Glass Menagerie Essay

In modern day society, people are expected to conform to the expectations placed on them by the general population. In such a world, it seems as though creating a sense of false reality is the only way individuality succeeds. In the play “The Glass Menagerie”, Tennessee Williams is able to symbolize fragility and uniqueness and an escape both to the outside world and from it through different characters.

I believe that this play revolves around the longing to be different to the point where the characters forget themselves. For instance the play starts of by saying “The apartment faces an alley and is entered by a fire escape, a structure whose name is a touch of accidental poetic truth, for all of these large buildings are always burning

Throughout the play Laura has removed herself completely from reality. She is not active in her own life and instead spends all of her time avoiding facing the real world in fear of rejection. Laura, like her glass, is also very beautiful if looked at the right way. For example, when Jim sees Laura, he doesn't just see a broken, insecure cripple; he also sees a beautiful and different woman with lots to offer the world. Laura draws an attachment to one specific figure, a unicorn. When she shows Jim, he exclaims “Unicorns—aren’t they extinct in the modern world?” (Williams, scene 7 line 188) it is clear that Laura has no place in the “modern world” and that she is like the unicorn, both before and after the horn is broken off. The horn, however, symbolizes her heart while the unicorn itself is her detachment from the real world. She should not be touched, since she breaks so easily. Even she seems to realize this when she tells Jim, “if you breathe…it breaks” (Williams s 7 line 197). For Laura in “The Glass Menagerie”, escape is impossible and it is tragic that in the end she is not even a beautiful rare glass figurine, but a unicorn with a broken horn, a “normal