How Actions in The Glass Menagerie Parallel Reality

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Throughout the play, Williams highlights the importance of family dynamics and interaction in regards to shaping an individual, tacitly emphasizing how the characters in The Glass Menagerie are imprisoned by their environment and situation. Williams shows that Amanda’s nostalgic remembrance of her youth, Tom’s need to escape the Wingfield apartment, and Laura’s “inferiority complex” create a schism between reality and the characters’ perceptions of reality. As the characters in the play struggle with personal wants and needs, the family dysfunction further forms an imaginary bubble around the Wingfield apartment, crafting an atmosphere filled with unrequited love, unknown abilities, and unrealized goals. However, Williams is keen to note that the _______ actions of the characters can bring light the harsh realities of the world. In The Glass Menagerie, Williams illustrates the duality of fantasy and reality with the passive and active actions of the characters in an effort to illuminate that it is human nature to live in ignorance but realizes that humanity can only truly experience life after recognizing truth.

Williams molds each of the family members in the play into emotional seclusion, “…inhabit[ing] a private world where the fundamental concern is with self-image,” illustrating the easiness of creating barriers and walls to live (Levy). Evidence of Levy’s analysis can be seen through Amanda’s delusional recollection of her popularity as a youth in the South. Exclaiming that she had “…received—¬seventeen!—gentlemen callers!” and telling countless stories about each caller, Amanda’s continuous tales of her adolescence fosters her perception of Laura (William 1. 1782). In Laura’s search for a gentleman caller, Amanda vi...

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.... 48, No. 4, April-May, 1973, pp. 150-53

Greiff, Louis K. “Fathers, Daughters, and Spiritual Sisters: Marsha Norman’s ‘night, Mother and Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie.” Text and Performance Quarterly 9.3 (July 1989): 224-228. Rpt. In Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. Tom Burns and Jeffrey W. Hunter. Vol 186. Detroit: Gale, 2004. Literature Resource Center. Web. 7 Mar. 2012.

Levy, Eric P. "'Through Soundproof Glass': The Prison of Self-Consciousness in The Glass Menagerie." Modern Drama 36.4 (Dec. 1993): 529-537. Rpt. in Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. Jeffrey W. Hunter and Deborah A. Schmitt. Vol. 111. Detroit: Gale Group, 1999. Literature Resource Center. Web. 20 Feb. 2012.

Williams, Tennessee “The Glass Menagerie” Literature: Reading Fiction, Poetry, and Drama. Ed. Robert DiYanni. 5th ed. New York: McGraw Hill, 2002. 1780-1831. Print.

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