Disabilities In Tennessee Williams The Glass Menagerie

Tennessee William’s renowned play, The Glass Menagerie, is a tragic tale about a family that doesn’t live in reality. Instead, the Wingfield family is constantly trying to use whatever means to escape their harsh and unsatisfying lives. Laura Wingfield, the daughter in the play has extreme social anxiety stemming from her own insecurity about her defective leg. She uses her defective leg as justification for becoming more introverted, participating in her own world rather than the one around her. Due to Laura’s insecurity about her leg she develops extreme social anxiety that prevents her from doing anything productive in the world around her. At the beginning

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.

The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams is a celebrated and cherished play that has affected generations. Written in 1945, the play very well may have been an outlet for Williams to accept what had happened to his own sister. Rose Williams had been lobotomized due to schizophrenia, affecting her brother greatly. While Williams’ family may be real, his characters are over dramatic and eccentric. The characters of Amanda, Tom, and Laura make up an extremely dysfunctional family living together in a 1930’s Saint Louis. By the end of the play, each character has affected themselves and each other. The characters spend the majority of their lives inventing someone who will make the rest of their family members happy, and when these facades crumble,

Tennessee Williams, born Thomas Lanier Williams, wrote The Glass Menagerie, a play which premiered in Chicago in 1944. This award winning play, autobiographical in nature, represented a time in which Williams felt the obligation of his responsibilities in regards to the care of his family. Robert DiYanni, Adjunct Professor of Humanities at New York University, rated it as, “One of his best-loved plays...a portrayal of loneliness among characters who confuse fantasy and reality” (DiYanni 1156). Alternatively, The Glass Menagerie, a play set in the era of the Great Depression and written from the narrator’s memory, was meant to teach us the how our relationships with one another can alter our futures, for better or worse. Everything about this particular play was a direct and clear symbolization of Williams ' life growing up. Williams uses characterization to depict several people from his real life in this play; his sister, himself, his overbearing mother, absent father, and a childhood best friend. Williams does a splendid job transforming his personal life into a working piece of art. In Tennessee Williams ' play, The Glass Menagerie, his character, Laura, is central to the structure and focus of the story due to her individual ties to all of the supporting characters throughout the seven scene play.

Williams’s play is a tragedy, and one of quietude. He once expressed that “Glass Menagerie is my first quiet play, and perhaps my last.” It is a play of profound sadness, and through relationships between characters, portrays the “cries of the heart.” There is no cry more powerful that the cry and inner desperation of the heart. Williams’s has very little social context, but rather focuses on the conflicts within a domestic family. Such a focus is powerful, and the playwright expresses this power and importance implicitly through the estranged relationship between Amanda and Tom Wingfield.

Laura overcomes physical obstacles by walking around town despite her disability. Laura says in a cheerful manner “I went to the art museum and the bird houses at the zoo. I visited the penguins every day!” (Williams 33). Laura gets out and walks around even though she has a disfigured leg. It makes her feel happy and independent when Laura does this. This is important because it shows that Laura is strong, independent and overcame what made her different or what some would call a “freak”.

We are sometimes known as our own worst critic and after reading Alice Walker’s short story “Everyday Use” and Tennessee Williams’ play “The Glass Menagerie”, we experience two characters that display this to be true. In “Everyday Use” we are introduced to Maggie, the timid and homely little sister who has burns throughout her arms and legs due to a house fire which occurred many years prior to when the story takes place. In “The Glass Menagerie” we read about Laura, an introverted character who suffers from a childhood illness causing her to have one leg shorter than the other leaving her to rely on the use of a

For decades, the “lost” and socially alienated characters in Tennessee Williams’ plays have remained some of the theatre’s most memorable characters. Many feel The Glass Menagerie is Williams’ best drama and his characters are the most

The Glass Menagerie was written by Tennessee Williams in 1944 and given this fact, it reflects some of the social norms,roles, and values of its time. One of the issues is the way in which gender influences the personalities and behaviors of the characters. Many of the women in “The Glass Menagerie”, for example seem to be helpless. The Glass Menagerie has a lot of symbolism but it also has a lot of gender specifics that affect the personalities of the characters. One example is when Jim and Laura are talking,

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

Tom and his sister Laura is symbolically the actual glass menagerie, the play belongs to neither of them. The play belongs to their mother, Amanda, as substantiated by

“ The Glass Menagerie ”, a memory play by Tennessee Williams, not only depicts the depressing and unhappy lives of the Winfield family at St. Louis around 1930’s, but also highlights the obstacle for Tom to pursuing his dreams under the family obligations; the obstacle for Laura to overcoming shyness and inferiorities to interact with the

 Laura, our fragile daughter-figure, finds herself escaping life at every turn. She induces sickness in her typing class and even as the Gentleman Caller awaits her in the livingroom.

Set in St. Louis Missouri prior to World War II, Tennessee Williams reflects back on his deeply tragic and dysfunctional familial experiences in, “The Glass Menagerie”. Williams brilliantly incorporates real aspects of society to reveal how they contributed to the nonreal aspects and the conflicts which affected his family. The real aspects of the play which had a significant impact on the lower middle-class families such as the Wingfields included, the economic hardships surrounding the Great Depression, the fall of the American south, society’s intolerance towards homosexuality, and many threats abroad. Although Williams play was merely a series of hazy memories, the nonreal aspects combined with the major societal conflicts contribute

Tennessee Williams, an American playwright, his famous works are “The Glass Menagerie” and “A Streetcar Named Desire” Tennessee Williams creation of drama is directly related to own personal life and experience. He has a sister Rose Williams she is diagnosed with schizophrenic. In The Glass Menagerie it is talking about a memory play in the 1940s talking about Tom Wingfield in the 1930s, Tom is the narrator and the major character in the book. The other three characters are Amanda the mother, Laura sister of Tom, and Jim the gentleman caller. Laura in the book is like a reflection of Rose; they both are disabled in some parts of their body. In The Glass Menagerie’s, Laura is crippled and in real- life Rose has schizophrenic. As the book has been a classical collection of Tennessee Williams a lot of people have read it from around the world by westerners and also easterners. The context of the book is talking about the United States classic low class families. For easterners, they might not be well