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The glass menagerie and dolls house women
The glass menagerie and dolls house women
The glass menagerie and dolls house women
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In my analysis I will focus on the middle age, renaissance and mythical story representations of unicorns in literature and how they connect with the character Laura Wingfield from The Glass Menagerie.
Middle Age, Renaissance, and Mythological stories’ representations of unicorns are “extremely wild woodland creatures” (Wikipedia) who could be captured by no man. They are shown as a symbol of purity and grace, parallel to virgins in the same areas of literature. Unicorns are also depicted as purifying poisoned water so that other creatures may drink and healing the sick.
Laura Wingfield is, by all evidence within The Glass Menagerie, a virgin maiden, which is the only kind of human who could bond with or draw a unicorn out of the forest. Laura
Bettelheim, Bruno. The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales. New York: Vintage, 2010. Print.
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.
Abstract: This is an analysis of celtic mythological motifs or themes (usually found Arthurian romances) in the medieval romance Yvain and the victorian classic, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland .}
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 hearing of Fairytales is particularly suitable for children, as children need to learn how to navigate the society and culture they are growing up into. Little red riding hood by Charles Perrault is a good example of a traditional French fairy tale which plays a symbolic function in representing the society in which its written the values of that society and the gender roles within it. As well as being a simple enough for children to understand the moral lessons and being enjoyable so that children want to listen to it.
Warner, Marina. From the Beast to the Blond on Fairy Tales and Their Tellers. New York: Chatto & Windus, 1994. Print.
Tennessee Williams’ play, “The Glass Menagerie”, depicts the life of an odd yet intriguing character: Laura. Because she is affected by a slight disability in her leg, she lacks the confidence as well as the desire to socialize with people outside her family. Refusing to be constrained to reality, she often escapes to her own world, which consists of her records and collection of glass animals. This glass menagerie holds a great deal of significance throughout the play (as the title implies) and is representative of several different aspects of Laura’s personality. Because the glass menagerie symbolizes more than one feature, its imagery can be considered both consistent and fluctuating.
In the story of Cinderella , the birds have a number of connotation amidst them.The birds symbolize as guiding spirit , disclossures of the thruth and retributors of revenge.
A prolific exemplification of the ideal female virtues portrayed in fairy tales is Charles Perrault’s “ The Little Glass Slipper”. Perrault presents the ideal female fairy tale character through his portrayal of Cinderella. Cinderella is a tame and forgiving individual who subjects herself to the will of her father, stepmother and s...
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.
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.
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”
Some fairy tales are so iconic that they withstand the passing of time. One of those fairy tales is that of Cinderella. The rags to riches story that gives even the lowliest of paupers, hope that they may one day climb the social ladder. While the core message of the story has transcended time, over the years it has been adapted to address a variety of audiences. One of those renditions is Perrault’s Cinderella where the traditional idea of gender is conveyed and therefore associated with good/evil. This idea is challenged by a fellow 1600’s French author, L’heriter de Villandon’s, who’s version of Cinderella brings about a female protagonist who is also the heroine.
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.
As you can see, the unicorn played an important role in the play even though it didnt seem as though it would. This is a very well put deception by Tennessee Williams showing his greatness in the art of play