Character Analysis: Machinal And The Glass Menagerie

Born in Columbus, Mississippi, Thomas “Tennessee” Lanier Williams, was a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright whose work includes A Streetcar Named Desire and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. During his childhood Williams’ family took a turn in life when they moved to St. Louis, Missouri. There on, Williams grew up in a destructive home where his father was a violent alcoholic; his mother was ill; and his sister, Rose, suffered from several mental illnesses. This resulted in Williams turning inward and start his writing. In the play A Streetcar Named Desire (Norton, 2012) Williams dramatizes the protagonist Blanche DuBois from Belle Reeve as a tragic figure who is not in touch with reality. In this essay I will show how Williams uses Blanche as a metaphor

Tennessee Williams is known to be a Southern playwright of American drama. Williams knew how to show haunting elements like psychological drama, loneliness, and inexcusable violence in his plays. Critics say Williams often depicted women who were suffering from critical downfalls due to his sister Rose Williams. Rose was always fighting with a mental health condition known as schizophrenia all her life. The character Laura in The Glass Menagerie is always compared to Rose, because they were both socially awkward and very quiet girls. This may be true, but one can look at Blanche DuBois from A Street Car Named Desire shadows his sister’s life and characteristics more than Laura did. In the obituary of Rose Williams that was written by

“The Glass Menagerie” by Tennessee Williams, was written in the early forties but could be misconstrued as a present-day play, because of the family dynamic that has changed since the forties but has not been completed replaced. In this play, we are introduced to Tom Wingfield who is the breadwinner for the family, which consists of his mom and sister. Amanda Wingfield who is an overbearing mother that knows no boundaries, and Laura Wingfield who is the sweet, and embarrassingly shy daughter of Amanda. Their family dynamic is like most of ours. The mother loves her kids dearly but struggles with letting go of her old identity, the daughter who allows her disability to determine her happiness and the brother who is obligated to work but would rather drink and party his money away. I’m sure many of us can relate to this family in some form. My favorite character in “The Glass Menagerie” is Laura. I love Laura because I can relate to her in more than one way. I was a shy individual most of my life, but once people got to know me they realized I was no different from them. In the following paragraphs, I will share Laura’s character with you, the similarities between Laura and the glass unicorn and I’ll tell you how the glass unicorn represents Laura.

    Families have been portrayed as “perfect.” A mother who loves her children no matter what and father who provides and children who are smart, creative and well behaved. Mothers are the ones who love their child the most. As stated in, “What ‘mom’ really means in America,”  Mother Love is a notion that the bond between a mother and a child was sacred, all- encompassing duty (Peterson 1). However in this contemporary movie, Penelope, the mother is portrayed as selfish and unaccepting to her daughter.

The Glass Menagerie had memorable and relatable characters, but they could not make up for the vagueness of the play. As a shy, introverted person, I related to Laura’s shyness and social anxiety. Tom’s struggle between gaining the freedom he so desperately wanted and his obligation to his family also resonated with me. Through these two characters, the playwright succeeded in demonstrating how a family’s expectations often do not align with that of their kids. Amanda, Laura and Tom’s mother, would wish for happiness and success for her kids, but her version of success and their version of success were different. Throughout the play, Tom kept saying that he was going to the movies, but it was never really revealed exactly what he did while he was out. Additionally, it was unclear where Tom went after finally leaving his family. It would have been nice to see what happened to Laura and Amanda after his departure. For these reasons, I would not recommend this play to a friend. Overall, the play was decent, but it was not one of my favorites. I recognize that the things discussed above were probably meant to add something to the play, but I completely missed what that was suppose to be. Instead, I was left with many unanswered questions at the end of the play.

Laura Wingfield, from the classic play The Glass Menagerie, by Tennessee Williams, plays a pivotal and probably the most significant role in the story. She plays a physically and emotionally crippled young woman who unlike the rest of her immediate family, always seems to have a sense of compassion. Laura is always trying to keep peace in the Wingfield apartment, giving us a small sense of her character. The sheer fact that Laura has the least amount of lines in the play only adds to her selflessness. Many aspects of the play are symbols of Laura’s characteristics and tendencies, making Laura the most symbolic figure in the play.

Mothers are typically seen as kind, loving, and nurturing, at least in a perfect world, that’s how they are. Rather, in the real world many of us wish that is how all mothers are. Various situations can lead to a woman to be too mothering. It is a factor that transcends real life. This conflict causing dynamic is very prevalent in numerous stories, films, and plays. Two plays where it is shown in significance are Machinal and The Glass Menagerie. In both cases, the actions taken by the mother roles in the shows, resulted in some of the character’s roles ending in unfortunate events of some sort.

The Glass Menagerie In The Glass Menagerie, Tennessee Williams places his characters in difficult situations throughout the play. Laura Wingfield is a very shy person with an illness that has left her crippled. This illness makes Laura fearful and it causes her to think less of herself. Amanda Wingfield (laura's mother) fancies laura to marry a man that will care for her, since she is young and dependent.

The play The Glass Menagerie written by Tennessee Williams takes place in the 1930’s, and as a result, the reader is able to come to the conclusion that life for the Wingfield’s is not one of luxury in fact it is quite the opposite. Amanda Wingfield is an overbearing southern mother who lives in the past; she places high importance on finding her daughter Laura a “gentlemen caller.” Tom, Amanda’s son and the narrator of the play, is given the task to not only make a living for the family, but to find this “gentleman caller” for his sister. Disabled by fear and insecurity and unable to fulfill her mother’s expectations, Laura Wingfield escapes life by collecting glass figurines and listening to old records. A brief romantic encounter with

Tennessee Williams’ adolescence was fairly difficult. His father was an abusive man who was often left out of the picture. He was left in the care of his mother, who often was overbearing. She cared for him dearly, but in doing so she often badgers him; yet he had a close relationship with her. Williams had a close relationship with his sister, Rose, who he idolized. In Williams’ memoirs, he states, “All my relationships with women are very, very important to me.” (Gussow). In many ways female characters from his plays are shaped from female relatives. Throughout many of Tennessee Williams’ plays, female characters fall into similar categories. These women typically are fragile, southern belle type, overreaching, living in the past, or a mixture of them.

Tennessee Williams’s play A Streetcar Named Desire leaves many readers with an ambivalence toward its main character. Torn opinions range from praising her as a lost soul who is victimized by her surroundings to incriminating her as a “fille de joie”. On one side, Williams prevents Blanche from being the tragic protagonist as a result of his own misogyny, which was ever so ingrained in his early life, and uses her victimization as an intentional stab at womanhood, especially that of the mid 1900’s. On the other side, Blanche’s downfall is a demonstration of William’s sympathy for her circumstances and uses it as a condemnation of the society that destroyed her. Despite such strong convictions and great disparity between to ends of the spectrum, William’s motives for Blanche are still unknown. Throughout the play, Williams sympathizes with Blanche, proving he is not misogynistic and instead condemns the social construct that brought about Blanche’s tragic circumstance.

    The Stagnant Lives of Blanche DuBois and Amanda Wingfield    "All of Williams' significant characters are pathetic victims--of time, of their own passions, of immutable circumstance" (Gantz 110). This assessment of Tennessee Williams' plays proves true when one looks closely at the characters of Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire and Amanda Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie. Their lives run closely parallel to one another in their respective dramas. They reject their present lives, yet their methods of escape are dissimilar. Both women have lost someone they cared for, and so seek to hold, and unintentionally suffocate, those they have left.

On the surface, Amanda Wingfield plays the role of a caring mother that would do anything in her children’s best interest. However, according to the play, “The Glass Menagerie”, you should never be fooled by the “Illusion of the truth.” She indeed values her children’s best interest. But in reality, she is a woman trying to relive her youth through her crippled and emotionally unstable daughter. Unlike the other characters, Amanda Wingfield is not clinging to a fantasy, but is fixated on another time and place in her life. A time where she herself was young and truly wanted by others. In light of her own experiences Amanda Wingfield could no longer stand by and see her daughter waste her youth. So, in order to fulfill both her social role as a mother and her fixation of youth, Amanda forced her daughter to follow the tradition of the gentlemen caller. This in modern time can be described as a man properly asking a girl out. Throughout the play, it is shown how desperately she wanted her

By definition, motherhood or mothering represents the caregiving role and work of female parents. For women carrying a child in their womb and then giving him or her birth creates a lifelong bond that cannot be broken. The act of nurturing this little human being strengthen this bond that is built on unconditional love. The mother's love begins with the idea of having a child and extends through the further physiological process of pregnancy, birth, feeding, and care. Further, mother's love represents woman's feelings that her self-love cannot be greater than her love for her child. So, most of the mothers regard the task of motherhood as an honorable task. Motherhood becomes a liberating process as it gives mothers the freedom to love their

During the 1950s the hyper-masculine mold that men were supposed to fit into alongside the importance of marriage and family life for females consequently resulted in devaluing the role of women. Despite an evolving society, the repetitive exposure to television shows, alongside with the patriarchal society that was solidified even more during the post-WWII years, created highly constructed gender identities in America where women continued to be oppressed. In Tennessee Williams play A Streetcar Named Desire, Williams exposes the reality of the glorified idea of the 1950’s female through the depiction of women as being subordinate to men. Through the character of Blanche, Williams represents female’s eternal dependence on men and social class.