A Comparison of Tennessee Williams´ The Glass Menagerie and Arthur Miller´s Death of a Salesman

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The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams and Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller are two of the twentieth century’s best-known plays. The differences and similarities between both of the plays are hidden in their historical and social contexts. The characters of The Glass Menagerie and the Death of a Salesman are trapped by the constraints of their everyday lives, unable to communicate with their loved ones and being fearful for their future. There are a lot of comparisons that exist, especially between the settings, symbolism and characterization drawn between the two plays. The contrast comes form the ways that the characters choose to deal or not with the harsh circumstances of life.
The Glass Menagerie is a deeply autobiographical play with the characters lightly disguised representations of Williams’ family. Tom is the playwright, Laura is his sister Rose, and Amanda is his mother, Edwina. His regularly absent father is also there as Tom’s father. The play is set in the Great Depression of the Thirties when jobs were few and family wealth disappeared very fast. When the play was first staged in 1944, America was going through the many of the difficulties of the Second World War. In Arthur Miller’s Death Of A Salesman, the center of the tragic is conflicting within a dysfunctional family. It is also an accusation of what can be called the American national values, especially the ones that existed in the years after the Second World War. Miller was very critical of the myth of capitalist materialism that was widely spread as the only way to be prosperous. Material possessions were associated with happiness. Success was measured in terms of automobiles and money.
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...tery is a betrayal towards the whole family and at the end he is the one that is left abandoned. It seems that Wingfiled family has a stronger bond and their social and economical difficulties are not big enough to separate the family, while the Loman’s family is not that strong to surrender under the pressure of the grasp economical circumstances.
Overall, these two plays and the characters that tell the stories, we see how two playwrights in the same genre at the same time period can have such differing styles of telling the story of a tragic American family. And while these characters are presented in different ways, it does not make either wrong. It just means that these two playwrights have had different experiences in their pursuit of their dreams. The Glass Menagerie and Death of a Salesman are two of the best know American plays of all times.

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