handicap Laura was picked on and led to having high anxiety and stress. The anxiety and stress led to her not going to business college as stated when Amanda went to Laura’s class and talked to Laura’s teacher. To escape from the stress, Laura has a collection of glass sculptures. This is stated in the scene information of Scene II with “She [Laura] is washing and polishing her collection of glass” (Williams 1251). In Scene III when Tom and Amanda are fighting Tom through his jacket and broke a sculpture “With an outraged groan he [Tom] tears the coat off again, splitting the shoulders of it and hurls it across the room. It strikes against the shelf of Laura’s glass collection, there is a tinkle of shattering glass. Laura cries out as if wounded” (Williams 1257). Laura has one piece in her collection that wasn’t broken till later and means the most to her and that is the unicorn, Laura states this with “I shouldn’t be partial, but he is my favorite one” (Williams 1282). The unicorn represents her because the unicorn is different from a normal horse just like how she is different from other women, she then allows her gentleman caller Jim O’Connor to hold the unicorn and saying “Go on, I trust you with him”
In The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams, the glass figurine of the unicorn plays an inherently important role as a representation of Laura's self esteem. The collection of glass figurines is used by Laura to escape from the dangers of the outside world. The unicorn is the central piece to her collection and is important because it directly symbolizes Laura. The unicorn represents Laura's obsession with her handicap and also represents the uniqueness in her character. As the play develops, the fracture of the unicorn's horn represents a change in Laura's perspective of self and also gives a reason to why she parts with the figurine in the end.