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Symbolism contributing to the characterization in the glass menagerie
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The glass menagerie research paper
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When encountering uncomfortable or undesirable situations, many people escape either physically or mentally. One of the most important themes within The Glass Menagerie, a classic play written by Tennessee Williams, is the difficulty the characters have facing and accepting reality. The play begins inside the Wingfield tenement apartment, where Amanda lives with her two children, Laura and Tom. The American drama takes place during the Great Depression, a time when families barely scraped by. The family’s lives are not without struggle, and everyone is forced to make sacrifices. Amanda wants Laura to to enroll in a typing class, grooming her for a future job. Tom is reluctantly employed at a warehouse, which halts his dream to become a writer. …show more content…
A disability she was born with is the root of her low self-esteem. While she was growing up, Laura wore a brace on her leg, which embarrassed her. In high school and the present, Laura escapes from reality and enters into a fantasy world. Throughout the play, it is clear Laura does not think or concern herself with the future. When her mother, Amanda, enrolls her in typing class, Laura drops out on the very first day. After that, Laura is so frightened that she does not tell Amanda and pretends to go to class every morning. Instead, Laura goes to the park or zoo, just like a young girl. When Amanda discovers Laura has dropped out of class, she is enraged: “Oh! I feel so weak I could barely keep on my feet! I had to sit down while they got me a glass of water! Fifty dollars tuition, all of our plans -- my hopes and ambitions for you -- just gone up the spout, just gone up the spout like that. [Laura draws a long breath and gets awkwardly to her feet. She crosses to the Victrola and winds it up.]” (Williams 14). After Amanda yells at Laura for dropping out of school and lying to her for weeks, Laura winds up the Victrola. She mentally escapes from the uncomfortable conversation by listening to music. Later on in the argument over Laura’s decision to drop out of school, Amanda asks Laura what she plans to do now that she will not get a job: “So what are we going to do for the rest of our lives? Stay home and watch the …show more content…
In order to deal with the pressure to find a job, Laura escapes to a fantasy world. While working at the warehouse, Tom escapes though his trips to the movies and bars to watch other people’s adventures. And in the end, Tom stops making sacrifices for his family and escapes from them entirely to have his own adventures. Yet those adventures do not quite satisfy him as in Naoimu Shihab Nye’s poem, “Burning the Old Year,” it is “only the things I didn’t do” that “crackle after the blazing dies” (Nye, 13-15). Tom, years after leaving home, mourns, “Oh, Laura, Laura, I tried to leave you behind me, but I am more faithful than intended to be! I reach for a cigarette, I cross the street, I run into the movies or a bar, I buy a drink, I speak to the nearest stranger -- anything that can blow your candles out!” (Williams, 97). Many years and many miles later, Tom is still ducking into bars and movie theaters to escape reality. This time, though, he is not trying to escape the reality of what he is doing with his life, but of what he is not doing. He cannot escape the guilt of having deserted the sister who needs
Laura Brown is a fragile middleclass housewife and mother in 1951. She lives a miserable life trying to play the model suburban housewife. Throughout The Hours, Laura is reading Mrs. Dalloway, which is Virginia's novel. Her obvious mental illness doesn't allow her to always connect and understand her environment. Situations that seem simple to the average person, such as making a cake, are beyond difficu...
She is a shy, quiet girl who keeps herself at a distance. She loves glass figurines and prides herself on them. To her brother, she is seen as crippled because she cannot walk well and is socially awkward. This results in Laura’s reality being different than the rest of the family’s because she closes herself off into a space where it is only her. Amanda wants the best for Laura, for her to have a husband or finish business school, because she wants Laura to get out of the house and get living. However, Laura does not want to live in that world, and it is shown when she skipped her business classes and through her interaction with Jim, her high school crush. Jim is the only person who is able to take Laura out of her own weird reality, and bring her into the reality of an ordinary girl. Laura breaks through her reality when she talks about the unicorn horn that Jim broke off her glass figurine, she tells Jim that, “It doesn’t matter. . . . [smiling] I’ll just imagine he had an operation. The horn was removed to make him feel less—freakish!” (Williams, 2009). Therefore, Laura being with Jim makes her feel a little less odd. This brings Laura out of her own reality for a bit, but then she retreats back into it when she finds out that Jim is engaged to someone else right after he kisses her. He broke her free of her own reality for a bit, just like how he broke the horn off of the
Laura's mother and brother shared some of her fragile tendencies. Amanda, Laura's mother, continually lives in the past. Her reflection of her teenage years continually haunts Laura. To the point where she forces her to see a "Gentleman Caller" it is then that Tom reminds his mother not to "expect to much of Laura" she is unlike other girls. But Laura's mother has not allowed herself nor the rest of the family to see Laura as different from other girls. Amanda continually lives in the past when she was young a pretty and lived on the plantation. Laura must feel she can never live up to her mothers expectations. Her mother continually reminds her of her differences throughout the play.
Additionally, a young man appears in Laura’s life that sings outside her bedroom window, writes poems to her, and follows her around town to demonstrate his passionate love for her. Porter states, “She tells herself that thro...
It is said in the character description that Laura “[has] failed to establish contact with reality” (Glass 83). This illustrates how Laura is childlike and naive, in that, Williams literally says that she has not established contact with reality. Laura is naive because she refuses to face life and all that comes with it, she is also childlike because she has sheltered herself and is unaware of her surroundings much as a child would be. Early on in the play the reader discovers that Laura had affections towards Jim when they were in high school. This, of course, will prove to be part of Jim’s easy manipulation of Laura. Shortly after this discovery, Laura’s gentleman caller, Jim, is invited over for dinner with the family. After having completed their evening meal, Laura and Jim go to another room and being
how society forced them to change and Laura to lose her status in order to fit
The family is starting to rely on Tom for most things, he is driving most of the way and helping people they meet and participating in all the things the family does. Tom has driven them to another destination.
When he asks what she gives it to him for, she replies, “A—souvenir.” Then she hands it to him, almost as if to show him that he had shattered her unique beauty. This incident changed her in the way that a piece of her innocence that made her so different is now gone. She is still beautiful and fragile like the menagerie, but just as she gives a piece of her collection to Jim, she also gives him a piece of her heart that she would never be able to regain. Laura and her menagerie are both at risk of being crushed when exposed to the uncaring reality of the world.
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.
Amanda was a woman who lives in a world of fantasy and reality. In the past memory and the future of the fantasy made Amanda very strong, but in the face of reality she was fragile. Just like Tom used to explain “I give you truth in the
Tom escaped from the fantasy world of Amanda and Laura by hanging out on the fire escape, even though he could never fully escape. Unfortunately for Tom, his life was cramped like the coffin and he was slowly suffocating emotionally and spiritually. Unhappy with the lifestyle he followed in the footsteps of his father, he searched for adventure, escaping the nagging of Amanda.
Jim is very self-assured and attempts to help Laura with her problems of self-esteem and shyness. Laura seems to be responding to his efforts of help when he unexpectedly announces his engagement to be married. Of course, this brings an end to the well-planned evening. At this point, there seems to be a wake-up call for these characters. A...
...e. As time goes on Tom finds it harder and harder to deal with the responsibilities of taking care of his family and the home. He decides to leave his job and his family for the merchant marines. He believes he will find the adventure he’s always been looking for. Instead of being free like he thought he would be, Tom is trapped by the memories of his sister. He says “I tried to leave you behind me, but I am more faithful than I intended to be!
Furthermore, she keeps a "larger-than- life-size" photograph of her husband over the mantel who left the family when the children were young. When Jim came over for dinner, Amanda wears the "girlish frock of yellowed voile with a blue silk sash" that she wore on the day she met her husband (1222). Amanda obsesses with the past, and at the same time damaging the children psychologically. Constant allusions to the past have psychologically affected Tom and Laura, trapping them into Amanda$BCT(J lost world.
One of the ways she center around herself is by consistently reminiscing on her younger days. Often throughout the play she reminds Tom and Laura of the beautiful woman she was. A perfect example is when Amanda says "One Sunday afternoon in Blue Mountain - your mother received seventeen gentlemen