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Shakespeare drama literary analysis
Shakespeare drama literary analysis
Analysis with the conventions of drama
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There are several different ways we can compare ourselves every day. Sometimes we choose to compare ourselves to each other. Looking at the similar and different things about each of us. We always wonder how closely we can relate to each other. Are our situations the same, or is the comparison even close at all? You could easily make the comparison between somebody who stabs you in the back to a snake. While they are two totally different things, they are both sneaky and would bite you if you weren't looking. We can use this same method to find relations to inanimate objects. After reading The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams, we can see a very similar comparison between the glass unicorn and Laura, along with how they both develop as …show more content…
The first time I saw the comparisons between Laura and the glass unicorn is when the story says, "Hold him over the light, he loves the light! You see how the light shines through him?" (7.201-202). This is the part of the play where Williams shows us that like the unicorn, Laura needs to be placed in a position where she can also shine. We can see this because in the moments that she is talking to Jim, Laura has really opened up and left behind the shy girl she has always been. Just because she found her perfect position, or that somebody placed her in the right spot, she can also shine just like the unicorn can when it is placed in the perfect …show more content…
It really shows the reader the deep connection between the two. This can be taken from the play when it reads, "Horn! It doesn't matter. Maybe it's a blessing in disguise" (7.258). This is where Williams shows that the unicorn losing its horn is like it becoming normal, just as Laura feels she has become a normal person because of the influence Jim has given her. When Jim first came Laura was extremely nervous and shy about him being there. After he talked with her and made her feel like an actual person with a meaning in life, she started to feel better about herself and opened up. Just as this is happening the unicorn falls and loses its horn, meaning that now the unicorn will fit in with the other horses on the shelf, just as Laura is fitting in with Jim. That’s why Laura says it’s a blessing in disguise, because just like she had thought that Jim coming over was a bad idea, it actually turned into a great experience. So maybe the unicorn losing its horn, while it may seem horrible at first, could turn out to be a blessing just as her situation turned out to
Laura is the owner and caretaker of the glass menagerie. In her own little fantasy world, playing with the glass animals is how she escapes from the real world in order to get away from the realities and hardships she endures. Though she is crippled only to a very slight degree physically, her mind is very disabled on an emotional level. Over time, she has become very fragile, much like the glass, which shatters easily, as one of the animals lost its horn; she can lose control of herself. Laura is very weak and open to attack, unable to defend herself from the truths of life. The glass menagerie is an unmistakable metaphor in representing Laura’s physical and mental states.
Everybody has something about them that makes them unique, but sometimes they tend to not realize how special they are because of it. In the play, The Glass Menagerie, Laura possesses a collection of glass figurines that symbolize how others see her despite her limp. She has allowed her limp to define who she is, as well as play a major part in the way that she acts around other people. Laura’s limp has restricted her life in certain ways and because of it, she has become a delicate, radiant, and unique individual.
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
In Tennessee William's play, The Glass Menagerie, the character of Laura is like a fragile piece of glass. The play is based around a fragile family and their difficulties coping with life.
how society forced them to change and Laura to lose her status in order to fit
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
really a place for someone like him and his mind rebelled. Lastly you can see
Because the glass menagerie symbolizes more than one feature, its imagery can be considered both consistent and fluctuating. The consistent side of this portrayal is that the menagerie is a constant symbol of Laura’s personality.
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.
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 main symbols in The Glass Menagerie are the glass menageries themselves. Laura, the daughter in the story, collects little glass figurines or animals; these figurines are called menageries. The small, glass, figures represent numerous elements of Laura’s personality. Both Laura and the figurines are fragile, whimsical, and somewhat behind the times. As Anita Gates writes, in her article "When Appearances Aren't What They Seem" Laura “is as delicate as the tiny glass animals she collects” (10). Laura is very fragile and weak in body, mind, and spirit. The menageries are weak also because they are made of glass. Therefore, both the figurines and Laura have to be cared for and treated lightly because of the possible damage that could be done to them if they were not properly taken care of.
In Tennessee Williams' play, The Glass Menagerie, each character attempts to escape the real world by creating their own “reality”. Laura hides from the world by magnifying her illness. Tom convinces himself that his needs supersede the needs of his family. Amanda focuses almost exclusively on the past - when she saw herself as a desirable southern belle. Even Jim focus his hopes on recapturing his good old high school days. Each character transposes their difficult situations into shadows of the truth.
The Fantasy World of The Glass Menagerie In The Glass Menagerie, Tennessee Williams creates a world in which the characters are disillusioned by the present. Amanda, Tom, and Laura achieve this disillusionment by resorting to separate worlds where they can find sanctuary. Each character develops their own world, far away from reality. Amanda frees herself from the harsh realities of life by constantly reminding herself of the past. To begin with, she continuously repeats the story of the "one Sunday afternoon in Blue Mountain" when she received seventeen gentlemen callers (1195).
Laura has a physical handicap with one leg being shorter than the other. With this handicap Laura was picked on and led to having high anxiety and stress. The anxiety and stress led to her not going to business college as stated when Amanda went to Laura’s class and talked to Laura’s teacher. To escape from the stress, Laura has a collection of glass sculptures. This is stated in the scene information of Scene II with “She [Laura] is washing and polishing her collection of glass” (Williams 1251). In Scene III when Tom and Amanda are fighting Tom through his jacket and broke a sculpture “With an outraged groan he [Tom] tears the coat off again, splitting the shoulders of it and hurls it across the room. It strikes against the shelf of Laura’s glass collection, there is a tinkle of shattering glass. Laura cries out as if wounded” (Williams 1257). Laura has one piece in her collection that wasn’t broken till later and means the most to her and that is the unicorn, Laura states this with “I shouldn’t be partial, but he is my favorite one” (Williams 1282). The unicorn represents her because the unicorn is different from a normal horse just like how she is different from other women, she then allows her gentleman caller Jim O’Connor to hold the unicorn and saying “Go on, I trust you with him”
In The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams, the glass figurine of the unicorn plays an inherently important role as a representation of Laura's self esteem. The collection of glass figurines is used by Laura to escape from the dangers of the outside world. The unicorn is the central piece to her collection and is important because it directly symbolizes Laura. The unicorn represents Laura's obsession with her handicap and also represents the uniqueness in her character. As the play develops, the fracture of the unicorn's horn represents a change in Laura's perspective of self and also gives a reason to why she parts with the figurine in the end.