The Glass Menagerie Is A Bad Mother

How does a person differentiate between a good and a bad mother? What characteristics set apart a good mother from a bad one? There are many factors such as loving, passionate, understanding and caring that add up to the qualities that craft the ideal mother, in general. However, Amanda Wingfield seems to have a compilation of the extreme opposite of those characteristics.

In the play The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams, AmandaWingfield who belongs to a genteel Southern family, regales her children frequently with tales of her idyllic youth and the scores of suitors who once pursued her. But contrary to popular opinion, Amanda can be portrayed as a “bad mother” since she is constantly disappointed in Laura for not attracting suitors and forces her son Tom Wingfield to work a dreary and dull job at a shoe factory.

Since the beginning for the first scene in the play, Amanda's actions in The Glass Menagerie were made clear, along with an abundance of scenarios that would make her a “bad mother”. First, she was an extremely domineering person, especially when it came to her children and she constantly put down her children and made them feel as if they were inferior and couldn't do anything right, or basically not as perfect as Amanda herself . She also refers back to her days in the South and blames her husband and children for the poverty and says that “in the South we had so many servants, gone, gone. All vestige of gracious living! Gone completely!” (Act 2, Scene V, 765.). Secondly, it is prominent throughout the play that Amanda does not want her children to voice their opinions and instead made her childrens'decisions for them, allowing them to decide little regarding their own future. Finally, by placing a la...

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...wever loving someone is not always enough. A good mother tends to her child's every need, and believes in them 100%. Unfortunately Amanda possessed neither of these qualities.

Amanda was a like a young woman living in an older woman's body. She was lost in her past and what she could have bee. She was an irresponsible mother who did not allow her children to make their own choices. She planned her responsibilities to Laura on Tom, leaving him with a large considerable amount of responsibilities that he did not ask for or what. Domineering is the best word to explain her. Tom and Laura were constantly being put down by their mother, and told to do things they did not want to do. Overall, Amanda Wingfield was an awful mother, always expecting too much. Never just accepting her children for who they were and loving them for being all that they could be.