The Character of Tom Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie Tom Wingfield is a determined young man. He has decided against everyone else in his family's wishes that he wants to leave the dismal life of a factory job, to pursue a chance in the Merchant Marines. He realizes that he would be running off like his father and this is probably the only thing that kept him from leaving this long. Amanda, Tom's mother, deep down knows the day is coming that Tom will leave. She says "But not till there's someone
A Comparison of Amanda Wingfield And Blanche Dubois 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
set in the cramped, dinghy apartment of the Wingfield family. It is just one of many such apartments in this lower-class neighborhood. Not one of the Wingfield family members desires to live this apartment. Poverty is what traps them in their humble abode. The escape from this lifestyle, this apartment and these relationships is a significant theme throughout the play. These escapes may be related to the fire escape, the dance hall, the absent Mr. Wingfield and Tom's inevitable departure. The play
Symbolism The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams is a touching play about the lost dreams of a southern family and their struggle to escape reality. The play is a memory play and therefore very poetic in mood, setting, and dialogue. Tom Wingfield serves as the narrator as well as a character in the play. Tom lives with his Southern belle mother, Amanda, and his painfully shy sister, Laura. The action of the play revolves around Amanda's search to find Laura a "gentleman caller. The Glass
difficulty people have in accepting and relating to reality. As a result of their inability to overcome this difficulty, the characters withdraw into a private world of illusion to find the comfort they can’t find in real life. Out of the three Wingfield family members, Laura probably is the one living furthest away from reality. There are several symbols in the play that represent that in some way. Her glass collection that she carefully takes care of, is the imaginary world she lives in to escape
members of the Wingfield family have chosen to hide from reality. Amanda tries to relive her past through Laura, and denies anything she does not want to accept. Laura is terrified of the real world, and choses to hide behind her limp, her glass menagerie and the victrola. Tom hides from his reality by going to the movies, writing poetry, and getting drunk. Mr Wingfield hides from his reality by leaving his family and not contacting them after he has done so. Each member of the Wingfield family has their
provides a means of escape for Tom from his cramped apartment and nagging mother. Therefore, the fire escape for him represents a path to the outside world. For the gentleman caller, the fire escape provides the means through which Jim can enter the Wingfield apartment, thus entering their lives. For Amanda, the fire escape allows Jim to come into the apartment and prevent Laura from becoming a spinster. The significance of the fire escape for Laura is that it is her door to the inside world in which
order to follow his own dream of writing as Tom too felt in the play. John Fritscher points out in his dissertation that Tennessee and Tom both were torn between their mother's interpretation of responsibility and their own instinct (5). Tom Wingfield, the narrator of the play, is representative of Tennessee Williams himself, down to them sharing the same first name. Tennessee Williams did not earn his nickname until his college days at the University of Missouri (Meyer 1864). Both Tom and Tennessee
The Glass Menagerie Often society seeks to thwart the desire of certain people to find and/or face the truth. Examples of this are found throughut literature. Two excellent example of this are Biff Loman from 'The Death Of A Salesman' and Tom Wingfield from 'The Glass Menagerie'. At some point, they both have to face and understand the truth about their lives. Biff is faced with the lies and morals of society obsessed with the corrupt version of American Dream, especially his father, and his inability
The Character of Tom in The Glass Menagerie Tom Wingfield has a dual role in The Glass Menagerie. The first Tom is the narrator, who introduces his second self, the character. In his fifth soliloquy, Tom the narrator indicates that time has detached him from the drama, "for time is the longest distance between two places" (Williams 1568). In the closing soliloquy Tom recounts how he lives and re-lives the story in his memory, though he is detached from the participants in the original affair
some families are able to cope, some are not, and The Glass Menagerie gives us insight into what truly happens to a family when faced with abandonment. The story begins in The Wingfield apartment in the rear of a building, which can only be entered by a fire escape. A picture hangs on the living room wall of Mr. Wingfield, who took flight from his family when the children were very small. As Tom, the son recounts, "Father was a telephone man who fell in love with long distances; he gave up his job
Jim calls him Shakespeare, although he secretly laughs at him for being so whimsical as wanting to be a poet. Jim, on the other hand is a practical and loyal man. He has aspirations of love family, and success. That is why he cannot stay in the Wingfield dreamland, and leaves as quickly as he arrives there. The many symbols in "The Glass Menagerie" can be interpreted in several ways. These are just a few interpretations derived from reading the play and other essays that analyze "The Glass Menagerie
Tom's Escape in The Glass Menagerie 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. Tom supports his family despite his unhappiness of his world. He tries to please Amanda by being the
it to become modernized. Some original parts of the play such as “dated” dialogue, character traits, and settings will be discarded, but the original vision of Tennessee Williams will remain intact by keeping elements essential to recounting the Wingfield Family struggles. As director of the updated production of The Glass Menagerie, one would first have to look at the type of speaking style and dialogue as a means to modernize the original content. In the play, Amanda, the mother, is characteristic
events. Did Tennessee William write the same play twice? Or, did the plays each hold a different meaning underneath? Before analyzing the two plays, we must first analyze the characters. Blanche Dubois in “A Streetcar Named Desire'; and Laura Wingfield in “The Glass Menageries'; have a lot of similarities throughout the two plays. Blanche and Laura are both living in a separate world from other people. Blanch is living in a world of fantasies, while Laura is living in her world with all the
the characters in this play. “Ultimately, the glass menagerie is symbolic of all their shattered dreams, failing to fulfill their transcendent aspirations, the Wingfields find themselves confined to a wasteland reality, their dreams become a ‘heap of broken images’'; (Thompson 15). Just as the menagerie itself is frozen in time, the Wingfields are also. They are restricted to the one way of living that they have practiced as time had passed, so they do not know how to break free of that confinement
loving family that is constantly in conflict. To convey his central theme, Williams uses symbols. He also expresses his theme through the characters' incapability of living in the present. The apartment that Amanda, Laura, and Tom Wingfield share is in the middle of the city and is among many dark alleys with fire escapes. Tom and Laura do not like the dark atmosphere and their mother always tries to make it as pleasant as possible. The two women do not get out much to
unicorn, as a symbol for Laura's uniqueness and the father’s photograph, representing something different to each character. Through regonition of these symbols, a greater understanding of the play’s theme is achieved. Throughout the play, Tom Wingfield was torn by a responsibility he felt for his mother and sister and the need to be his own man. He used the fire escape most in the play. He went outside to stand on it when he smoked, to escape the nagging from his mother, and to make his final independence
Mr. Wingfield is the character in The Glass Menagerie who does not appear in the novel but has a significant impact on the meaning of the work. Mr. Wingfield, who is an employee for a telephone company, abandons his family because he “fell in love with long distances” that the telephone conveys into publics' perception. Mr. Wingfield’s abandonment of his family establishes the future of their life. Mr. Wingfield’s abandonment evidently leads to Tom’s abandonment of his mother, Amanda, and his sister
Illusion vs. Reality in The Glass Menagerie 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