Hopelessness, Futility and Escape in The Glass Menagerie
The Glass Menagerie is set in the cramped, dinghy apartment of the Wingfield family. It is just one of many such apartments in this lower-class neighborhood. Not one of the Wingfield family members desires to live this apartment. Poverty is what traps them in their humble abode. The escape from this lifestyle, this apartment and these relationships is a significant theme throughout the play. These escapes may be related to the fire escape, the dance hall, the absent Mr. Wingfield and Tom's inevitable departure.
The play opens with Tom addressing the audience from the fire escape. This entrance into the apartment provides a different purpose for each of the characters. Overall, it is a symbol of the passage from freedom to being trapped in a life of desperation. The fire escape allows Tom the opportunity to get out of the apartment and away from his nagging mother. Amanda sees the fire escape as an opportunity for gentleman callers to enter their lives. Laura's view is different from her mother and her brother. Her escape seems to be hiding inside the apartment, not out. The fire escape separates reality and the unknown.
Across the street from the Wingfield apartment is the Paradise Dance Hall. Just the name of the place is a total anomaly in the story. Life with the Wingfields is as far from paradise as it could possibly be. Laura appears to find solace in playing the same records over and over again, day after day. Perhaps the music floating up to the apartment from the dance hall is supposed to be her escape which she just can't take. The music from the dance hall often provides the background music for certain scenes, The Glass Menagerie playing quite frequently. With war ever-present in the background, the dance hall is the last chance for paradise.
Mr. Wingfield, the absent father of Tom and Laura and husband to the shrewish Amanda, is referred to often throughout the story. He is the ultimate symbol of escape. This is because he has managed to remove himself from the desperate situation that the rest of his family are still living in. His picture is featured prominently on the wall as a constant reminder of better times and days gone by. Amanda always makes disparaging remarks about her missing husband, yet lets his picture remain.
Until she was old enough to walk, she spent most of her time in a cradleboard made of willow branches. In her tribe if a child was not quiet enough they would often get its noise pinched; this was because crying or giggling could give them away to enemies or even bears.
One problem facing pandas is their seeming difficulty in mating successfully. Females have a low frequency of ovulation (once a year in the spring) and the males demonstrate an infamous apathy toward females in heat ((2)). When mating is successful, the female giant panda will give birth, after 96 to 160 days, to a cub that is one-nine hundredth the size of her ((1)). Cubs open their eyes after six to eight weeks, nurse for about nine months, and stay with their mothers for up to three years before venturing out on their own ((1)).
...re not alone. Mitchell said our destiny and we might as well get started with it; we should become a part of the planetary community. We should be ready to reach out beyond our planet and beyond our solar system to find out what is really going on out there (Mitchell).
Every time the family comes to a confrontation someone retreats to the past and reflects on life as it was back then, not dealing with life as it is for them today. Tom, assuming the macho role of the man of the house, babies and shelters Laura from the outside world. His mother reminds him that he is to feel a responsibility for his sister. He carries this burden throughout the play. His mother knows if it were not for his sisters needs he would have been long gone. Laura must pickup on some of this, she is so sensitive she must sense Toms feeling of being trapped. Tom dreams of going away to learn of the world, Laura is aware of this and she is frightened of what may become of them if he were to leave.
Clyde Barrow was a trouble maker from an early age. His life in the nineteen twenties consisted of cracking safes, robbing stores, and stealing cars. It was not long after that when he met an innocent waitress, Bonnie Parker, at a mutual friend’s house. Their attraction was instantaneous (20th Century History.) They began robbing together, along with their gang whose membership was constantly changing. Together they would be nearly unstoppable. When Clyde would be put in jail, Bonnie was right there to aid him in escaping. This was the very beginning of the dynamic duo.
During the 1930s many families were encouraged to move into the Southern plains and begin farming. This push for more farming and even new methods of farming came from the government’s efforts to get past the depression, produce more crops, and boost the economy. Farming would help these families...
Narcolepsy is a neurological disorder that is chronic. It affects the portion of the brain that helps regulate sleep. More commonly triggered by emotions such as sadness, frustration and even surprised. Even laughter can trigger a narcoleptic to fall out sleep.
Throughout the history of the United States, never before was there a longer period of dust storms to occur as The Dust Bowl, most commonly known as “the dirty thirties.” The Dust Bowl affected farmers in parts of the United States and Canada, but it was most commonly found in the Southwest/Midwest. Unlike other severe catastrophes which caused damage to ones ecology and agriculture, “Georg Borgstrom, has ranked the creation of the Dust Bowl as one of the three worst ecological blunders in history” (Worster 4) due to the fact it only took fifty years to accomplish. Many living in the Southern plains during this time of period struggled to maintain a living, “The bank, the fifty-thousand-acre owner can’t be responsible. You’re on land that isn’t yours. Once over the line maybe you can pick cotton in the fall. Maybe you can go on relief. Why don’t you go to California? There’s work there, and it never gets cold” (Steinbeck 23). The greed within the farmers during the 18th century unfortunately led to the Dust Bowl because they were too focussed on obtaining available rich acres to expand their industry and business for money. Ultimately, this led to the occurrence of “Black Sunday,” the migration of farmers fleeing to the Western parts of America, and the economic factors of those affected by the Dust Bowl.
...ations and behavioral patterns of the giant panda can lead to more information into areas such as how their metabolism works and also strategies female pandas use while pregnant.
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.
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.
Since it rained a lot of the Northwest Coast, clothing was more important for blocking the rain than for keeping them warm. They wore capes and spruce hats as protection against the rain.
In Tennessee Williams' play, The Glass Menagerie, each character attempts to escape the real world by creating their own “reality”. Laura hides from the world by magnifying her illness. Tom convinces himself that his needs supersede the needs of his family. Amanda focuses almost exclusively on the past - when she saw herself as a desirable southern belle. Even Jim focus his hopes on recapturing his good old high school days. Each character transposes their difficult situations into shadows of the truth.
My project question is: has human development disabled the power of genetic mutations and natural selection or enhanced it? My aim is to understand the importance of natural selection and the impact that human development has had on it. According to The Concise Oxford Dictionary(p 334), human development is defined as the process of enlarging people’s freedom and opportunities and overall well being through various resources. I will research the effect that the progression of humans, in terms of their developments, has had on the abnormalities that have come to occur. I chose to do this topic because only in the last 5 to 10 thousand years of humans existence on the planet earth has a distinct difference in the DNA structure of the human begun to arise. These differences are of recent occurrence. A population explosion was intense up until two decades ago (Paul and Anne Ehrlich,1989) and it is a great interest of mine to understand what influence it had on the mutations that have come to occur. I aim to have a better understanding of whether the majority of the mutations that are occurring are beneficial and therefore encouraging the human races survival or harmful and therefore causing its demise.
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...