Tennessee William's The Glass Menagerie
Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.
-- Albert Einstein.
The most important theme in The Glass Menagerie is the difficulty people have in accepting and relating to reality. As a result of their inability to overcome this difficulty, the characters withdraw into a private world of illusion to find the comfort they can’t find in real life.
Out of the three Wingfield family members, Laura probably is the one living furthest away from reality. There are several symbols in the play that represent that in some way. Her glass collection that she carefully takes care of, is the imaginary world she lives in to escape the real live where she doesn’t finish high school, fails typing class, and doesn’t have any “gentlemen callers” like her mother expects her to. Another symbol for Laura’s personality is “Blue Roses”, the nickname Jim gives her in high school. Blue roses are, although beautiful, not real and can’t be found in nature, what refers to Laura’s uniqueness but also to her very own, special beauty that lies beyond her differentness and inability to live in reality. Overall, Laura is a very important character, because the whole story is basically about her (Tom tells us) and she also is the one who is most concerned with the play’s theme of withdrawing from reality.
At first sight Tom seems to be the only one in the Wingfield family who is capable of functioning in the real world, interacting with strangers, and holding down a job to finance his mother and sister. But he also, withdraws into his illusions to abscond the never-ending conflicts with his mother and his frustration about his monotone, meaningless life. During the play, Tom often mentions “the movies” he’s going to all the time, which represent his attempt to escape all this and to give him the illusion of adventure. The same goes for the fire escape to where Tom often withdraws whenever the “fire” of conflict and arguing with Amanda gets to hot.
Tom's attitude toward his sister puzzles the reader, since even though he clearly cares for her, he is frequently indifferent and even cruel. Not once in the play does he behave kindly or lovingly toward Laura, not even when he knocks down her glass menagerie. Laura on the other side is the only character who, despite the selfishness that characterizes the Wingfield family, never does anything to hurt anyone else.
Demonstrated, by her praying when her mother asks her and attending church as well. Furthermore, in combination with references to slavery from Amanda and a few derogatory terms from Tom one can assume Laura and her family are Caucasian American. Moreover, it can be assumed that the play was written for a time period before it was published in 1944. Shown by the play also making references to the Second World War, and the Spanish civil War, presumably meaning the play took place some time in the late 1930’s. In the play the super-objective of Laura is to protect the alternate reality she has created where she feels far less crippled, and far more accepted. However, Laura faces the obstacle of real life, and her issues with her mother and her brother. The importance of protecting this alternate reality is extremely high to Laura because it is the only thing that has protected her from feeling confusion, pain, and anger towards the problems she faces. Meaning, it’s her only defence against something she has no control over (her illness, her families problems, feeling accepted).
Later approaching the tragedy of of the book, Tom displays another act of sub-human behavior, nonchalantly brushing off his affairs, “And what’s more I love Daisy too. Once in a while I go off on a spree and make a fool of myself, but I always come back, and in my heart I love her all the time.”(201). Tom in a sense...
Tom clearly does not believe that staying at home with his mother and sister is worth the unhappiness he feels. A common issue that arises in The Glass Menagerie is Tom’s nightly trips to the movies. When asked about his frequent trips to the movies, Tom describes that “adventure is something I [he]” doesn’t “have much of at work.” (4.Tom) Living vicariously through the movies he sees, remains one of Tom’s only true sources of happiness.
The Glass Menagerie is a play written by Tennessee Williams. It involves a mother, Amanda, and her two children, Tom and Laura. They are faced with many problems throughout the play. Some of these problems involve: Amanda, the mother, only wants to see her kids succeed and do well for themselves. How does her drive for success lead the book?
Although the glass menagerie is meant as a direct metaphor for Laura, it also serves as a metaphor to the other characters in the play through various means. They are all interconnected in some way, depending on each other, and when things don’t turn out right, everything begins to fall into a downward spiral, with little or no hope for improvement.
The characters inhabit their private realities in order to detach themselves from a world that confuses and alienates them. Laura, Amanda, Tom, and Jim prefer to immerse themselves in their narrow view of time rather than embrace the flow of time. Laura remains isolated as she has failed to find love. Amanda judges Laura as she imposes her own narrow expectations on her. Tom believes that he can escape reality and become inseparable from the imaginary worlds of movies. Jim's idealistic view of Laura suggests that he is out of touch with reality. The play demonstrates that the characters desire to escape reality due to their inability to live in the present and embrace the flow of
If we take a look at the different symbols used throughout the play, I think that the most important one when it comes to escape is the fire escape. It is in the center from the very beginning, when Tom makes his opening addressing to the audience from it. To understand the role of the fire escape one has to see that it serves a different purpose for each of the characters. In general we can say that it represents the borderline between freedom and imprisonment. Apart from this, the different characters see it in different ways. For Tom, the fire escape is an opportunity to get away from the apartment and his nagging mother. For Amanda, on the other hand, it's a door through which gentleman callers for Laura can come into their apartment / into their world. For Laura, even though she's been outside, it's the border between the safe and the dangerous, between the known and the unknown.
These personal downfalls in life drive Tom into a life of poetry and movies, and Laura into a world of glass figurines. Tom is unsatisfied with his work at the warehouse and feels his life lacks adventure. Therefore, he finds it through writing poetry and watching movies. When business is slow at the shoe warehouse, Tom goes to the washroom to work on his poetry.
how society forced them to change and Laura to lose her status in order to fit
Because the glass menagerie symbolizes more than one feature, its imagery can be considered both consistent and fluctuating. The consistent side of this portrayal is that the menagerie is a constant symbol of Laura’s personality.
Part of Tom’s desire to leave is this treatment at the hands of his mother. In the beginning of the play, he loses his appetite because of his mother’s “constant directions of how to eat it” (923), and at one point she said that, in reference to books that she took from Tom, she “took that horrible novel back to the library,” (931) and that she “won’t allow such filth brought into [her] house!” (931). Part of Tom’s desire to leave is this treatment at the hands of his mother; another part is his job, and how monotonous and stagnant it is at the workshop. [PP2] Together, they leave Tom feeling trapped in his lifestyle of struggling through the days. He mentions to seeing a magician show at the movies, which sums up his feelings of
Similarly, Tennessee Williams’ (1945) The Glass Menagerie, bears two strikingly comparable characters, pulled from the memory of Tom Wingfield. Tom’s mother, Amanda, is much like Willy in the way that she regrets not being able to keep Tom’s father around, yet she is not suicidal, instead she is overbearing and intrusive on Tom’s personal life constantly pushing him to be more successful, make more money and to find his sister, Laura, a suitor (p. 20).
The Glass Menagerie is a play written by Tennessee Williams in 1945. The play takes place in the Wingfield’s apartment in St. Louis. Tom is the protagonist in the play and he stays at home with his mother Amanda and his sister Laura. Tom’s Father left the family when he was younger leaving him as the man of the house. His mother Amanda expects him to do everything a man would do. This included working, paying bills, and taking care of herself and Laura. Laura is disabled and she doesn’t work therefore Tom is left providing for his whole family. Being abandoned by Mr. Wingfield left the family distraught. No one seemed to be able to cope with the fact that he was gone even though he left many years ago. Amanda is constantly treating Tom like a child. She tells him how to eat, when to eat, and what he should and should not wear. Tom eventually gets fed up with everything. He can’t stand his factory job, the responsibility of being the man or being treated like a child by his mother. Tom decides to follow in his father’s footsteps and leave the family. It seems as if Tom thinks that running away from his problems will make them go away but things didn’t turn out that way. Although the play was written many years ago, young adults in this day and age can relate to Tom and his actions. The main theme in the play is escape. All of the character use escape in some way. Laura runs to her glass menagerie or phonographs when she can’t handle a situation, Amanda seems to live in the past, and Tom constantly runs away when things aren’t going his way. Escape is a short term fix for a bigger problem. Running away may seem like the easiest thing to do, but in the end the problem is still there and it may be unforgettable. As time goes on esc...
Tom is the main character and is known as the man of the house since his father left them some years ago. Laura is the shy daughter of Amanda and is stated in the character list as “having failed to establish contact with reality, continues to live vitally in her illusions” (Williams 1247). Laura has a physical handicap, with one leg being shorter than the other. With this handicap Laura was picked on and led to 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.
written in between 384 and 222 BC, and his views were taken on by some