Essay on Escape Mechanisms in The Glass Menagerie

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

In The Glass Menagerie, Tennessee Williams uses the theme of escape to help drive the play forward. None of the characters are capable of living in the real world. Laura, Amanda, Tom and Jim use various methods to escape the brutalities of life. Laura retreats into a world of glass animals and old records. Amanda is obsessed with living in her past. Tom escapes into his world of poetry writing and movies. Jim also reverts to his past and remembers the days when he was a high school hero. Mr. Wingfield is referred to often throughout the play. He is the ultimate symbol of escape. This is because he has managed to remove himself from the desperate situation that the rest of the family is still

   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.

In Tennessee Williams’ play, The Glass Menagerie, all four members of the Wingfield family have chosen to hide from reality. Amanda tries to relive her past through Laura, and denies anything she does not want to accept. Laura is terrified of the real world, and choses to hide behind her limp, her glass menagerie and the victrola. Tom hides from his reality by going to the movies, writing poetry, and getting drunk. Mr Wingfield hides from his reality by leaving his family and not contacting them after he has done so. Each member of the Wingfield family has their own escape mechanism which they use to hide or escape from the real world.

She thinks she is extremely abnormal, and plays pretend with her glass animals as an escape from reality. Williams further victimizes her by giving her a limp, making her handicapped. Laura considers herself a “freak,” which hinders her rate of maturity. Laura and her mother frequently argue about how Laura will achieve a successful lifestyle for herself, and Amanda pushes her into situations Laura feels uncomfortable in. One of these situations is placing Laura in a business school, which she secretly drops out of. During this scene, Amanda is interrogating Laura about why she dropped out of business school, and reveals a conversation she had with a woman who works there. The employee states, “Her hands shook so that she couldn’t hit the right keys! The first time we gave a speed test, she broke down completely—was sick to at the stomach and almost had to be carried into the wash room! After that morning, she never showed up anymore. We phoned the house but never got any answer,’” (Williams 14). Laura is the victim of an overwhelming shyness, which disables her from functioning normally. When Amanda says to Laura, “I thought you were an adult; it seems that I was mistaken,” (Williams 12), she further supports the idea that Laura is stunted in mental growth development. The only scene where

In both plays it is seen that the characters experience difficulty with recognizing what is a fantasy and what is reality. Amanda and Willy both deny their childrens’ underachievement and blames and accept that the destiny of their kids exists in their grasp. Consequently, they envision their kids as being something they are not, trying to shroud their childrens’ disappointments. Such illusions permit Amanda and Willy to feel fruitful in framing Laura and Biff's lives. Amanda denies Laura as a challenged person and adjusts any individual who trusts her to be along these lines, all throughout the play. Willy impacted Biff's conviction that he had been a sales representative for Bill Oliver. Biff starts to scrutinize this after the meeting that

To escape the harsh means of reality, humans gravitate to leaving in the past or a dream. Some people fear dreaming, while others live to dream. Tennessee Williams’ play The Glass Menagerie presents three incomparable worlds: dream, reality and memory. The members of the Wingfield family in The Glass Menagerie shield from the reality and choose to live in a dream or a memory. Williams conveys that each character has their own dreams, which are wrecked, by the real world. The whole Wingfield family chooses to live in a dream or a memory and disregards the expectation of the present. Accompanying with many ideas, Williams denotes the uncomfortable situations the Wingfield family faces many times. William explores the nature of dreams, memory,

I agree that the `The Glass Menagerie' is definitely a play about life that is explored "through he fantasies of a crippled girl." However, more than that, it is a play about family and how they interact with each other, causing them to lead such a life. So, yes, although the plot centres on Laura, we also learn a fair amount about Amanda and Tom's life. Therefore, Williams actually explores life through the fantasies of an American family who share one main thing in common- they all have big dreams, but they are all flawed. Thus, failure is their only fate.

Amanda, abandoned by her husband, must now raise her two children alone, Tom and Laura. Amanda is informed

The Glass Menagerie is a play written by Tennessee Williams. It is mainly about three characters: Tom Wingfield, the narrator; Amanda Wingfield, Tom’s mother; and Laura Wingfield, Tom’s sister. The family is supported by both Tom and Amanda, working at a shoemaking warehouse and selling magazine subscriptions respectively. However, with some things unable to work, Amanda wants Laura to have a man to support both of them, but there are some things that are restraining her from doing so, such as Laura’s disposition. Tom brings a man named Jim O’Connor to satisfy Amanda’s wants, but this, too, does not work out. The Wingfields are all stuck in their own illusions in some way, and Jim is the only escape, coming from the real world. The Glass Menagerie explores many things in the aspects of a dysfunctional family, using contrasts between fantasy and reality.

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

In The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams, the primarily characters exhibit a state of illusion that originates from their dissatisfaction and unhappiness with their lives. Tom seeks adventure in the movies. Amanda reminisces often about her days as a Southern Belle. Laura sits in a dream world with her glass collection, and Jim wallows in the praises of his high school glory. In their own unique ways, they demonstrate their anxiety. Thus, the characters are all displeased, but take no action to improve their situation in any feasible.

In Tennessee Williams' drama "The Glass Menagerie", Williams uses symbolism and foreshadowing to show how the little things in people's lives can be the "escape" of the reality of daily problems that they may face, main example being Laura's glass figures. Story is introduced with Tom, the protagonist and narrator of the story. The other characters are his sister Laura, and his mother Amanda, who is the antagonist. An imperative element about the story is that it is not told in the narrator's present time, but is entirely based of his memories. Tennessee Williams did that to place an emphasis on the mood of the story through Tom's point of view. In the story, Amanda and Tom constantly fight because of Amanda's harassment, which in turn is causing Tom to be both unhappy and restless. She resents how Tom likes to spend his time. He likes to drink and watch movies, but Amanda taunts him for wanting to pursue his own dreams instead of working to support his family. So every character in the story faces a certain dilemma. Tom hates his job, while Amanda wants to make changes to Laura so that she can be more outgoing. Which in turn causes Laura not be at ease. But Laura is true to her character, she doesn't get angry, but is extremely shy. Some messages in the story jump out at you, such as the difficulty of accepting reality, and how people can't truly escape their problems. The central mood is that of despair. As the story progresses, each character is working through a

The Glass Menagerie is set in 1937 in St Louis, Missouri where America was in a time of peril when the American economy collapsed and caused a shortage of jobs and money known as the Great Depression (Roberts and Zweig 1379; 3). The play is about a family who lived in an apartment complex in Missouri. The story is about a son named Tom Wingfield, who tells “memories” about a problem about his sister (Williams 1380; 1). Tom works in a shoe warehouse and is miserable of the job and dreams of a career away from his family, his mother and his sister stay in an apartment. Laura the sister who believes that she can’t do anything because of her physical appearance and quits school entirely because of her self-esteem. Her mother requests her son to find a gentleman caller for Laura because the mother believes that she would be taken care of if she finds a suitor to marry the daughter, but it does not go well because the man that tom finds is already engaged and ready to marry another girl. Because Laura Wingfield is exceptionally timid and self-conscious, she is afraid of taking judgmental calls which can alter her limited lifestyle in Tennessee Williams’ classic American drama The Glass Menagerie.

A person’s path to enlightenment and understanding can be tumultuous and challenging. In the play, The Glass Menagerie, by Tennessee Williams, each character has difficulty accepting reality. This makes them withdraw into their own little world of illusion to find a sense comfort and peace. In The Glass Menagerie, the author presents the glass figurines as a metaphor for the Wingfield family along with other families during the Great Depression.