Comparing Glass Menagerie and Streetcar Named Desire
Tennessee Williams is one of the greatest American playwrights. He was constantly shocking audiences with themes such as homosexuality, drug addictions, and rape. He broke free from taboos on such subjects, paving the way for future playwrights.
Williams wrote about his life. The Glass Menagerie is a very autobiographical play. A Streetcar Named Desire, although meant to a play that anyone can relate to, also contained characters and situations from his life. In both plays, the characters are drawn from his life. This essay will discuss is the similarities between The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire, which have similar characters and themes throughout them.
A Streetcar Named Desire takes place in New Orleans. The characters are Blanche Dubois, Stanley Kowalski, Stella Kowalski (Blanche’s sister, Stanley’s wife), and Mitch, a friend of Stanley’s. The play focuses on Blanche and how she falls deeper and deeper into her delusional state, until, finally at the end, a doctor and a nurse take her away.
The Glass Menagerie takes place in St. Louis. The play features the Wingfields. Amanda is the mother and her two children are Tom and Laura. A gentleman caller named Jim O’Connor comes in at the end of the play. This play is basically about Tom’s memories of the last bit of time he was with his family, before leaving them as his father did. Since the play takes place in the memory, it is dark and some things are very exaggerated. Laura is a cripple who is lost in her own world, with no hope of ever finding someone to love her. Amanda is also living in her own world, one where she is still a southern beauty. She feels that if Laura doesn’t marry so...
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... one in The Glass Menagerie.
Throughout both of these plays run many common themes, often themes from Williams own life. He was a writer who broke taboos and wrote about depraved people, people going crazy and many other themes that weren’t considered appropriate at the time. His own life was very chaotic.
Works Cited A Streetcar Named Desire. By Tennessee Williams. Dir. Scot Whitney. Harlequin Productions, Olympia. September 1998.
2.“Remember Tennessee Williams.” Tom Sullivan. 21 June 2000. http://www.lambda.net/~maximum/williams.html Roudane, Mathew C. Ed. The Cambridge Companion to Tennessee Williams. New York: Cambridge Press, 1997 Williams, Tennessee. “The Glass Menagerie”. Anthology of American Literature: From Realism to the Present. By Tennessee Williams. Ed. McMichael, George et. al. New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 2000. 1445-
Comparing A Streetcar Named Desire and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof In the game of life, a man is given the option to bluff, raise, or fold. He is dealt a hand created by the consequences of his choices or by outside forces beyond his control. It is a never ending cycle: choices made create more choices. Using diverse, complex characters simmering with passion and often a contradiction within themselves, Tennessee Williams examines the link between past and present created by man's choices in "A Streetcar Named Desire" and "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. "
Tennessee Williams was one of the most important playwrights in the American literature. He is famous for works such as “The Glass Menagerie” (1944), “A Streetcar Named Desire” (1947) or “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955)”. As John S. Bak claims: “Streetcar remains the most intriguing and the most frequently analyzed of Williams’ plays.” In the lines that follow I am going to analyze how the identity of Blanche DuBois, the female character of his play, “A Streetcar Named Desire”, is shaped.
In Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire, its form of a Southern Gothic enables the playwright to base the play on sexual identity and judgement and the female characters all experience their struggle to liberate from their current position. For example, Blanche is notably known for her situation – The ‘polka dot’ which recurs throughout the play as a testimony to Blanche’s past. The playwright presents these situations using the play’s structure of a recurring cycle of a daily life of the characters. Unlike Alfieri in A View from the Bridge, A Streetcar Named Desire has no narrator and mostly focuses on the characters to establish Williams’ point of view. Perhaps, t...
The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams is a touching play about the lost dreams of a southern family and their struggle to escape reality. The play is a memory play and therefore very poetic in mood, setting, and dialogue. Tom Wingfield serves as the narrator as well as a character in the play. Tom lives with his Southern belle mother, Amanda, and his painfully shy sister, Laura. The action of the play revolves around Amanda's search to find Laura a "gentleman caller. The Glass Menagerie's plot closely mirrors actual events in the author's life. Because Williams related so well to the characters and situations, he was able to beautifully portray the play's theme through his creative use of symbolism.
The Glass Menagerie closely parallels the life of the author. From the very job Tennessee held early in his life to the apartment he and his family lived in. Each of the characters presented, their actions taken and even the setting have been based on the past of Thomas Lanier Williams, better known as Tennessee Williams.
If one examines Lacanist obscurity, one is faced with a choice: either reject subcultural discourse or conclude that class has significance, given that the premise of constructivism is invalid. The primary theme of Humphrey’s[2] critique of Marxist socialism is the fatal flaw, and subsequent economy, of deconstructivist society. It could be said that Sontag promotes the use of subcultural discourse to modify and attack sexual identity.
In Williams’ Streetcar Named Desire the characters represent two opposing themes. These themes are of illusion and reality. The two characters that demonstrate these themes are Blanche, and Stanley. Blanche represents the theme of Illusion, with her lies, and excuses. Stanley demonstrates the theme of reality with his straightforward vulgar ness. Tennessee Williams uses these characters effectively to demonstrate these themes, while also using music and background characters to reinforce one another.
Tennessee Williams was born Thomas Lanier Williams in 1911. As a successful playwright, his career was greatly influenced by events in his life. He was noted for bringing the reader "a slice of his own life and the feel of southern culture", as his primary sources of inspiration were "the writers he grew up with, his family, and the South." The connection between his life and his work can be seen in several of his plays.
Character Conflict in Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire. Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire is a play wrought with intertwining conflicts between characters. A drama written in eleven scenes, the play takes place in New Orleans over a nine-month period. The atmosphere is noisy, with pianos playing in the distance from bars in town.
that is part of the paradigm of language, but rather the fatal flaw, and therefore the paradigm, of class. The
Generally when some one writes a play they try to elude some deeper meaning or insight in it. Meaning about one's self or about life as a whole. Tennessee Williams' "The Glass Menagerie" is no exception the insight Williams portrays is about himself. Being that this play establishes itself as a memory play Williams is giving the audience a look at his own life, but being that the play is memory some things are exaggerated and these exaggerations describe the extremity of how Williams felt during these moments (Kirszner and Mandell 1807). The play centers itself on three characters. These three characters are: Amanda Wingfield, the mother and a women of a great confusing nature; Laura Wingfield, one who is slightly crippled and lets that make her extremely self conscious; and Tom Wingfield, one who feels trapped and is looking for a way out (Kirszner and Mandell 1805-06). Williams' characters are all lost in a dreamy state of illusion or escape wishing for something that they don't have. As the play goes from start to finish, as the events take place and the play progresses each of the characters undergoes a process, a change, or better yet a transition. At the beginning of each characters role they are all in a state of mind which causes them to slightly confuse what is real with what is not, by failing to realize or refusing to see what is illusioned truth and what is whole truth. By the end of the play each character moves out of this state of dreamy not quite factual reality, and is better able to see and face facts as to the way things are, however not all the characters have completely emerged from illusion, but all have moved from the world of dreams to truth by a whole or lesser degree.
Donahue, Francis. The Dramatic World of Tennessee Williams. New York: Frederic Ungar Publishing Co., 1964.
Gestures are unique forms of non-verbal communication, which have been studied, both out of context and within culture and race. In 1942, Dr. David Efron wrote the book, Gesture and Environment, which was a summary of Efron’s research of the claims of the Nazi scientists that “differences in gestures were due solely to racial inheritance” (Ekman, 7). He compared groups of immigrant Southern Italians and Eastern Jews, living in New York City, by using direct observation and recording the outward gestures of this collection of people. These observations were then evaluated and studied to determine whether there were group differences between them. Efron went even further to research whether there were differences between the traditional Eastern Jews and “Americanized” Jews with the same background; and between the traditional Southern Italians and the “Americanized” Southern Italians. He even went so far as to include sketches of gestural patterns of these groups and other appropriate illustrations, drawn by Stuyvesant Van Veen, an artist from New York City. Efron’s research was so unique and diverse that his book was re-published in 1972 under the name, Gesture, Race and Culture.
In a sense, postsemiotic theory implies that class has intrinsic meaning, but only if the premise of postmodern materialism is valid; otherwise, Lyotard's model of the subcapitalist paradigm of reality is one of "cultural Marxism", and therefore part of the dialectic of sexuality. Marx promotes the use of subsemantic cultural theory to deconstruct hierarchy. However, Lacan's model of the subcapitalist paradigm of reality holds that consciousness is capable of intent. Von Junz[4] states that we have to choose between subsemantic cultural theory and Sontagist camp.
Nonverbal communication surrounds us all the time. “Nonverbal communication is all aspects of communication other than words” (Wood, 2016, p. 135). It is not communication with words, but we use nonverbal communication when we talk. We use nonverbal communication without even realizing it in every facet of our lives. This type of communication can be challenging depending on someone’s culture. Something that means one thing in America, can mean something totally different in another country. It is important to know this so that you don’t offend someone from another culture (Wood, 2016, p. 149).