“The Glass Menagerie,” is a woeful play, plagued by a missing father, a young man walking in the very father’s footsteps, and a mother whose only life is lived in the past. There is one other unfortunate member of this dysfunctional family—Amanda’s daughter, Laura. Laura lives in a fantasy world, afraid to face the reality of her crippled destiny. She exists in a world of glass, pretty and flawless. Laura represents the glass menagerie; this is reinforced by the disjunction of the horn from the misfit unicorn which in turn represents her handicap.
The fragile Laura is treated throughout the story as though she is breakable. When she attempts to do something, her family members, “come to her rescue” and prohibit her from finishing rather simple tasks. The family's regard for her fragility is shown when Amanda stops her from bringing in the blancmange, “No, sister, no, sister―you be the lady this time and I'll be the darky,” Amanda says, though Laura is already up. The family attempts to hide their protection from her and tells her little excuses, i. e., when Amanda explains by saying, “Resume your seat, little sister―I want you fresh and pretty―for gentlemen callers!” A similar situation occurs not long after when Laura tries to do a simple household chore and Laura rises insisting, “Mother, let me clear the table.” Though she shows genuine desire to clear the table, her mother denies her with the advice that she does something else, “No, dear, you go in front and study your typewriter chart . . . “ She is sheltered and protected; just like glass. When someone handles glass, it's with a gentle touch and care is taken to avoid it breaking it. The same concept is applied here. The family handles her with care because sh...
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...she hadn't been acquainted with many people, making her sort of lonesome.
During Jim and Laura's dance, Jim accidentally bumps into the table, sending Laura's favorite article of glass toppling onto the floor—the unicorn. Upon crashing into the floor, its horn was separated from the unicorn. Laura makes up a story to go along with the accident. “I'll just imagine he had an operation. The horn was removed to make him feel less—freakish! Now he will feel more at home with the other horses, the ones that don't have horns . . .” The horn was symbolic of Laura's handicap. Laura feels that if she were to be cleansed of her handicap she would be like everyone else and wouldn't be as, “freakish.” Just as Laura tells Jim that blue is wrong for roses, people shouldn't be handicapped as horses aren't ment to have horns. In this view, she is the glass menagerie.
Her low self-esteem makes it difficult for Laura to interact in society causing her to be more comfortable living in her imagination. John takes note of his sister diffident personality and tries to make Amanda understand, "[…]in the eyes of others-strangers-she 's terribly shy and lives in a world of her own and those things make her seem a little peculiar to people outside the house"(Williams 47). Being so self conscious about her disability, Laura allowed herself to become distant from the world around her. Laura creates this distance by escaping “[...] into a world of glass and music. Her father 's old phonograph records provide her with escape that the unfamiliar new tunes can 't provide”(). Laura finds comfort in what she is familiar with which is why she flees into her world of imagination and memory. When Laura is unable to deal with real life issues and duties she seeks tranquility in her delicate glass figurines and the remains of her father before he choose to elude the
Time progression, education, and social justice movements have weakened the grasp of female oppression. Yet, the wounds of inequality are continuously bleeding, despite having years to heal. Modern women face unequal pay in the workforce, little representation in congress, female genital mutilation in 29 countries, a lack of education, etc. Laura’s unhealable wound is representative of this truth. Interestly, Laura’s character is not an empowering feminist hero, as her situation and disability suggest. There are no heroes or villains within this story as Lori Leathers Single argues in Flying the Jolly roger: Images of Escape and Selfhood in Tennessee William’s The Glass Menagerie, “Because the play is about familial dysfunction, there are no heros or villians in The Glass Menagerie. In order to understand the truth beneath the surface, the audience needs to maintain its objectivity.” (152 Single). Literary heros customarily gain unhealable wounds during an encounter with “hell”, or a low point in their journey. The wound allows the hero to become wiser, mature, and strong. Laura’s wound does not lead to these positive traits however. Alternatively, the unhealable wound eats Laura alive, drowning her in the typical psyche of an oppressed woman. As Robert J. Cardullo introduces in the academic journal entitled Liebestod, Romanticism, and Poetry in The Glass Menagerie, “Laura Wingfield of The Glass Menagerie (1944) hardly qualifies as a Romantic superwoman, a majestic ego to transcend the “mereness” of mundane human existence.” (Cardullo 76). Laura does not defeat the malevolent presence of female oppression, but instead embraces it through the victimization of
In Tennessee Williams The Glass Menagerie, we are given opportunity to see and understand that even truth can be cloaked by illusion. There are four main characters, we have Tom Wingfield whom is the narrator of the play. By day is a warehouse worker in a shoe factory, often absent minded for he would must rather be focusing on his passion for poetry and writing. By nightfall he often finds refuge from his mother's constant berating in the local movies. Laura Wingfield is Tom's beloved sister. Crippled since childhood from a disease known as plurosis, Laura is also emotionally crippled as an adult, in the sense that she is so incredibly shy attending business school was simply too much for her. To others it is no issue but to her it's all than she can see. Instead of fulfilling her mothers wishes she spends her days carefully attending to her delicate glass animals and listening to her father's record collection.
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.
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.
Seen as the only stability and object to bring her joy, laura creates and attachment to the menageries. After a feud between Tom and Amanda, Tom accidentally knocks a menagerie over. Here, Laura shrieks, “My glass!- menagerie”, and covers her face, clearly upset. (Williams 24) The depiction and addition to the scene of the menagerie shattering depicts the shattered relationship tom and his mother share in this scene. In the beginning of this scene, Tom and Amanda re seen fighting over his apparent late night disappearances by going to what he states is the movies. In his mother's eyes, this is because of the books and their impact on him. Annoyed by the constant nagging when she takes his books insisting that she will not “ALLOW SUCH FILTH BROUGHT INTO … [her]... HOUSE”, he is taken aback by the statement and reminds her of his rent payments. (Williams 21) In doing so, he creates a bigger argument fueling her fears by stating that instead of going to the movies, he is committing an unspeakable act.Because of this, Tom ruins his relationship with his mother and forces her to not speak with him until he apologizes. Although the glass menagerie is not broken until after this scene, the understanding of the glass shattering after the argument allows the audience to understand why Willams included the glass piece and Laura's disabilities. By
The glass part of the menagerie represents the weaknesses that each character has. Tom’s thrust for adventure is the glass part of him, his Achilles heel. It causes him to lose his job in the play, go out to the movies, drink, and eventually to break his bonds and leave the family. Laura’s weakness is her crippled leg and her shyness. Laura’s shyness makes her drop out of typing school, and in social situations, she is self-conscious about her crippled leg. She is able to forget about these draw backs for a moment and overcome them when Jim treats her like a normal women. Amanda’s weakness however are the mistakes that haunt her and sadly she never overcomes them. The glass is also seen as the goal that they reach for since they all wish to shine like glass. Glass is seen to most as being pure and sparkling while the family is obviously not, but each tries to become pure by fulfilling their desires. Sadly their dreams are also fragile since in the process of achieving them, they break their dreams. Laura tries to be normal and believes she can with Jim but her dream is dashed away when he reveals that he is engaged (Williams 971: 7). Amanda tries to live vicariously through her children but ends up breaking Laura’s heart and driving Tom away. Tom however tries to run away and find adventure but ironically ends up like his mother, being haunted by his past mistake of abandoning Laura (Williams 975:
When awaiting Jim’s visit to the household, Laura is anxious and wondering if Jim is her same high school crush Jim. He arrives and Laura is so upset that she gets sick and has to miss dinner and instead lay down, so Jim accompanies her while Amanda and Tom clean up. He gets Laura to warm up to him using his charm and laughter, and even gets her to show him her glass collection and dance with him. When they dance, Jim bumps into the table and knocks off Laura’s favorite glass piece, her unicorn. Her unicorn is used as a symbol for her peculiarity and differentness from most other girls her age, and when Jim breaks the unicorn’s horn off, he shows Laura that she is normal too: “Now it is just like all the other horses” (Williams 1748, Scene 7). It takes Jim for Laura to realize that in reality, she is not all that different from other girls, and most of what she thought kept her from being normal was all in her head, like Elisabeth Beattie says in her analysis of the play: “When Jim… destroys her illusion, Laura realizes she is indeed ordinary, like her unicorn-turned-horse” (Beattie). Jim is the key for Laura to see that she is not strange and unusual like she is in her
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 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.
Everybody has something about them that makes them unique, but sometimes they tend to not realize how special they are because of it. In the play, The Glass Menagerie, Laura possesses a collection of glass figurines that symbolize how others see her despite her limp. She has allowed her limp to define who she is, as well as play a major part in the way that she acts around other people. Laura’s limp has restricted her life in certain ways and because of it, she has become a delicate, radiant, and unique individual.
Like the glass menagerie, the only people who see her unique beauty are the ones who take the time to look at her in the right light. 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 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? Inferiority complex! Know what that is? That’s what they call it when someone low-rates himself!” Seeing her now as the vibrant creature she is, Jim is intrigued by her exotic beauty. Though Laura’s entire collection represents her personality, the unicorn in particular, symbolizes her unique and rare soul. When she shows Jim her menagerie, she declares the unicorn to be her favorite. “Aren’t those extinct in the modern world?” Jim replies. He also says that the unicorn must be lonely because he is not like the other horses. It seems that the unicorn is Laura’s favorite because she can easily identify with it, its beauty, its distinctiveness, and its solitary
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”
The unicorn is a mythological figure. Closely related to the horse, it is uniqueness comes in the form of a long horn located on the center of its forehead. In Laura's menagerie, it is unlike the other figures. In fact, Laura refers to the unicorn as being "freakish." (109) Her characterization of the unicorn reflects how she feels about herself. It is because of its uniqueness that Laura chose to identify with it. She creates a world with her figurines in which the abnormal coexists with the normal. When Jim, the gentleman caller, inquires about the unicorn being lonely, she replies, "He stays on a shelf with some horses that don't have horns and all of them seem to get along nicely together."(101) In her imaginary world no one judges her because of her limp and it is that world she is capable of coping in. Laura's characterization of the figurines hints at her inner desires to be able to deal with the outside world and become less "freakish." Laura tells Jim, "[the figurines] all like a change of scenery once in a while." (102)
In The Glass Menagerie, Tennessee Williams uses the roles of the members of the Wingfield family to highlight the controlling theme of illusion versus reality. The family as a whole is enveloped in mirage; the lives of the characters do not exist outside of their apartment and they have basically isolated themselves from the rest of the world. Even their apartment is a direct reflection of the past as stories are often recalled from the mother's teenage years at Blue Mountain, and a portrait of the man that previously left the family still hangs on the wall as if his existence is proven by the presence of the image. The most unusual factor of their world is that it appears as timeless. Amanda lives only in the past while Tom lives only in the future and Laura lives in her collection of glass animals, her favorite being the unicorn, which does not exist. Ordinary development and transformation cannot take place in a timeless atmosphere such as the apartment. The whole family resists change and is unwilling to accept alteration. Not only is the entire family a representation of illusion versus reality, each of the characters uses fantasy as a means of escaping the severity of their own separate world of reality. Each has an individual fantasy world to which they retreat when the existing world is too much for them to handle. Each character has a different way of dealing with life when it seems to take control of them, and they all become so completely absorbed in these fantasies that they become stuck in the past.