Relationships in Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie

Relationships in Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie Throughout the Glass Menagerie, Tennessee Williams concentrates a lot

on family relationships. There are the Wingfields at the start of the

play and they experience different interactions with each other: Tom

and Amanda (son and mother), Amanda and Laura (mother and sister) and

Laura and Tom (sister and brother). At the sixth scene of the play

appears Jim and we see him interacting mostly with Laura. I will try

to show how Tennessee Williams develops these relationships throughout

the play.

Starting with Tom and Amanda, already at the first scene we see

Amanda, Tom and Laura sitting at the dinner table, and Amanda is

constantly annoying Tom with her nagging. She tells him off for the

way he chews, the way he 'plays' with his fingers and basically for

anything she finds 'weird'. At first we see that Tom is respectful

towards her, remaining silent and standing her comments. At a certain

point he just can't stand it anymore, and he tells her "I haven't

enjoyed one bite of this dinner because of your constant directions on

how to eat it."

A few pages after that, Amanda is starting to bring up her past and

the way she picked her gentleman callers as a young woman. Though

apart from the memories she is bringing up, she is sending Tom a

message in disguise ("…never anything coarse or common or vulgar!"),

telling him her hopes are that he will...

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...ring his life. The most

important thing here is the relation between Tom and Laura, which is

very similar to the one Williams had with his sister Rose. He felt

very bad for leaving her alone and later he returned, finding out that

she wasn't well and it's too late to help her (that is why he is

sending Tom back to Laura). We can see that Williams felt very

responsible for his sister too, the way Tom does for Laura. Also, Tom

and Jim are quiet similar. They both worked at a warehouse, both have

dreams to escape their world (Williams wanted to write, so does Tom).

Both their fathers weren't present at their childhood (Tom's father

left, Williams' wasn't really present at home) and in the Wingfields

home the picture of the father lays hanging on the wall, symbolizes a

warning rather then a memory- don't come out like him!