Symbols in The Glass Menagerie
In the play, The Glass Menagerie, by Tennessee Williams, Williams uses many symbols which represent many different things. Many of the symbols used in the play try to symbolize some form of escape or difference between reality and illusion. The first symbol, presented in the first scene, is the fire escape. This represents the "bridge" between the illusory world of the Wingfields and the world of reality. This "bridge" seems to be a one way excursion. But the direction varies for each character. For Tom, the fire escape is the way out of the world of Amanda and Laura and an entrance into a world of new dimensions. For Laura, the fire escape is a way into her own world. A way to escape from reality. Amanda perceives the fire escape as a way for gentlemen callers to enter their lives. She is also trying to escape her own vacant life. Our author, Tennessee Williams utilizes the fire escape as a literal exit from his own reality as well. His way of escaping is through the play. In Tom's opening speech, he says, "I give you truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion." This quote refers to Williams' own life told through the play. Everyone in the play seeks haven from their lives, attempting to escape into an imaginary fallacy world. In "The Glass Menagerie," Williams' fire escape portrays each of the character's need to use the fire escape as a literal exit from their own reality.
The Glass Menagerie is set in the apartment of the Wingfield family. By description, it is a cramped place located in the city of St. Louis. It is one of many apartments in the neighborhood. Of the Wingfield family members, none like living in the apartment. The only reason that traps them in their submissive dwelling is poverty. The concept of escaping their own lives and retreating into an illusion world has entered each of the character's minds. Escaping from this lifestyle, this apartment, and these relationships is a significant theme throughout the play. These escapes are linked with the symbolic "fire escape" as well as the absent Mr. Wingfield.
Mr. Wingfield left his family for a life on the road. "He worked for the telephone company and fell in love with long distances." This action left Tom with all of the responsibilities in the family including taking care of his half-mad, overbearing mother, Amanda and a disabled sister, Laura.
Although the glass menagerie is meant as a direct metaphor for Laura, it also serves as a metaphor to the other characters in the play through various means. They are all interconnected in some way, depending on each other, and when things don’t turn out right, everything begins to fall into a downward spiral, with little or no hope for improvement.
Joy, M. (2012). Your Mob - Aboriginal Nursing. [video online] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=phz7DwQ80w8 [Accessed: 14 Apr 2014].
Imagine the sun bursting through the trees for the first time of the new day, the smell of freshly cut grass still potent to your nose as you tee the ball up for a round of golf in the cool mist of a spring morning. "That is what brings you back every time, the smell of the air, the coolness of the whether and the beautiful surroundings that make every shot enjoyable." (Suess, PI) This is the game of golf in its finest and most exquisite time to many people and many people it has touched in its long history. Golf is a lifestyle and not just games to people that are avid in playing. The game of golf has a history that is rich in technological advances and personal accomplishments, which through time has shown to shape the sport into what it has become today.
The Glass Menagerie is an eposidic play written by Tennesse Williams reflecting the economic status and desperation of the American people in the 30s.He portrays three different characters going through these hardships of the real world,and choosing different ways to escape it.Amanada,the mother,escapes to the memories of the youth;Tom watches the movies to provide him with the adventure he lacks in his life;and laura runs to her glass menagerie.
Tennessee Williams’ play, “The Glass Menagerie”, depicts the life of an odd yet intriguing character: Laura. Because she is affected by a slight disability in her leg, she lacks the confidence as well as the desire to socialize with people outside her family. Refusing to be constrained to reality, she often escapes to her own world, which consists of her records and collection of glass animals. This glass menagerie holds a great deal of significance throughout the play (as the title implies) and is representative of several different aspects of Laura’s personality. Because the glass menagerie symbolizes more than one feature, its imagery can be considered both consistent and fluctuating.
Generally when some one writes a play they try to elude some deeper meaning or insight in it. Meaning about one's self or about life as a whole. Tennessee Williams' "The Glass Menagerie" is no exception the insight Williams portrays is about himself. Being that this play establishes itself as a memory play Williams is giving the audience a look at his own life, but being that the play is memory some things are exaggerated and these exaggerations describe the extremity of how Williams felt during these moments (Kirszner and Mandell 1807). The play centers itself on three characters. These three characters are: Amanda Wingfield, the mother and a women of a great confusing nature; Laura Wingfield, one who is slightly crippled and lets that make her extremely self conscious; and Tom Wingfield, one who feels trapped and is looking for a way out (Kirszner and Mandell 1805-06). Williams' characters are all lost in a dreamy state of illusion or escape wishing for something that they don't have. As the play goes from start to finish, as the events take place and the play progresses each of the characters undergoes a process, a change, or better yet a transition. At the beginning of each characters role they are all in a state of mind which causes them to slightly confuse what is real with what is not, by failing to realize or refusing to see what is illusioned truth and what is whole truth. By the end of the play each character moves out of this state of dreamy not quite factual reality, and is better able to see and face facts as to the way things are, however not all the characters have completely emerged from illusion, but all have moved from the world of dreams to truth by a whole or lesser degree.
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.
Major media companies such as MTV, BET, Power 106, and Hot97, who specialize on the hip-hop culture also, play a role in influencing the minds of the fans and using hip-hop as a means of enhancing criminal stereotypes of the black male in America. These media channels focus on playing music that has violent content, vulgar lyrics, and obscene images (Hampton, Gullotta, & Ramos, 2006). This helps the media channels to attract more fans and make more profits from hip-hop at the expense of facilitating development of crime and disrespect towards women.
The Glass Menagerie reflects Williams's own life so much that it could be mistaken as pages from his autobiography. The characters and situations of the play are much like those found in the small St. Louis apartment where Williams spent part of his life. Williams himself can be seen in the character Tom. Both worked in a shoe factory and wrote poetry to escape the depressing reality of their lives, and both eventually ended up leaving. One not so obvious character is Mr. Wingfield, who is the absent father seen only by the looming picture hanging in the Wingfield's apartment. Tom and Williams both had fathers who were, as Tom says, "in love with long distances." Amanda, an overbearing mother who cannot let go of her youth in the Mississippi Delta and her "seventeen gentleman callers" is much like Williams own mother, Edwina. Both Amanda and Edwina were not sensitive to their children's feelings. In their attempts to push their children to a better future, they pushed them away. The model for Laura was Williams' introverted sister, Rose. According to Contemporary Authors "the memory of Rose appears in some character, situation, symbol, or motif in almost every work after 1938." Edwina, like Amanda, tried to find a gentleman caller for Rose. Both situations ended with a touching confrontation with the caller and an eventual heartbreak
Tennessee Williams employs the use of symbolism in The Glass Menagerie. Among the many symbols within the play is the fire escape. In the context of The Glass Menagerie, the fire escape represents an escape from the dysfunction of the Wingfield family. It is used as a door to the outside world, an escape, and it is integral to the plot of the story. Tom views the fire escape as a way out, it reminds him of the decision that he needs to make - should he stay and be miserable or leave and be happy, but abandon his sister?
If we take a look at the different symbols used throughout the play, I think that the most important one when it comes to escape is the fire escape. It is in the center from the very beginning, when Tom makes his opening addressing to the audience from it. To understand the role of the fire escape one has to see that it serves a different purpose for each of the characters. In general we can say that it represents the borderline between freedom and imprisonment. Apart from this, the different characters see it in different ways. For Tom, the fire escape is an opportunity to get away from the apartment and his nagging mother. For Amanda, on the other hand, it's a door through which gentleman callers for Laura can come into their apartment / into their world. For Laura, even though she's been outside, it's the border between the safe and the dangerous, between the known and the unknown.
Wiliam’s use of symbolism in The Glass Menagerie adds a lot of meaning to the play. The fire escape has important meanings for each of the characters. For Tom, the fire escape is the way out of the world of Amanda and Laura, and an entrance into a world of adventure. For Amanda, the fire escape is perceived as a way for gentlemen callers to enter their lives. She is also trying to escape her own vacant life. And for Laura, the fire escape is a way into her own world where nobody else can invade. The fire escape portrays the escape from reality into a world of illusion for each character.
The difference in the two sports that the athletes played (basketball and golf) is quite a big one. In basketball, the object of the game is if you are on offense you want to put the ball into the round hoop while you are being guarded by opposing players and you have a boundary you have to stay in. If you are on defense, you want to prevent the offense from scoring into the hoop and if a shot is made, you throw the ball from out of bounds and then you are on offense. In golf, you are not on a team you are playing for your own
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...