Glass Menagerie

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?The Glass Menagerie?

In the ?The Glass Menagerie?, two themes are used so that the characters

can deal with their painful facts of life. ?Illusion? and ?Escape? are the two themes which

all the characters use. Tom Wingfield uses both of these themes to try and live a good

happy life. Tom is capable of maintaining a life outside of his home, at his job, and

going out of town. Tom is not a business man, he prefers more of a literature and

reading environment to sustain his fantasies. Amanda Wingfield is another character that

uses illusion and escape to deal with the painful facts of life also.

The Wingfields are distinguished and tied together by their similarly weak

relationships to reality. However, the illusions to which they concede are not exclusively a

characteristic of theirs. The outside world is just as open to illusion. Tom also finds

illusion in the movies he watches, Tom think?s that other viewers at the movies he

attends are substituting on-screen adventure for real-life adventure, which fullfils his

illusion rather than real life. Amanda's relationship to illusion is the most complicated in

the play. Unlike her children, she is partial into the real world values and longs for social

and financial success. Yet her attachment to these values is exactly what prevents her from

perceiving a number of truths about her life. Amanda's retreat into illusion is in many

ways more pathetic than her children's, because it is not a willful constructive imagination,

but instead a wistful distortion of reality.

Tom shows ?escape? because of not having a father, In the beginning of

the movie, The Merchant Marine Service and the fire escape outside the apartment, haunts

Tom. The play takes an unclear attitude toward the moral implications and even the

effectiveness of Tom's escape. As an able bodied young man, he is locked into his life not

by outside factors but by emotional ones. By his loyalty to and maybe even love for Laura

and Amanda. Escape for Tom means the restrain and denial of these emotions in himself,

and it means doing great harm to his mother and sister.

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