Throughout The Glass Menagerie Laura is presented as an extremely shy and sensitive person. This play also describes her personal fears, hopes, and dreams. Her shyness is emphasized even more by being contrasted with her mother Amanda's forceful and almost brutal nature and actions towards Laura.We clearly are made aware almost immediately of Laura's overly sensitive nature. Laura can be characterized by her loneliness, sensitivity, trapped feelings, and outcast.
Laura has no gentlemen callers and feels very isolated from the rest of the world in many ways. In her childhood, she walked through school trying to escape the reality of being “ disabled.” Horrified of people and their thoughts of her, she made her way to her classes, “ And everybody was seated before I came in. I had to walk in front of all those people. My seat was in the back row. I had to go clumping all the way up the aisle with everybody watching!”(VII.104). The other characters within the play seem to think of Laura as some kind of rare animal due to her actions and fear of people. Laura removes herself from school when she makes bad grades, “I made bad grades on my final examinations.”(VII.166). She also refuses to properly open the door and makes excuses so she will not have to face Jim when he comes to visit and have dinner, “ I can’t . . .I’m sick . . .Oh, Oh, Oh . . .” (VI.55,56,59). The loneliness Laura has is carried out through the play, especially when she comes to find out that Jim is engaged to another woman and cannot be with her. She goes back to her own little world so that no one can hurt her and she can protect her glass menagerie.
Laura’s physical and emotional sensitivity can be seen throughout the play of The Glass Menagerie. One example ...
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...tepping out of her comfort zone, may seem harmful she can be normal is she really tries.
Despite the fact that Laura has her own problems, she exhibits pure compassion towards others. Laura has the least amount of lines in the play which presents her selflessness. Characters with The Glass Menagerie seem to assume that, like a piece of gossamer glass, which is colorless until light shines upon it, Laura can take on whatever color they would like her to. Other view her as an exotic creature, rather quaintly foreign and secluded to the rest of the society. In the end of the play She is left in her own little unique world with her glass menagerie to be take care of and that she feels accepts her. Laura goes back to what is now "normal" for her - the world she has created with her glass menagerie of unique animals.
Works Cited
The Glass Menagerie
Sparknotes
Cliffnotes
Her low self-esteem makes it difficult for Laura to interact in society causing her to be more comfortable living in her imagination. John takes note of his sister diffident personality and tries to make Amanda understand, "[…]in the eyes of others-strangers-she 's terribly shy and lives in a world of her own and those things make her seem a little peculiar to people outside the house"(Williams 47). Being so self conscious about her disability, Laura allowed herself to become distant from the world around her. Laura creates this distance by escaping “[...] into a world of glass and music. Her father 's old phonograph records provide her with escape that the unfamiliar new tunes can 't provide”(). Laura finds comfort in what she is familiar with which is why she flees into her world of imagination and memory. When Laura is unable to deal with real life issues and duties she seeks tranquility in her delicate glass figurines and the remains of her father before he choose to elude the
"The Glass Menagerie" is a play about intense human emotions; frustration, desperation, sadness, anger, shyness, and regret. Perhaps the most intense scene in the play is when a gentleman caller, Jim O'Connor, finally does come. All of their futures hang in the balance during this scene. Laura is actually drawn out of her shyness with someone besides her family, and she actually begins to feel good about herself.
In Tennessee Williams The Glass Menagerie, we are given opportunity to see and understand that even truth can be cloaked by illusion. There are four main characters, we have Tom Wingfield whom is the narrator of the play. By day is a warehouse worker in a shoe factory, often absent minded for he would must rather be focusing on his passion for poetry and writing. By nightfall he often finds refuge from his mother's constant berating in the local movies. Laura Wingfield is Tom's beloved sister. Crippled since childhood from a disease known as plurosis, Laura is also emotionally crippled as an adult, in the sense that she is so incredibly shy attending business school was simply too much for her. To others it is no issue but to her it's all than she can see. Instead of fulfilling her mothers wishes she spends her days carefully attending to her delicate glass animals and listening to her father's record collection.
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.
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 quote written by british novelist Laurence Sterne, “No body, but he who has felt it, can conceive what a plaguing thing it is to have a man’s mind torn asunder by two projects of equal strength, both obstinately pulling in a contrary direction at the same time.” ties to the life of Laura Wingfield. Within the play, The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams, Laura feels her mind being pulled in two directions, both by her family, and herself. Surrounded by a broken family, Laura shapes the play as a symbol of her family's relationship as she begins the play “crippled”- symbolizing a broken home- and heals over the course of the play due to conflicts and self realizations; showing the families final healing, even in an unconventional manner.
Tennessee Williams’ play, The Glass Menagerie, depicts the Wingfield family in a naturalistic viewpoint that highlights the importance of a man in the life of a woman. Without a husband in the play, Amanda’s son Tom is rendered as “the man of the house.” Williams attributes the monetary stability of the Wingfields entirely to Tom. Williams stresses the necessity of a working man through Tom so that women and children can be financially stable. As a naturalist, Tennessee Williams illustrates the characters’ reactions to various events and circumstances in accordance with man’s natural instincts of survival. Williams reveals Amanda in this approach, and he portrays naturalistic tendencies in her personality and character, her relationship with her son, and her connection with her hopeless daughter, Laura. Amanda is trying to survive and raise her children without a husband to support her economically.
The family in Tennessee Williams’ play, The Glass Menagerie, faces various dilemmas. One of the most prominent is the issue of anxiety. Throughout the play, the family focuses their attention mainly on Laura and her struggle with both her physical disability and social anxiety. However, closer analysis reveals that Laura is not the only character suffering, each family member displays signs of being affected by anxiety. Their interactions with one another trigger feelings of nervousness, unhappiness, and anger. The issue of anxiety extends beyond Laura, affecting the whole family, and ultimately leads to tragedy.
A second critic, Joseph K. Davis, takes the stance that Laura's weakness overpowers her ability to be sensitive. Davis divides the dramatic pattern of The Glass Menagerie into two parts. Part of the pattern is "the dramatization of men and women by a display of their fragmented, tortured psychologies" (Davis 192). He states in his analysis of The Glass Menagerie: "His [Tom's] sister Laura tries to live in the present, but her crippled body and grim prospects in the secretarial school overcame her fragile sensibilities" (194). Davis implies that, like Amanda, Laura's weakness consumes her ability to live in reality and her sensibility, her one strength.
Symbolism plays an integral part in Williams’s play, The Glass Menagerie. Examples of the use of symbolism include the fire escape, as an escape from the family, the phonograph, as an escape from reality, the unicorn, as a symbol for Laura's uniqueness and the father’s photograph, representing something different to each character. Through regonition of these symbols, a greater understanding of the play’s theme is achieved.
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.
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 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.
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...