The Failure of Amanda in The Glass Menagerie
In Tennessee Williams’, “The Glass Menagerie” Amanda was a woman who liked to reminisce about the past in order to escape from reality. Amanda was not wicked but intensely flawed. Her failures were centrally responsible for the adversity and exaggerated style of her character. Certainly, she had the endurance and heroism that she was able to support her children when her husband was gone. In her old life, she was once a Southern Belle with a genteel manner who lived on Blue Mountain. This was a place where Amanda’s version of the good old days back when she was young and popular. Amanda was full of charm in conversation that she managed to have seventeen gentlemen caller in a single day. Amanda liked to talk to her children having seventeen gentlemen callers but ended up marrying a charming Irishman who worked for the telephone company. He traveled and left the family and the only reminder of him was his smiling photograph. Amanda turned the tragedy of her husband’s abandonment as a joke, “a telephone man who fell in love with long distances” (643). Amanda’s relationship with her children was illustrated by her failure in life and the exaggerated style of her character.
Amanda always put up a defensive front for others to view that hid the reality of her life. She painted a colorful picture for others to perceive. Amanda worked hard to make the apartment ready for her daughter’s gentleman caller. She talked of polishing the wedding silver, taking out the monogrammed table linen to be laundered, cleaning the windows and putting up fresh curtains. Amanda even went so far as to enhance Laura’s bosom with two powder puffs. She called it “gay deceiver”(662).
Amanda was affectionate and loving but demanding beyond reason. She was not in anyway cruel, in fact, very loving but her desires for her family became so unpleasant for her children. Amanda’s relationship with Tom was difficult with and often unreasonable. Although he was a grown man whose wages supported their family, she still would intervene with the affairs of his life. Amanda would instruct Tom how to chew his food by telling that “animals have secretions in their stomach which enable them to digest food without mastication, but human beings are supposed to chew their food before they swallow it down”(644). Tom goes to the movies as an escape from his ...
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...r Laura to have a gentleman caller was another failure. Jim was engaged and is to be married soon. Amanda was furious because the plan did not work out. She accused him of playing a practical joke on them, by intentionally bringing another woman’s fiancé’ to disgrace them. Amanda was obviously surprised, the evening had been expensive for the Wingfields, and her dreams for her daughter have been shattered.
Amanda was a woman who typically refuses to face reality that resulted in a lot of disappointments and frustrations. Looking back to the past with regrets only prevented her from moving on. She could have used her past experiences and learned from it. Although she is caring and loving, she should not have sacrificed the happiness of her children for her own selfish desires. Her fears had made her life and the lives of her children miserable. Had she learned to be patient, strong and accepting of what life has brought, she and her family could have had a more fulfilling life.
Work Cited
Williams, Tennessee. “The Glass Menagerie.” Literature and the Writing Process. Ed. Elizabeth McMahan, Susan X. Day, and Robert Funk. 7th ed. Upper Saddle River; Prentice, 2003
641-681
What changes have occurred in Amanda’s behavior? What are some possible reasons for these changes?
Also, it seems Tom does not care if he gets fired or not judging by the amount of time that he spends writing poetry at work. Tom does not appreciate what he has or that his family is provided for. Tom also shows a hint of selfishness when he tells Amanda that there is nothing in that house that he can honestly call his own. Tom also goes to the movies or gets drunk almost every night and he knows that Amanda and Laura are worried about him but that changes nothing. He still goes out without thinking of how it affects his mother or sister.
Williams, Tennessee. The Glass Menagerie. The Bedford Introduction to Literature: Reading, Writing, Thinking. 5th ed. Ed. Michael Meyer. Boston: Bedford, 1999. 1865-190
...something she discovered was useless. They both put emphasis on something that had brought them nothing but pain and suffering and it is this entrapment that makes Amanda and Willy most unlikable. Rather than learning from their mistakes and teaching their children to avoid making the same ones, Amanda and Willy lead their children down the same path to failure, a path that Amanda found to have a dead end, a path to which Willy found no end at all.
In today's rough and tough world, there seems to be no room for failure. The pressure to succeed in life sometimes seems unreasonable. Others often set expectations for people too high. This forces that person to develop ways to take the stress and tension out of their lives in their own individual ways. In the plays "The Glass Menagerie" and " A Streetcar Named Desire" written by Tennessee Williams, none of the characters are capable of living in the present and facing reality. Two of the characters are Amanda Wingfield and Blache Dubios. In order for these characters to deal with the problems and hardships in their lives they retreat into their own separate worlds of illusion and lies.
The Glass Menagerie is a play written by Tennessee Williams. It involves a mother, Amanda, and her two children, Tom and Laura. They are faced with many problems throughout the play. Some of these problems involve: Amanda, the mother, only wants to see her kids succeed and do well for themselves. How does her drive for success lead the book?
Kate Chopin and Tennessee Williams are both well known writers and were able to create memorable characters within their works. One of Chopin's renowned characters is the heroine Edna Pontellier, a woman who tries to break away from the social norms of the nineteenth century. One of Williams' well known characters is Amanda Wingfield a caring mother that is trapped in her past. I will be analyzing Tennessee William's Amanda of The Glass Menagerie and Kate Chopin's Edna of The Awakening and will be comparing and contrasting various elements in their character to prove that even though both women could be seen as pitiable characters, Amanda is more deserving of the title. On first glance, Edna could be seen as a character that deserves sympathy because of her conflicts while Amanda could easily be the most hated character in The Glass Menagerie. Unlike Edna, Amanda gives more qualities of a character deserving of pity.
As Winfield 's wife, Amanda is worthy of love and respect. Amanda is a southern lady, when she was young, she had an attractive appearance and graceful in manner, and her families were also quite rich. These favorable conditions made her the admiration of many men. Still, her final choice was a poor boy. She did not hesitate and bravely to choose her own love. Though her marriage was not as good as she had imagined the happiness of life, and the husband, Winfield meager income also drinking heavily, finally abandoned Amanda and two young children, but she still remembered and loved her husband. Her husband 's weakness did not make Amanda fall down; instead, she was brave enough to support the family, raising and educating of their two young children. Daughter Laura was a disability to close her fantasy world, and she was collection of a pile of glass small animals as partners. Amanda knew Laura sensitive, fragile, she was always in the care and encourages her daughter. Because of her shortcomings, Laura sometimes frustrated and Amanda immediately replied that "I 've told you never, never to use that word. Why, you 're not crippled, you just have a little defect". Amanda for the care of the children was more reflected a mother 's strong from the play that Amanda paid money to send Laura to typing school. She hoped daughter have a better future and married a good man to take care of the family, and encouraged her daughter, prompting her to go out of the glass menagerie to experience her real life, but Amanda placed more expectations for his son Tom because her husband left home, Tom is the only man and the mainstay of the family. She wanted Tom to realize that is a kind of family responsibility, also is a kind of essential social
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.
Jim is very self-assured and attempts to help Laura with her problems of self-esteem and shyness. Laura seems to be responding to his efforts of help when he unexpectedly announces his engagement to be married. Of course, this brings an end to the well-planned evening. At this point, there seems to be a wake-up call for these characters. A...
Tennessee Williams has a gift for character. Not many playwrights do, and even fewer possess the unique ability to craft a character as paradoxical and complex as Amanda Wingfield. In The Glass Menagerie, Amanda is a very difficult character to understand because of her psychological disposition. Williams realizes this and provides the reader with a character description in hopes of making the character more accessible to meticulous analysis.
Amanda is also well characterized by the glass menagerie. The glass sits in a case, open for display and inspection for all. Amanda try’s to portray herself as a loving mother, doing everything she can for her children, and caring nothing for herself, when in fact, she is quite selfish and demanding. Amanda claims that she devotes her life to her children, and that she would do anything for them, but is very suspicious of Tom’s activities, and continually pressures Tom, trying to force him in finding a gentleman caller for Laura, believing that Laura is lonely and needs a companion, perhaps to get married. Like the glass, her schemes are very transparent, and people can see straight through them to the other side, where ...
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.
Williams, Tennessee. The Glass Menagerie. In Literature: An Introduction to Reading and Writing, 4th ed. Ed. Edgar V. Roberts and Henry E. Jacobs. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1995. 1519-1568.
At first glance, Amanda Wingfield from Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie seems like a selfish women stuck in her past. In some ways this observation is correct; however, she is much more than that. Her kind and caring nature, and her insatiable love for her children has been overshadowed by her brash and insensitive dialogue. Her character is extremely complex and each one her actions reveals more of her overwhelming personality. Amanda loves her children and tries her best to make sure they do not follow in her path to downfall. Unfortunately, while she is trying to push her children toward her ideals of success; she is also pushing them away. Amanda Wingfield is a kind women stuck the wrong place and time; she