In The Glass Menagerie the Wingfield family saturates themselves in their toxic relationships with one another and has trapped them within their broken home. Clearly, each individual within the family is trying to create their own escape from their family responsibility. Tom, Laura, and Amanda are all facing different adversity while trying to escape their reality. Throughout the play each of these characters are forcefully trying to live a life that they are not equipped to live. The play exemplifies how each of the characters damaged self is not only from their broke home, but, also from their unfulfilled hopes and dreams. Some would assume that this is unacceptable but, they are coming from a broken home, which creates their entrapment to be inevitable. The actions of the Wingfield family are acceptable because their broken home makes them trap themselves in their family responsibilities.
Nevertheless, the internal struggle within Tom becomes apparent as he begins to resort to drinking in order to cope with his toxic relationship with his mother and his hatred for working at the factory. Throughout the play it is palpable that he hates his home life and especially the inability to use his instincts and strengths at the warehouse.
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This becomes understandable when he exemplifies that a "Man is by instinct a lover, a hunter, a fighter, and none of those instincts are given much play at the warehouse!"(Gardner 937). This shows that Tom feels imprisoned in his life situation and that he will never be able to lead because of those restricting him in his life. The pressure of taking on the family responsibility of becoming the household figure put Tom down a path that crushes his dreams. These restrictions and pressures lead to his abuse of alcohol and beginning of abandonment towards his family by constantly leaving to find his own self-fulfillment. This leads Tom down to an inevitable path that follows his fathers and becomes his only way of escape. In addition, the play exemplifies that Amanda forcefully pushes her ideas and wants on to her children Tom and Laura. Her two children seem to feel obligatory into meeting her expectations, leaving them feeling miserable and lost. In the script Amanda is as an overbearing mother who seems to obscure the fear that her children will live the life she is living. Throughout the play the mother continually pushes her feelings on to Laura about her desires for example, when she exemplifies “Fifty dollars' tuition, all of our plans - my hopes and ambition for you - just gone up the spout, just gone up the spout like that” (Gardner 931). This explains her fixation with the idea of saturating her ideals into her daughter’s life. The family responsibility of being the mother and father figure in the household puts an abundance of pressure on Amanda. Unknowingly she begins to force the life and dreams that she wishes she would have lived and achieved through Tom and Laura. This is her only way to feel as though she is not as trapped inside of the broken home that she has contributed to. Nevertheless, in the ending of the play Amanda continues in her deep-rooted mentality which drives from her obsession with her past.
Tom loses his job and continues living miserably and abandons his family just like his father. When Laura’s favorite glass unicorn breaks it symbolizes her dream of finding true love is no longer attainable. When Laura is talking to Jim and mentions that “Glass breaks so easily. No matter how careful you are” (Gardner 940), she is actually using the glass unicorn to resemble her families fragile state. This state leads the Wingfield family down their inevitable fate of all their hopes and dreams being crushed. These unfulfilled dreams put Amanda, Tom, and Laura back into their vicious cycle of
misery. Thus, The Wingfield family’s home is broken and full of toxic relationships this holds the family members trapped. Their own selfish yearning of wanting what is best only for their wants and needs keeps the family in their miserable daily life cycle. The abandonment of the father figure in the household and the mother’s inability to move on from her past makes the family’s action of being trapped in family responsibility acceptable. In the end Amanda, Tom, and Laura all have their own individual way that they feel will help them escape their realities of life. In the end of this play the author exemplifies that the family’s individual escape methods are their own way of trying to find their easy way out. When all of the Wingfield’s dreams are unfulfilled the truth becomes apparent, the family's fate was inevitable.
The Glass Menagerie, written by Tennessee Williams in 1944, tells a tale of a young man imprisoned by his family. Following in the footsteps of his father, Tom Wingfield is deeply unhappy and eventually leaves his mother and sister behind so he may pursue his own ambitions. Throughout the play, the reader or audience is shown several reasons why Tom, a brother to Laura and son to Amanda, is unhappy and wishes to leave his family. However, the last scene describes Tom’s breaking point in which he leaves for the last time. Amanda tells Tom to “go to the moon,” because he is a “selfish dreamer.” (7. Amanda and Tom) The reasonings for Tom’s departure are due to his mother’s constant nagging, hatred for
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?
In Williams, Tennessee’s play The Glass Menagerie, Amanda’s image of the southern lady is a very impressive. Facing the cruel reality, she depends on ever memories of the past as a powerful spiritual to look forward to the future, although her glory and beautiful time had become the past, she was the victim of the social change and the Great Depression, but she was a faithful of wife and a great mother’s image cannot be denied.
The Glass Menagerie is a play about the memories of a young man named Tom Wingfield. Tom dreams of escaping his complicated and completely dependent family. Tennessee Williams uses symbolism to emphasize Tom’s yearning to leave. The first symbol of this the fire escape which serves as a bridge to reality from the illusive wo...
Because of him working in the warehouse and having to put his dreams on hold, it seems to make him bitter and rude to his mother. His mother puts a lot of pressure on him with working and making the money to pay the bills. Also his mother is always getting mad when he goes out. In the play Tom snaps at his mother one night after she’s nags him about going out, some of the stuff he said wasn’t necessary, but we all say things we don’t mean when we are upset. His mother does work by trying to sell magazines, but during this time period the Great Depression was going on so it was hard on everyone with money.
Tom Wingfield is a determined young man. He has decided against everyone else in his family's wishes that he wants to leave the dismal life of a factory job, to pursue a chance in the Merchant Marines. He realizes that he would be running off like his father and this is probably the only thing that kept him from leaving this long. Amanda, Tom's mother, deep down knows the day is coming that Tom will leave. She says "But not till there's someone to take your place." She wants Laura, if not herself to be taken care of. At that moment in the play Tom is the breadwinner in the family and up to this point Tom is the underpriviledged child that wants to move on. He wants to pursue his dream, a more adventurous life. Tom was a likable character until we find out he didn't pay the electric bill with the intended money. When Jim is over and he says "I paid my dues this month, instead of the light bill". At this point, Tom becomes a more selfish character. There is less sympathy given in his direction. In fact, this is probably where we feel a little more sorry for Amanda.
The three family members are adults at the time of this play, struggling to be individuals, and yet, very enmeshed and codependent with one another. The overbearing and domineering mother, Amanda, spends much of her time reliving the past; her days as a southern belle. She desperately hopes her daughter, Laura, will marry. Laura suffers from an inferiority complex partially due to a minor disability that she perceives as a major one. She has difficulty coping with life outside of the apartment, her cherished glass animal collection, and her Victrola. Tom, Amanda's son, resents his role as provider for the family, yearns to be free from him mother's constant nagging, and longs to pursue his own dreams. A futile attempt is made to match Laura with Jim, an old high school acquaintance and one of Tom's work mates.
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 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...
escape out of the apartment and a metaphorical escape from the Wingfield family. For Laura, it represents what will never be able to do, because of her severe social anxiety and physical disability. Tom sees the escape as a choice, he freely uses it to come in and out of the apartment and it is up to him to choose to escape, his mother, Amanda, will not freely give him the opportunity to. The fire escape plays a major role within the plot of The Glass Menagerie and is symbolic to the characters within the
Amanda loves her children and tries her best to make sure they do not follow her path to downfall. Unfortunately, while she is trying to push her children toward her ideals of success, she is also pushing them away. Amanda Wingfield is a kind woman stuck in the wrong place and time; she is trying to make her children’s life perfect while attempting to get a re-do on her love life with Laura and forcing Tom to fill the role that her husband abandoned. Amanda Wingfield was never meant to be in the situation that she finds herself in.
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.
In Tennessee Williams' play, The Glass Menagerie, each member of the Wingfield family has their own fantasy world in which they indulge themselves. Tom escaped temporarily from the fantasy world of Amanda and Laura by hanging out on the fire escape. Suffocating both emotionally and spiritually, Tom eventually sought a more permanent form of escape.
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”
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...