Analysis Of The Glass Of Menagerie

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Recommended: Character of Amanda Wingfield in the glass menagerie

Aysha Rathor
English 112
Professor Cochran
May-08-2014
The Glass of Menagerie
In the four-character memory play by Tennessee William among the most prominent themes in Glass of Menagerie is the difficulty the Wingfield’s have in accepting the reality:
“The Wingfield apartment is in the rear of the building, one of those vast hive-like conglomerations of cellular living-units that flower as warty growths in overcrowded urban centers of lower middle-class populations and are symptomatic of the impulse of this largest and fundamentally enslaved section of American society to avoid fluidity and differentiation and to exist and function as one interfused mass of automatism” (Stage directions, 1.1). William uses this depiction in the beginning of the play to portray a prison like feeling for the apartment the Wingfield family takes on. Each member of the Wingfield family is incapable of to accept reality and as a result each one lives in there world of illusion where he or she finds comfort that can’t be offered to them by the real world. The first symbol represented by the author is the fire escape which represents the bridge between the illusionary world and reality for each member of the Wingfield family. To understand the role of the fire escape one has to see that it plays a different role for each character in the play.
The play is set in the apartment of the Wingfield family by the author’s description it is a confined space located in the city of St. Louis. None of the family member like living there but due to poverty they live in the fire escape but their minds are always somewhere escaping from their lifestyle and reality. And these escapes are all connected with the symbolic “fire escape” and Mr. Wingfield. He lef...

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...presents how she lives in the world of fantasy indicated my unicorn and Jim showed her a whole new world. The breaking of the horn on the unicorn represents the new transition for Laura to the reality but then she gives it away to Jim when he realizes that he didn’t mean to kiss Laura and he already has a fiancé. Laura gives away the one thing that represented her reason to connect with reality and find herself a nice gentleman caller and live her life and do the thing she wants to. But Laura gives it away because she’s so used to living in the fantasy world that she doesn’t have the courage to.
The Whole Winglfiled family has a problem distinguishing the difference what is real and what is not. At the end of the play only one character is able to escape the fireplace Tom he was so tired of her mother nagging and having all responsibility and was what he and did

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