Tennessee Williams was a great American short story writer of the 20th century. Some of his works include The Resemblance Between a Violin Case and a Coffin, Portrait of a Girl in Glass, and Something about Him. Though all these stories do have their own story-line, characters and tones they all share common characteristics. In the short story Something about Him, Williams depicts the life of a hated man,a plain women and the judgemental people that surround them on a day to day basis. Two prominent characters are Haskell and Miss Rose. Haskell was the kind of guy to try to please everyone and he came off as a superficial person. Williams uses a library to describe the simple, quiet, and boring Miss Rose. Miss Rose ends up convincing …show more content…
At the beginning we are shown wilderness that depicts the savage and freedom of childhood and towards the end we get the image of the structured and constrained adulthood.With adulthood also come more pressure. The sister is taught to play piano and Tom is uncertain of his feelings for Richard Miles, the boy that his sister liked and played music with. In Portrait of a Girl in Glass, Williams exposes us to what it is to live the life of a very closed up person. Laura loves to sit in her room and look at animal glass figures. These glass figures represent Laura’s fragility and the containment of her mind and thoughts. She rarely speaks and doesn't like to be outside of her room or safe haven. Laura and her brother, the narrator, were fatherless and there was no given reason of why. Laura just liked to listen to the records he left and never cared to listen to the new ones her brother bought because she was scared of exploring and finding new things. Though all these stories have completely different story lines Williams has elements that can connect all three short stories. All these characters were left behind by someone. For Miss Rose, Haskell left town and made her resume living her boring life again. For Tom, Richard died and his sister grew up and was forced to leave behind the great days she had with Tom for womanhood leaving Tom. As for Laura, not only did she get left by her
| Tom wants his old life back prior to the accident and he sees the accident as the end of his life as he knew it. He loses his sense of identity and sense of family in particular.Feels guilty and ashamed about the irrevocable consequences his brother’s irresponsibility had for other people and their familiesRetreats into a depressed state which feels empty and black.
Tennessee Williams is one the major writers of the mid-twentieth century. His work includes the plays, The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire. One theme of The Glass Menagerie is that hopeful aspirations are followed by inevitable disappointments. This theme is common throughout all of Williams' work and throughout his own life as well. It is shown through the use of symbols and characters.
Tennessee Williams is regarded as a pioneering playwright of American theatre. Through his plays, Williams addresses important issues that no other writers of his time were willing to discuss, including addiction, substance abuse, and mental illness. Recurring themes in William’s works include the dysfunctional family, obsessive and absent mothers and fathers, and emotionally damaged women. These characters were inspired by his experiences with his own family. These characters appear repeatedly in his works with their own recurring themes. Through The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire, Tennessee Williams presents the similar thematic elements of illusion, escape, and fragility between the two plays, proving that although similar, the themes within these plays are not simply recycled, as the differences in their respective texts highlight the differences of the human condition.
Tennessee Williams' play, The Glass Menagerie, describes three separate characters, their dreams, and the harsh realities they face in a modern world. The Glass Menagerie exposes the lost dreams of a southern family and their desperate struggle to escape reality. Williams' use of symbols adds depth to the play. The glass menagerie itself is a symbol Williams uses to represent the broken lives of Amanda, Laura and Tom Wingfield and their inability to live in the present.
The Glass Menagerie symbolizes Laura. Tom really cares about his sister Laura. He is motivated by anger. Tom goes out to drink and watch movies just to get
Miss Emily is a mysterious character in “A Rose for Emily” by William Faulkner. She is the protagonist in this work. Emily used to be a vibrant and hopeful young woman, but something has changed with her. She had plenty of potential suitors, but her father rejected them all. After her father’s death, she is devastated and lonely. It is almost as if she is depressed, but then she meets homer Barron, a foreman from the north. They spend a lot of time together and the town certainly notices. The town talks about these two and it spreads around like wildfire. One day, Homer is seen going into Miss Emily’s house and he is never seen again. Loss can affect anyone and it certainly affects Miss Emily. Miss Emily’s psychological resilience to anything remotely traumatic is very low. She has a very high for need to get love from anyone. Miss Emily is a dynamic character; her mind and body both change throughout the story, but they are very slight changes that someone rarely notices at first.
OPTION 1: NOT FOR MARKS In a paragraph, compare and contrast the narrator from Araby and Arnold from The Stone Boy. Use textual evidence to provide support for your response. The stories “Araby” and the “The Stone Boy” have similar theme of alienation.
Amy bloom’s silver water is a sad story on the theme of illness; precisely describes how often the irreversible mental illness of a family member affects the rest of the family. The narrator begins her story in the first two paragraphs with feedback in which she remembers the good health of his sister and the good times spent with her sister Rose “before her constant tinkling of commercials and fast-food jingle there had been Puccini and Mozart and hymns so sweet and mighty you expected Jesus to come down off his cross and clap . . . there had been the prettiest girl in Arrandale Elementary School, the belle of Landmark Junior High.” In the third paragraph, the narrator breaks the tone of joy she had at the opening of the story by a melancholy and sad tone that she held until the end of the story.
Laura Wingfield has chosen to hide from reality in the play The Glass Menagerie. She seems to live in a world of her own, and hides from everything and everyone outside of the apartment. Laura is terrified of anything new or different. Her mother sent her to business college, but Laura was so afraid that ‘The first time [they] gave a speed-test, she broke down completely – was sick at the stomach and almost had to be carried into the wash –room.’ (p 243). Laura uses her limp as an excuse to hide from the world. She believes that her slight limp makes her crippled and that she cannot be a part of the real world because of it. Laura’s glass menagerie and the victrola act as things which protect her from the real world in the play. Whenever she is
The way Tom acts on the difficulties and challenges that he faces at home not only affect him but his family as well. He escapes his troubles from home, due to the pressure, by going to the movies. Finally, his mother realizes and
Tennessee Williams was an American writer known for short stories and poems in the mid 1950’s. His more famous writing was A Streetcar Named Desire. His writings influenced many other writers such as August Strindberg and Hart Crane. His writings A Streetcar Named Desire and The Glass Menagerie was adopted to films and A Streetcar Named Desire earned him his first Pulitzer prize. In A Streetcar Named Desire there is many elements that build the plot and story line. The story is about a girl who is drove crazy by his sister’s husband and eventually sent to the mental hospital. The main plot is towards the end of the story when Blanche Dubois is blackmailed by her sister’s husband and raped by him. Everything takes its toll on her until she begins drinking heavily and is thought to have gone crazy and placed in a mental hospital. In this story, many things play affect in the contrast of the writing such as Blanche arriving at her sister’s house, seeing her sister’s husbands attitude, the poker game, Blanche getting raped. These events make Blanche an easy victim. In Tennessee Williams, a street car named desire, the start of kindness turns to tragedy and pain.
This play is narrated by and based on the memories of a 21-year-old man named Tom Wingfield. It takes place in a small St. Louis apartment in 1937 during the depression. Tom feels that he is forced to live with and support his mother, Amanda, and sister, Laura. This is because his father abandoned them year's ago. He feels trapped because he works a boring job in a shoe warehouse to pay the bills but wants to be a writer. Amanda seems unappreciative of his support and dwells on better times in her life as a Southern Belle and how she wants the same opportunities for Laura. She sets a lot of rules for Tom to follow that prevents him from enjoying life, even nagging about the way he chews his food! Tom turns to liquor, movies and literature to escape and for the adventure and excitement he desires. Throughout the play Tom's emotions as narrator are not portrayed the same as what he really feels as the character. To add to the family's misery, the father's picture still hangs on the wall in the apartment!
The Glass Menagerie, written by playwright Tennessee Williams, is the story of a family torn apart by heartbreak from the past and tragedy from the present. Williams' parallels this play to his true life experience with his own family, which makes The Glass Menagerie an even more tragic version of what happens to a family when love is lost and abandonment is reality. Providing for a family can be an overwhelming responsibility, for there are many pitfalls along the way, 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.
Tennessee Williams’ famous work, The Glass Menagerie, features a disabled and very shy main character who eventually learns that her disability is not what makes her different, it is what makes her unique. This turning point occurs when she reconnects with an old acquaintance who taught her about change and truly embracing yourself, despite your flaws. It is by complete accident that Laura comes to this realization, her and her friend Jim are dancing around the living room when Jim accidently bumps the table where a few of Laura’s glass figurines are placed:
Since she has a disability, Laura finds it hard to communicate with the outside world around her and secludes herself within her fantasies that center on her animal figurines and musical demos. While scolding her daughter for quitting business school, Amanda exclaims to Laura: “So what are we going to do the rest of our lives? Stay home and watch parades go by? Amuse ourselves with the glass menagerie, darling? Eternally play those worn-out phonograph records your father left as a painful reminder of him” (Williams 1637). Laura receives harsh