A Dysfunctional Family
Families are supposed to be there for each other and what have you. The families of today are more or less normal, but in the book The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams the Wingfield family is very dysfunctional. What makes this family dysfunctional are the members of it, such as Amanda, Tom, and Laura. Amanda was a very talkative mother.
Amanda Wingfield was how the book called her, “A little woman of great but confused vitality clinging frantically to another time and place.” (p. 5). This is very true on top of that Amanda was loquacious and always bragging about how many gentleman callers she had. By doing this Amanda made her daughter Laura feel bad. An example of such is “One Sunday afternoon in Blue Mountain- your mother received – seventeen - gentleman callers! Why, sometimes there weren’t chairs enough to accommodate them all.” ( i, p. 26). Tom on the other hand took care of his family.
Tom Wingfield was the man of the house because his father had “fallen in love with long distance” and he was caring for the girls. When Amanda gets in the way or tries to make things even more difficult for Tom he decides to go out to the movies or rather drinking. Tom finally flipped at Amanda one day and told her how he felt about her and the warehouse. He said, “You think I’m in love with the Continental Shoemakers? You think I want to spend fifty-five years down there in that – celotex interior! With – fluorescent – tubes! Look! I’d rather somebody picked up a crowbar and battered out my brains – than go back mornings! I go! Every time you come in yelling that Goddamn “Rise and Shine!” “Rise and Shine!” I say to myself “How lucky dead people are!” But I get up. I go!” ( iii, p. 41). Laura can’t really handle all that much.
Laura Wingfield is Amanda’s daughter. She is a very shy girl who does not take a well to meeting new people. Laura’s problem is she has “A childhood illness that has left her crippled, one leg slightly shorter than the other, and held in a brace.” (p. 5). Laura was attending Rubicam’s Business College. Her mother had went to the business college to see how Laura was doing and to her surprise the teacher had told Amanda, Laura was not attending anymore.
In one of Shakespeare’s most masterful pieces, he depicts a tragic love story in which love conquers all…but at what cost? The truth is in this play, love is the victor, but with horrible consequences. Love lives on, love survives, but only at the loss of life. Not only in this play, but in many other Shakespearean works, the constant theme stands that any kind of marriage or deep emotional bond which is solely based on love ends tragically. Othello’s passionate love for Desdemona is the same passion that causes him to end her life. Antony, under the suspicion that Cleopatra has died, tries to commit suicide to only find out soon after that she is alive and in hiding, but all in vain for the fatal wound has already pricked it’s victim. Shakespeare constantly relates love with tragedy, stating that love is in fact fleeting and impermanent. The only way for love to live forever is if it dies young.
Amanda Wingfield is the mother of Tom and Laura. She is a gracefully aging Southern Belle seemingly stuck on the values and traditions of the past that she once flourished so well in. Even though she has been abandoned by her husband and left to care for two children alone, Amanda is ever resiliently optimistic – though her life is not at all what she had planned for it to be. To Tom she is a constant nag and even more of an incentive to chase the dream within his grasp. She is just as dominating with Laura, insisting Laura always be ready and pretty for her “gentleman callers.” Laura knows deep down inside that these callers will never come, but Amanda cannot let go of the idea. She forces Laura to retreat into her world of imagination even further. Jim O'Connor is by the far the most ordinary out of them all. Jim i...
In The Glass Menagerie, Tennessee Williams presents us with four characters whose lives seem to consist in avoiding reality more than facing it. Amanda lives her life through her children and clings to her lost youthfulness. Tom retreats into movie theaters and into his dream of joining the merchant seamen and some day becoming a published poet. Laura resorts to her Victrola and collection of glass ornaments to help sustain her world of fantasy. Finally, Jim is only able to find some relief in his glorified old memories. This essay will examine how Amanda, Tom, Laura and Jim attempt to escape from the real world through their dreams.
The Glass Menagerie is a play written by Tennessee Williams. It involves a mother, Amanda, and her two children, Tom and Laura. They are faced with many problems throughout the play. Some of these problems involve: Amanda, the mother, only wants to see her kids succeed and do well for themselves. How does her drive for success lead the book?
As Winfield 's wife, Amanda is worthy of love and respect. Amanda is a southern lady, when she was young, she had an attractive appearance and graceful in manner, and her families were also quite rich. These favorable conditions made her the admiration of many men. Still, her final choice was a poor boy. She did not hesitate and bravely to choose her own love. Though her marriage was not as good as she had imagined the happiness of life, and the husband, Winfield meager income also drinking heavily, finally abandoned Amanda and two young children, but she still remembered and loved her husband. Her husband 's weakness did not make Amanda fall down; instead, she was brave enough to support the family, raising and educating of their two young children. Daughter Laura was a disability to close her fantasy world, and she was collection of a pile of glass small animals as partners. Amanda knew Laura sensitive, fragile, she was always in the care and encourages her daughter. Because of her shortcomings, Laura sometimes frustrated and Amanda immediately replied that "I 've told you never, never to use that word. Why, you 're not crippled, you just have a little defect". Amanda for the care of the children was more reflected a mother 's strong from the play that Amanda paid money to send Laura to typing school. She hoped daughter have a better future and married a good man to take care of the family, and encouraged her daughter, prompting her to go out of the glass menagerie to experience her real life, but Amanda placed more expectations for his son Tom because her husband left home, Tom is the only man and the mainstay of the family. She wanted Tom to realize that is a kind of family responsibility, also is a kind of essential social
Claim: When making a decision, people are often influenced by the pressure society places on them in order to follow the social norm, or what is socially accepted.
Which is why he is left to help support his sister and mother “Oh I can see the handwriting on the wall as plain as I see the nose in front of my face! It’s terrifying! More and more you remind me of your father! He was out all hours without explanation-Then left! Good-Bye! And me with the bag to hold. I saw that letter you got from the Merchant Marine. I know what you’re dreaming of. I’m not standing here blindfolded. Very well then. Then do it! But not till there’s somebody to take your place.”(Williams 2308) Amanda knows Tom doesn’t want to be there doing the same thing every day. She knows he is unhappy on where he is in life, but her and Laura need him to support them until Laura can get a gentleman caller. Amanda even states in the play that whenever Laura gets a gentleman caller that he can go wherever he wants to go land or sea. (Williams 2309) Tom goes out to the movies to watch different films most nights to help cope with not being able to go on adventures and be free. He lives that life through the actors in the film that get to expierence his dream. “ Yes, movies! Look at them-(A wave toward the marvels of Grand Avenue.) All of those glamorous people-having
As the play develops, the theme that prevails and remains highlighted through the writing is the sense of abandonment, which is a core fear in humans that is intensified as we grow and realize that we lack a lot of things, such as self-esteem and even direction in life. Even though Williams did not experience a complete feeling of abandonment, what he lived was enough to mark his life with the necessary bitterness to expose in his writings. Those significant events that occurred in his life can be recognize also in the play The Glass Menagerie; his father was absent for the majority of his childhood, her sister Rose abandon herself to live in her own world, and his mother abandon him by letting operate on her ill sister. In the play, Tennessee Williams is "Tom" the son that is struggling to support his mother and sister after his father leaves. His form of escape is the...
Even though Shakespeare was written a long time ago, with different scenarios and a different culture, many of the basic life skills are still implied throughout his plays. Kelly Bagdanov published an article on her blog, “Why Teach Shakespeare?”. In the article, one of the things it said was, “The play's raise questions of hate, awe, tenderness, anger, despair, jealousy, contempt, fear, courage, and wonder.” . These feelings are very similar to the ones that human beings feel now when they go through certain scenarios in life. For example in A Midnight Summer's dream, the characters a conflict occurs when one character is love with another but he does not love her back, “And I am sick when I look not on
Reality is hard to face, when everything going on around a person is not in the greatest conditions. The Wingfield family does not live in the greatest conditions. Tom, Amanda and Laura all live in an apartment together. Tom, the main character and narrator of the play, is the brother to Laura and the son to Amanda. Tom is forced to take on the role of the breadwinner of the family because his father left them. This has thrown the entire family off the rails. It has altered the reality in which all of the characters live. In Tennessee Williams’ play, “The Glass Menagerie”, The Wingfield family has difficulty differentiating reality versus non-reality. The world we are living in today relates
Deceiving and irrational, love can be a challenging emotion to endure. It can be difficult to find happiness in love, and on the journey to find that happiness, love can influence one’s thought process. Shakespeare uses specific wording in his play, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, to poke fun while exploring the individual’s quest for love. The desire to find love and a happy ending with a lover is so strong in the foundation of mankind, that people will not accept a life without it. In fact, they would rather give up their attribute of rationality than their opportunity to find a significant other. The heart’s control of the mind can make a foolish man.
The following study is closely related to Milgram’s Experiments and the Stanford Prison. The subsequent experiments tried to show how perfectly normal human beings can be pressured into unusual behaviors by authority. In decision, the study concluded with two reasons, one would be to fit in with the group which would be normative influence. Furthermore, because they believe the group is better informed than they are (informational influence). Asch Study turned out to go on to help explain why people respond and are influenced despite knowing they are wrong. The following experiment was successful in the sense of providing ones influence on wanting to
Cialdini, R. B., & Goldstein, N. J. (2004). SOCIAL INFLUENCE: Compliance and conformity. Annual Review of Psychology, 55, 591-621. Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com/docview/205845016?accountid=458
Psychology is a social science study that covers diverse subject topics and carries out different forms of research in order to understand the development and function of human beings. A scientific study focuses on people's mind and its functions especially those affecting behavior in a particular context. Psychology is divided into different branches, and each branch addresses its own form of content in relation to mental processes and behavior. Social psychology is one of the psychology branches. This subdiscipline focuses on individuals and their thoughts. Experts in this field of study focus on why an individual acts as well as reacts the way he/she does. It studies the interaction between people, but the focus is on one human being rather than many individuals. Scientists as well as psychologists study it in order to understand how individuals influence and communicate with each other. This research paper seeks to address this branch of psychology in detail by explaining its meaning, the relationship between it and other fields of psychology and the differences as well as the similarities it has with these other fields. Further, the paper will also discuss the diverse research methods that are applicable with social psychology to determine how a person affects groups of people and how these groups affect an individual.
Many Americans are used to getting the products they desire, at any cost. Trade with other countries is a necessity to the US because of the needs of the American people. Some examples of consumption could be wine, diamonds and gems, and vehicles. Another driving force in the global economy is cost of labor. Imagine the amount of money some companies would have to pay American workers to do the same work as some third world countries. Offshoring has become a big factor in the global economy. Many companies have opened customer service centers in different countries due to the savings. Clothing companies moved their manufacturing plants to other countries due to the cost of labor. Major stores in the US, for example, Wal-Mart, brings in most of their product from other countries to save money and pass that savings onto the consumer. Capitalism in the US has recently helped the global economy, the benefits of the Americans in the world’s marketplace is seen the return of money to the rest of the