Brutality Of Reality In The Glass Menagerie By Tennessee Williams

Coming from a lonely and abusive home Mary had to find happiness outside of her house. Her mom made a friend from their church and she happened to have a three month year old baby. Mary always occupied the Richardson’s by helping with baby Alyssa, while also distracting herself from reality. Meeting the Richardson’s ended up being Mary’s worst nightmare. One night the Richardson’s went out and asked Mary and her mother to watch Alyssa.

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

The characters of A Streetcar Named Desire and The Glass Menagerie are bound to their own hold on illusions as a means of coping. In A Streetcar Named Desire, the character of Blanche exemplifies the hold of illusion when she says, “I don 't want realism. I want magic!” Blanche exemplifies the idea of delusion as a means of coping. In The Glass Menagerie, the character Tom Wingfield sets the tone of the play with his opening monologue in which he says, “I give you truth in the

Amanda is obsessed with her past, and uses it to escape reality, as she constantly reminds Tom and Laura of the time she received seventeen gentlemen callers. The reader cannot even be sure that this actually happened. However, it is clear despite its possible falseness, Amanda has come to believe it. She refuses to acknowledge that her daughter is crippled and refers to her handicap as "a little defect - hardly noticeable" (Williams 1648). Only for brief moments does she ever admit that her daughter is "crippled" and then resorts back to denial. Amanda doesn't perceive anything realistically. She believes that this gentleman caller, Jim is going to be the man to rescue Laura and she hasn't even met him yet. When Jim arrives, Amanda is dressed in a "girlish frock" she wore on the day that she met their father and she regresses to the childish, giddy days of entertaining gentleman callers. Amanda uses her past as a means to escape the reality she does not want to face.

She was forcibly drawn into the adult world without anyway of escaping it or anyone to help her, it was as if she was in her own personal hell whe n Arnold Friend showed up at her housing wanting to take her out for a ride with him (“ Where Are You Going Where Have You Been 862”). Connie was so shocked she didn’t expect reality to hit so hard. When Arnold showed up he came for the mature woman he saw last night and wasn’t leaving until her got her to go with him. He even said to her that “ I’m your lover. You don’t know what that is but you will” and “ The place where you come from ain’t there anymore, and where you had in mind to go is cancelled out (“ Where Are You Going Where Have You Been 868 and 871”). All she wanted to do at the moment was be in her parents arms but it was too late for her because the monster had came and got her .

“That’s why they were only taking a few things at a time; they weren 't really coming for ivory and paintings. They wanted me!” Even when she wasn’t in her room she was always afraid of something. “I always dreaded that my parents would divorce. It was my third biggest fear, right next to the fear that one of them would get abducted by heartmen on the road to Sugar Beach, or my first fear, that I would get sucked into the lagoon by neegee.” Out of all three fears only one seemed to happen. Her parents relationship finally came to an end after a lot of fighting, disagreement, and cheating. “Daddy, I hold your foot, don’t leave us. Daddy, please, I beg you” she cried that day. From then on, except the servants and cook, “it was only women at Sugar Beach.” Even after dealing with something so hard in her life that wasn’t even what affected her the most.

Tom ends the argument by calling Amanda an "ugly- babbling old -witch"(Williams 1875), and struggles to put his coat on, intent on leaving.  When he cannot put the coat on properly, he becomes frustrated with his clumsiness and flings it across the room, breaking some of the glass collection. Laura "cries out as if wounded"(Williams 1875).  This shows how fragile Laura really is and how she reacts when even the small balance of her apartment is shifted.  The most prominent use of this symbol comes at the crisis of the story, when Jim is left alone with Laura. The conversation turns to Laura's glass collection, when she remarks "glass is something you have to take good care of."(Williams 1900), again showing her fragility. More parallels are drawn between Laura and the glass collection with the introduction of the unicorn. Jim says, "Poor little fellow, he must feel sort of lonesome"(Williams 1902) to which Laura replies, " He stays on a shelf with some horses that don't have horns and all of them seem to get along nicely together"(Williams 1902).  The unicorn becomes a symbol for Laura because just like the unicorn she is different.  When Jim and Laura dance, and Jim accidentally knocks the unicorn off the table and its horn is broken off, it loses its uniqueness. Similarly, when Jim kisses Laura and then shatters her hopes by telling

Illusions are the solutions to happiness. People willingly hold on to illusions in order to prevent physical, emotional, and mental pain. They choose to see only the bright side of life and they ignore the unpleasant side. Fahrenheit 451 and The Truman Show are both filled with illusions. Mildred and Truman both accept what comes before them without any complaints. There are two instances where Montag causes problems with his words, but Mildred chooses to ignore them and move on.

“Illusions commend themselves to us because they save us pain and allow us to enjoy pleasure instead. We must therefore accept it without complaint when they sometimes collide with a bit of reality against which they are dashed to pieces” (Sigmund Freud). Illusion can be a part of our lives; however, if taken to the extreme, it can lead one to forget reality. Every individual has problems in life that must be faced with reality and not with illusion, even though it might throw one into flames of fires. Tennessee Williams' play of a family reveals the strength of resistance between reality and desire, judgment and imagination, and between male and female. The idea of reality versus illusion is demonstrated throughout the play. Blanche's

Alma travels to America, in search of a speedier recovery for her daughter, Maribel who suffered an extreme brain injury after she fell three stories from a ladder. Maribel accident makes Alma often feel guilty, since she believes that if she payed more attention to her, Maribel would not have fallen from the ladder. Her family leaves the comfort of Mexico and goes to the United States for higher quality medical care. Alma knows that her family had ¨bundled up our old life and left it behind, then hurdled into a new one with only a few of our things, each other and hope¨ (Henriquez 6). Focusing on her daughter's health, Alma reluctantly leaves her hometown in Mexico to move to Delaware. Alma has ¨bundled up¨ her old life, to attempt to focus on her new one. She is leaving her life behind to grow in her new one in America. The family is ready to build a new life in America. Alma doesn´t want to focus on her mistakes in the past, she only believes in hope to guide her in her journey in

Amanda’s strong and outgoing personality has made Laura become submissive painfully shy and self-conscious. She never let Laura make her own decisions. Laura was forced to attend a Business College because her mother wanted to, which resulted her escaping from school. So, to retreat from the real world, she resorted to playing her victrolla and admires her glass menagerie collection.

Amanda Wingfield was a complex character that encompassed many facets of her personality. She longed to have the life she had as a girl and young woman with gentleman callers and being the center of attention; her reality though, was a much more dismal existence with a son who worked at a factory making little money at a job he despised and a daughter that was as emotionally and physically

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. Like his father, "a telephone man who fell in love with long distances," (Williams 1523), Tom has fallen in love with the long distance that is time.

    The Glass Menagerie, by Tennessee Williams, contains multiple themes.  While there are many themes, the theme that holds the piece together is illusion versus reality.

Amanda Perkins has died, Lila’s cousin and Stephanie’s best friend. As the crowd of black drifted to the open gates of the church to wish her blessings, Lila weeped in a tiny corner, desperately trying to keep her voice low. She didn’t want anyone to hear. Amanda was murdered. Who could have done this to her? Amanda had disappeared about 17 weeks ago. She went out running and never returned home. Lila’s aunt, aunt Allie, had filed a missing persons case but the case was never solved. Uncle Jonathan gave up while Aunt Allie had hope. She always believed that Amanda would return. When Amanda finally did return, she was already dead. Killed by someone who hasn’t been identified yet. Stephanie slumped down the aisle to where she was supposed to sit. That seat was facing the open casket, where her BFF lay.