Essay On The Glass Menagerie

In The Glass Menagerie, by Tennessee Williams, and A Doll House, by Henrik Ibsen, each protagonist faces the difficulty of society’s rule. Tom, being the “man of the house”, provides for his family and is depended upon. Were as Nora is co-dependant of her puppet master of husband Torvald. Despite their differences, Tom and Nora parallel the flaws in their common daily lives.

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 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 characters that come alive in Williams' works represent people from his life. Amanda Wingfield from The Glass Menagerie holds strong resemblance to Tennessee's mother Edwina Williams. Williams described his mother as "a woman whose endurance and once fine qualities continued to flourished alongside a narrowness of perception and only the dimmest awareness of human feeling (Susquehanna. "Biographical Criticism)." Amanda easily mirrors this description of Edwina because of her selfishness concerning Laura's being unattached; Edwina was much like Amanda, getting numerous gentlemen callers as a young woman. Laura Windfield in The Glass Menagerie is very much like Williams' sister Rose Williams. Rose was institutionalized for having schizophrenia and was not able to interact with the outside world. Having pleurisy, Laura was also kept from being a part of the world she longed for. By using examples of people from his own life in

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, 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.

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

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.

    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

The glass menagerie symbolizes Amanda Wingfield's overwhelming need to cling to her past and her fulfilled fear of being alone.  Amanda resents the poverty-stricken neighborhood in which she lives so

Tennessee Williams (1911-1983), born Thomas Lanier Williams and is considered by be one of the leading playwright of his age and post-World War II America. He took many of the elements of his plays from his own life. He was born in Columbus, MS, to a violent, aggressive traveling salesman and a high-minded, puritanical, preacher 's daughter. He had an older sister named Rose, who he adored, but suffered from mental problems that eventually caused her to be institutionalized. Rose was the model for several of Williams characters,His family moved to St. Louis at some point in his childhood. Williams attended a succession of universities before he finally received his degree in playwriting. Between stints in college, he worked for three years in a shoe factory.

If I could change the outcome of the story, I would have allowed Laura and Jim O’Connor to get married. I would have made this change because then Amanda’s problem would have been solved, and Laura would have had financial support in the future. Another reason I would have made this change is because Jim O’Connor would have been the ideal man for Laura because he connected with her. He saw past her awkward fondness of a glass animal set. He also got Laura to take pride in herself.

The Glass Menagerie is a memory play written by Tennessee Williams in 1944 which tells about the life a family of three. This play is an incredible piece because it is based off the life of Tennessee Williams himself; the main characters are Amanda, the mother, Tom, the son, and Laura, the daughter. In Paul Newman’s depiction of the play which has been converted into a film, the film perfectly uses acts out every aspect of the play. Tennessee Williams keeps the audience attentive in his play, that’s why the film was successful. Williams accomplishes this through the character’s glass menageries, Laura’s emergence out of her shell and heartbreak, and the ending.

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.