The Theme of Escape in The Glass Menagerie
The Glass Menagerie, a play by Tennessee Williams, is set in the apartment of the Wingfield family, housing Amanda Wingfield and her two children Tom and Laura. The father left many years ago, and is only represented by a picture on the living-room wall. The small, dingy apartment creates a desperate, monotonous feeling in the reader. None of the Wingfields has any desire to stay in the apartment, but their lack of finances makes it impossible to move. Escape from this monotonous and desperate life is the main theme throughout the play.
The different characters in 'The Glass Menagerie' have their own individual ways of escaping from their realities. Tom Wingfield, the main character and narrator, probably has the one that most clearly relates to what we usually call escaping. His dream is to get away from the entire place in which he is currently living. He is tired of supplying his mother and sister without getting anything but remorse in return. Early in the play we can see this urge to get away through his frequent visits to the movie theatre. To him the movies serve as windows into another world, an exiting world filled with fun and challenges. Another thing that it is worth mentioning when speaking about this is Amanda's attitude towards the movies. She thinks that he spends too much time on the movies, and she keeps haunting him for it. I believe that this is supposed to tell the reader that Amanda has some kind of feeling that Tom sometime will follow in his fathers footsteps, and that she is trying to prevent this from happening. For Amanda this is a very natural reaction; with Tom out of the apartment there would be nothing left for her and her daughter to feed from....
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...ot a way of solving your problems, and that true freedom only can be found through confronting your problems, not by running away from them.
Works Cited and Consulted:
Bloom, Harold. Introduction. Tennessee Williams. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House, 1987. 1-8.
King, Thomas L. "Irony and Distance in The Glass Menagerie." In Tennessee Williams. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House, 1987. 85-94.
Levy, Eric P. "'Through Soundproof Glass': The Prison of Self Consciousness in The Glass Menagerie." Modern Drama, 36. December 1993. 529-537.
Thompson, Judith J. Tennessee Williams' Plays: Memory, Myth, and Symbol. New York: Peter Lang, 1989.
Williams, Tennessee. The Glass Menagerie. In Literature: An Introduction to Reading and Writing, 4th ed. Ed. Edgar V. Roberts and Henry E. Jacobs. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1995. 1519-1568.
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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.
The role of abandonment in The Glass Menagerie can best be described as the plot element that underlies the overall tone of despondence in the play because it emphasizes the continuous cycle of destruction and hardship that the Wingfield family experiences; indeed, abandonment in the play is a reiterative element that strips the excesses from the three main characters in the play and leaves them in their barest forms, united by a sorrowful reality and clutching each other through the ever-present need to sink into a self-constructed oblivion. The first, and perhaps the most notable and most frequently discussed, example of abandonment in the play would be that of Amanda Wingfield’s husband’s abandonment of his family; he left them at an unspecified time in the past because “he fell in love with long distances,” and evidently forsook any obligations and emotional affiliations that he may have had with his wife and offspring (Williams 5). Having been abandoned by a man who was both husband and father affected Amanda, Tom, and Laura in that it established many of their familial dynamics...
Williams, Tennessee. The Glass Menagerie. In Literature: An Introduction to Reading and Writing, 4th ed. Ed. Edgar V. Roberts and Henry E. Jacobs. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1995. 1519-1568.