The Glass Menagerie Research Paper

Tennessee Williams’ play, The Glass Menagerie, is referred to as a memory play, centered around the Wingfield family. Many consider it autobiographical, as the characters strongly reflect Williams’ own troubled family. The play is set during the late 1930s, a time period characterized by the Great Depression. The hardships that resulted from this era took their toll on the American people, and many chose to live vicariously through entertainment, imagination, or memory. Tennessee Williams uses symbolism in The Glass Menagerie to depict the fantasies the Wingfield family members create to escape reality.

Thomas Lanier Williams was born March 26, 1911 in Columbus, Mississippi. Williams and his siblings were raised primarily by their mother,

After the stock market crash of 1929, millions of Americans were unemployed, and the entire country felt the effects of the economic crash. This not only affected America’s economy, but also its society. The Wingfield family’s apartment was in a tenement building, suggesting their class and wealth. Tom was fortunate enough to have a warehouse job, which meant he was responsible for providing for his family. Even Jim, who was successful in high school and prognosticated “to arrive at nothing short of the White House by the time he was thirty”, worked in the same warehouse as Tom, at around the same pay wage (Williams 50). Social expectations of women still leaned towards a more conservative approach. Despite Amanda’s failure of a marriage, the plotline of the play includes Laura’s gentleman caller. Amanda feeds into the 1930s societal expectations of a woman. She insists that Laura does not fall to dependency. She tells Tom to find Laura a caller, because he will not be free from his familial responsibilities as long as Laura is unmarried. While this insistence can be seen as maternal worry, since Laura dropped out of business school and does not have the confidence to pursue another occupation, Amanda seems to be driven more by society and its expectations. Amanda lives in the past, recalling her gentleman callers, and she seems shocked that Laura hasn’t had any. When Tom is around, Amanda describes

She is so adamant about her past as a Southern Belle that it is almost as if she cannot accept being anything other than that. She brags about receiving seventeen gentlemen callers, but married a man who “fell in love with long distances” rather than with his family (Williams 5). Amanda’s life is dictated by the societal expectations she holds, and she enforces them on her children. She still sees herself as a popular, charming, and beautiful lady living in the South with callers every weekend. Because of the tilted way she views her world, she refuses to accept Laura’s disability and the fact that Tom is not meant to succeed in the warehouse. While Laura and Tom created worlds to escape to, Amanda’s world is just a twisted version of what she wants to