A Glued Glass Menagerie.

Tennessee Williams uses the character Amanda in “The Glass Menagerie” to express the attitude of how proper young men and woman should carry themselves. Amanda’s attitude towards her children sets the stage for their unhappy lives. Her refusal to accept her children for who they are has led to Tom drinking during the evenings and Laura having social anxiety. “The Glass Menagerie” reflects the social norms, roles, and values of the 1940’s when it was written. It depicts woman as helpless and unable to provide for themselves, while men should be focused on furthering their careers and providing for the family. Amanda believes that a young woman of Laura’s age should be attending social events and getting schooling till she can attract a gentlemen caller who will provide for her. Finally, she believes that Tom should be concerned with furthering his career to provide a better life for Laura and herself since he became the man of the house once his father left. Amanda’s attitude displays the social norms during the 1940’s and sets the framework for Laura’s disappointing meeting with a gentleman caller as well as Tom Leaving.

Amanda becomes a woman bent on finding her daughter either a job or a husband and finding out why her son disappears every night. To help her appear strong and willful, Amanda escapes to her own days as a young girl, finding more than seventeen gentlemen callers, and allows herself to believe her life is stable enough that her daughter and her will be financially taken care of. These facades crumble when she realizes her daughter has never been capable enough to find either a job or a husband. While these expectations of Laura hurt her, they allow her mother to escape to her days of being flaunted over and adorned by men. Once she does see her daughter is struggling, Amanda has to face the fact that her daughter will always be dependant upon her mother. These realities continue to affect how her children act and the results of the

Amanda Wingfield’s life is turned upside down by her husband’s departure. In her mind it shatters hope for

If there is any signature kind of character that marks Tennessee Williams’s plays, it is without a doubt the faded Southern belle. The Glass Menagerie’s Amanda Wingfield, the mother of Laura and Tom, is a perfect representative of this type, not unlike Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire, also by Williams. A proud and effervescent woman, Amanda passionately holds on to memories of a happier time, of days long gone by. Generally, a faded belle in a Tennessee Williams play is from a wealthy Southern family, raised by parents with traditional beliefs, and has suffered an economic or social, or both, downturn of fortune at some point in her life. Like Amanda, these women all have difficulty accepting a status in society different than what they are used to, as

    Tennessee Williams allows the main characters in the plays, A Streetcar Named Desire and The Glass Menagerie, to live miserable lives, which they first try to deny and later try to change.  The downfall and denial of the Southern gentlewoman is a common theme in both plays.  The characters, Blanche DuBois from A Streetcar Named Desire and Amanda from The Glass Menagerie are prime examples.  Blanche and Amanda have had, and continue to have, many struggles in their lives.  The problem is that Williams never lets the two women work through these problems and move on.  The two ladies are allowed to destroy themselves and Williams invites the audience to watch them in

   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.

Elizabeth is in a situation in her marriage where she feels like she has no rights and she is scared that she is setting the wrong example for her daughter Sylvie. Elizabeth's grabs Sylvie and takes her on a roadtrip to Halifax to show her that there is more in life than washing dishes and cooking dinner. Also Elizabeth’s ditching of her family was a proving point to her husband that she does not fear leaving him anymore. This was a major bounce back point in her life as she faced her fears and proved herself not just to her husband, but also to her

Amanda Wingfield lives in a world somewhere between reality and her own delusions. As necessary, she closes her eyes and ignores the harsh realities of the real world. She was once a southern belle when she was young. She longs to relive this time, this romantic vision of her past that she clings to. That is a better choice than accepting the reality of her current state of poverty and the accepting of abandonment. She lives each day looking through this fallacy of visions from her memories and dreams. She has no way of reconciling her current status and the one she still dreams of. These two worlds never collide and give her the path towards reality. “One Sunday afternoon in Blue Mountain - your mother received - seventeen! - gentlemen callers!”,

Amanda is a desperate mother who is “clinging frantically to another time and place.”() Caught between the past and the present, she has a hard time coming to terms with the fact her life had passed her by. She hopelessly uses escape

    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.

When Hannah’s beloved husband Frank Roennfeldt takes their infant Grace and jumps into a dinghy to protect her from a swarm of racial abuse, Hannah is unaware that this is the last time she will ever see her husband. She is forced to cope with the unknown for four years, wondering every day if her husband and daughter are alive. Despite never giving up hope, this loss takes a toll on Hannah’s mental health, as she feels isolated/isolates herself ??. Stedman emphasises Hannah’s loneliness and vulnerability through bittersweet lines of dialogue such as “The baby I lost is never coming back.” (pg. 310) and “Frank was a lovely man.” (pg.

Throughout the play, Amanda persistently demonstrates controlling power. Before Laura’s gentleman caller arrives, Amanda and Laura are arguing about Laura’s appearance. Amanda says, “To be painfully honest, your chest is flat,” (Williams 70). Amanda directly

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.

Written in 1944, Tennessee Williams wrote a play during World War II when people were barely making ends meet. Centering on the Wingfield family, the story consisted of five characters: Amanda Wingfield (the mother), Laura Wingfield (the daughter), Tom Wingfield (son, narrator, Laura’s older brother), Jim Connor (Tom and Laura’s old acquaintance from high school) and Mr. Wingfield (father to Tom and Laura, and Amanda’s husband)- who abandoned the family long before the start of the play. The title, “The Glass Menagerie”, represented a collection of glass animals on display in the Wingfields’ home. At one point or another, these animals then represented each character when they couldn’t accept reality. The theme of this play were about the

Through Amanda’s inability to separate the real from the fantasy, William’s proves that Amanda’s main coping mechanism is to retreat from reality. Amanda’s role as the forgotten southern belle also impacts her relationship with her daughter Laura, who suffers from crippling social anxiety and an inferiority complex as a result of her disability.