Comparing Amanda Of The Glass Menagerie And The Awakening

Kate Chopin and Tennessee Williams are both well known writers and were able to create memorable characters within their works. One of Chopin's renowned characters is the heroine Edna Pontellier, a woman who tries to break away from the social norms of the nineteenth century. One of Williams' well known characters is Amanda Wingfield a caring mother that is trapped in her past. I will be analyzing Tennessee William's Amanda of The Glass Menagerie and Kate Chopin's Edna of The Awakening and will be comparing and contrasting various elements in their character to prove that even though both women could be seen as pitiable characters, Amanda is more deserving of the title. On first glance, Edna could be seen as a character that deserves sympathy because of her conflicts while Amanda could easily be the most hated character in The Glass Menagerie. Unlike Edna, Amanda gives more qualities of a character deserving of pity. Before judging

Amanda is based off of his mother, Edwina Williams. Amanda and Ms. Williams were caring women and they both were verbose. Throughout The Glass Menagerie, Amanda would have long soliloquies explaining her past and how she was a very wanted woman in her girlhood. According to Signi Falk, Williams' own mother had a "verbal compulsion" (Bloom 103) and that Williams stated that "his mother would be talking a half hour after she's laid to rest" (Bloom 103). Ms. Williams' love for Williams shows when she "spends nine night sleeping with her son to take care of him while he was sick with diphtheria, during this time this illness was a common death for children" (Bloom 15). Another way that Amanda was based off of his mother is the way that she escaped from reality through memories, "she retreated into memories of the happier times of her youth" (Bloom 16). Amanda also escaped reality and her financial problems through her speeches about her