The Glass Menagerie is a tale of a family caught up in their own deep struggles and sometimes selfish dreams. Throughout this memory play, the Wingfield’s struggles and conflicts lie deep within themselves, but also with each other. Laura and Tom each have profound conflicts with their mother, Amanda. What Laura wants for herself is completely different from what Amanda wants for her, as it is with Tom and Amanda. Laura’s quiet, timid life with her glass figurines greatly differs from the vivacious, successful, gentlemen- seeking life that Amanda wishes her to pursue. And Tom wants to escape the stifling home he inhabits with his mother and sister, and become lost in literature, movies, liquor, and adventure, and just get away, like his father did. But Amanda wants Tom to become a thriving businessman, and simply escape the shoe factory that employs him. These conflicts complicate the relationships that the characters hold with each other, and the world. The conflicts that divide Laura and Amanda, and Amanda and Tom, not only obscure their ties with each other, but ultimately weaken their grasp on reality.
Throughout the play, Tom and Amanda continually feud. Tom is working-class citizen employed in a shoe factory. Usually, he seems fine with this, but always seems to be sneaking off to write poems, to the point that he gets fired for writing one on a shoebox lid. And when this lifestyle doesn’t please him, he loses himself in literature, such as D.H. Lawrence. And then even further loses himself in alcohol or his frequent trips to the movies. He’s caught between staying at the shoe factory and supporting and attempting to please his family, and going off on his own, like his father. Amanda, on the other hand, wants Tom to be a...
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As it was obvious, the conflicts with Laura, Tom, and their mother, greatly drove them apart, both from each other and from reality. Had they been able to accept each other, and themselves, each would have had a greater grasp on the reality of the world around them. Instead, they chose to accept the reality of life and themselves, and dove deeper into their fantasy worlds they had created for themselves. Their inability to accept each other and reality continued to drive them apart, to the point that Tom left, and Laura would forever be entrenched in her glass world. Had they taken a look at the world around them and accepted themselves, each other, and the world, they could have attempted to grasp at the harsh realities of the real world, instead of turning the other way, and grasping at their own fantasies, far from the realms of reality.
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.
Jim points out how Tom could be an enhanced person numerous times during the final scenes, including when he tells Tom that he will be fired if he doesn’t start working harder at work (935). Tom responds by saying that he doesn’t plan on working in the warehouse for long, as he plans to leave his family to be a merchant sailor. This illustrates Tom’s character and his tendency to follow unrealistic desires before addressing his responsibilities. He wants to be analogous to his father who abandoned their family. Furthermore, Tom refuses to move past his ways to accept the responsibility of his family to aid them. Amanda, shows a similar trait when she continually brings up her past life by attracting suitors. Moreover, Amanda remains stuck in her past glories and remains unable to move forward and support her children attain self-sustainability and
In Williams, Tennessee’s play The Glass Menagerie, Amanda’s image of the southern lady is a very impressive. Facing the cruel reality, she depends on ever memories of the past as a powerful spiritual to look forward to the future, although her glory and beautiful time had become the past, she was the victim of the social change and the Great Depression, but she was a faithful of wife and a great mother’s image cannot be denied.
Tennessee Williams employs the uses of plot, symbolism, and dialogue to portray his theme of impossible true escape, which asserts itself in his play, The Glass Menagerie. Each of his characters fills in the plot by providing emotional tension and a deep, inherent desire to escape. Symbolism entraps meaning into tangible objects that the reader can visualize and attach significance to. Conclusively, Williams develops his characters and plot tensions through rich dialogue. Through brilliant construction and execution of literary techniques, Williams brings to life colorful characters in his precise, poignant on-stage drama.
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
On April 12th, 2014, Syracuse Stage presented the play The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams. The play was directed by Timothy Bond, and turned out to be an interesting production. The Glass Menagerie is a memory play that is set in St. Louis in 1937. Its action is taken from the memories of the narrator, Tom Wingfield. Tom who has a dream of being a poet works in a shoe warehouse to support his mother, Amanda, and sister, Laura. Their father, Mr. Wingfield ran off years ago. They had not heard from him except for in one postcard, they said he fell in love with long distance. Their mother Amanda, who genuinely wants the best for her children, pressures them with her uncontrollable desires for them. She is disappointed that Laura, who is crippled and is painfully shy, does not attract any gentlemen callers. She is even more disappointed to see that her son is following in his father’s footsteps.
Tennessee Williams’ play, The Glass Menagerie, depicts the Wingfield family in a naturalistic viewpoint that highlights the importance of a man in the life of a woman. Without a husband in the play, Amanda’s son Tom is rendered as “the man of the house.” Williams attributes the monetary stability of the Wingfields entirely to Tom. Williams stresses the necessity of a working man through Tom so that women and children can be financially stable. As a naturalist, Tennessee Williams illustrates the characters’ reactions to various events and circumstances in accordance with man’s natural instincts of survival. Williams reveals Amanda in this approach, and he portrays naturalistic tendencies in her personality and character, her relationship with her son, and her connection with her hopeless daughter, Laura. Amanda is trying to survive and raise her children without a husband to support her economically.
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross describes people, specifically the Wingfield family, as “stained - glass windows. They sparkle and shine when the sun is out, but when the darkness sets in, their true beauty is revealed only if there is a light from within.” Through the play, Laura Wingfield’s beauty is masked by her crippled appearance and glass figurines. However, Amanda Wingfield’s beauty is hidden by her nostalgic controlling past. Amanda’s son and Laura’s brother, Tom, has his glowing dreams and future crushed by the regret of abandonment. Throughout the play, The Glass Menagerie, by Tennessee Williams, the reader is tested and persuaded by the three main characters to be the protagonist of the 1945 play. To begin, the audience may feel Amanda Wingfield, mother of Tom and Laura Winfield, is the protagonist because of her developed personality. Whereas, critics would consider Tom as the central character because he is the play’s narrator. Finally, the reader may consider Laura as the focus because of her capacity to change through the play. In essence, depending on interpretations, any of these three characters are possible protagonists.
Because of him working in the warehouse and having to put his dreams on hold, it seems to make him bitter and rude to his mother. His mother puts a lot of pressure on him with working and making the money to pay the bills. Also his mother is always getting mad when he goes out. In the play Tom snaps at his mother one night after she’s nags him about going out, some of the stuff he said wasn’t necessary, but we all say things we don’t mean when we are upset. His mother does work by trying to sell magazines, but during this time period the Great Depression was going on so it was hard on everyone with money.
During a reality television show, there are cameras everywhere filming what is going on in real time. This relates to Tom’s narration because it is unfolding as the play goes on. Tom’s other role of being in the play, is like when the reality television stars go into the confession booth and tell the camera how they felt about something that has previously happened that day. So, there is the reality of what is actually going on and being seen through the camera with an unbiased eye, and then there is a point of view from one of the reality stars who share what was going on from their
The Glass Menagerie is a play written by Tennessee Williams in 1945. The play takes place in the Wingfield’s apartment in St. Louis. Tom is the protagonist in the play and he stays at home with his mother Amanda and his sister Laura. Tom’s Father left the family when he was younger leaving him as the man of the house. His mother Amanda expects him to do everything a man would do. This included working, paying bills, and taking care of herself and Laura. Laura is disabled and she doesn’t work therefore Tom is left providing for his whole family. Being abandoned by Mr. Wingfield left the family distraught. No one seemed to be able to cope with the fact that he was gone even though he left many years ago. Amanda is constantly treating Tom like a child. She tells him how to eat, when to eat, and what he should and should not wear. Tom eventually gets fed up with everything. He can’t stand his factory job, the responsibility of being the man or being treated like a child by his mother. Tom decides to follow in his father’s footsteps and leave the family. It seems as if Tom thinks that running away from his problems will make them go away but things didn’t turn out that way. Although the play was written many years ago, young adults in this day and age can relate to Tom and his actions. The main theme in the play is escape. All of the character use escape in some way. Laura runs to her glass menagerie or phonographs when she can’t handle a situation, Amanda seems to live in the past, and Tom constantly runs away when things aren’t going his way. Escape is a short term fix for a bigger problem. Running away may seem like the easiest thing to do, but in the end the problem is still there and it may be unforgettable. As time goes on esc...
The main literary element of the play is theme. The theme of “The Glass Menagerie” is the difficulty of accepting reality. Each of the characters have a hard time accepting reality. Tom, Laura, and Amanda each have their own way of escaping reality. Tom provides for his family by working a job that he doesn’t like with long hours in a warehouse. “He is the most realistic character in the play, being on a missionary from a world of reality that we somehow set apart from.” (The Glass Menagerie, page 1176) With the stress of everyday life at home it is slowly pushing Tom over the edge, so he escapes by going to the movies and drinking a lot. Laura sees herself as crippled and fears how others see her. She spends a great amount of time playing with her glass figurines to escape society and everyday life. Amanda the mother reminisces about life before her husband left. She also spends all of her time figuring out how she can get gentleman callers for Laura. She thinks that if Laura can’t go to business college and make something of her future she needs to get married. For each of the characters they have a harsh reality ever since their father/husband left them.
In Tennessee Williams' play, The Glass Menagerie, each member of the Wingfield family has their own fantasy world in which they indulge themselves. Tom escaped temporarily from the fantasy world of Amanda and Laura by hanging out on the fire escape. Suffocating both emotionally and spiritually, Tom eventually sought a more permanent form of escape.
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.
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...