Essay on the Symbolism of the Menagerie in The Glass Menagerie

Have you all heard of taylor swift? The countless boyfriends she has had. The way that every single one of her songs symbolizes one of her relationships. Is it weird that she cannot keep a man? Likewise, Tennessee WIlliams uses his play The Glass Menagerie to symbolize his personal life. The play is about the Wingfield family. A fatherless family that includes a mother, a sister, and Tom Wingfield as the narrator of the play and a character in it. Tennessee Williams uses his memory play The Glass Menagerie to symbolically reflect his life through the character of Tom Wingfield.

Taylor swift writes all her songs reflecting her boyfriends. Likewise, Tennessee WIlliams uses his play The Glass Menagerie to symbolize his personal life. The play is about the Wingfield family. A fatherless family that includes Tom Wingfield as the narrator of the play and a character in it. Tennessee Williams uses his memory play The Glass Menagerie to symbolically reflect his life through the character of Tom Wingfield.

The qualities of glass parallel Laura's characteristics: like the tiny glass animals, she is delicate, beautiful in her oddness, terribly fragile. The little collection, like Laura, in an entity that is locked completely in the realm of the home. The animals must be kept on a little shelf and polished; there is only one place where they belong. In a similar way, Laura is kept and cared for, dependent on her mother and brother for financial support. The Blue Roses are another important symbol of Laura. The image of blue roses is a beautiful one‹and it is the image that is on the screen at the start of Scene Two. But blue roses are also pure fantasy, non-existent in the real world. Laura, like a blue rose, is special, unique even, but she is also cut off from real life. When Tom accidentally breaks some of the pieces in the glass menagerie, the incident foreshadows Laura's heartbreak later on in the play. The event emphasizes the collection's fragility, and so metaphorically we are reminded of Laura's fragility. Tom is the one responsible, and the pain of his position is made clear. As much as he would like to live his own life, his actions have a great effect on the well-being and security of his mother and sister. By being reckless, he destroys the pretend-world of his sister. Later on, he chooses to live his own life rather than live up to his responsibility for her security.

“The Glass Menagerie” is a play by Tennessee Williams. There are only four characters in the drama with a fifth character referenced so much that his character is a big part of the story line. The play is about a southern woman named Amanda and her two grown children. Tom is the son who has the responsibility of taking care of his sister and their mother. Laura has a disability that limits her capabilities and her confidence; consequently, her mother does not seem to understand how these limitations have made her life events extremely different from her mother’s early years. The fourth character, Jim, is an acquaintance of Tom and is a gentleman caller who ends up doing more harm than good for Laura. Amanda’s husband, who abandoned the family long ago, is not in the play, but is referenced throughout the story line; the set even has a big portrait of him hanging in the living room. Williams portrayed the personalities as he typically has in other plays with “characters who prefer dwelling in a fantasy world” (Wang). The characters have such a fascination of past events that they are not able to focus on the best choices for the present.

Laura is unable to survive in the outside world. She retreats into the apartment and her glass collection. Laura consumes herself with the “little animals made of glass,” and tells Jim that if “[he] breathes it breaks”. When Laura is describing the glass figures to Jim, she emphasizes how fragile they are. This is a comparison to Laura, meaning that she is fragile like the glass. It seems like Laura is describing herself when she talks about the glass pieces. While Jim was holding the unicorn, he accidently snaps off the horn, and Laura then replies with “its lost its horn, so it is like all the other horses”. I believe that this is foreshadowing what is going to happen between her and Jim. Just like the unicorn, Laura is broken by the experience, never to be

In a 1965 interview, Tennessee Williams said, “I have always been more interested in creating a character that contains something crippled. I think nearly all of us have some kind of defect, anyway, and I suppose I have found it easier to identify with the characters who verge upon hysteria, who were frightened of life, who were desperate to reach out to another person” (Stang, 1965). The Glass Menagerie takes place at the apartment of the Wingfield family in the 1930s. Each character finds the need to escape reality due to their individual personal desires and motivations. The main characters Laura, Amanda, Tom Jim and Father each have various weakness and strength that develop their character. Tom is the narrator and the protagonist of the story. He desires to escape his overbearing life for a life full of adventure and excitement.

The major conflict in “The Glass Menagerie” is the feeling of hopelessness that each of the Wingfield’s struggles with. Amanda’s hopelessness comes from the feeling that she isn’t as important as she once was, as though her fame/glory is slowly fading away. It is this fear that causes her to push Laura to become more socially accepted and popular with others. Laura is extremely afraid of seeing Jim O’Connor, and beneath that we can see her insecurities about her physical appearance and her fear of being able to be a productive member of society. Tom’s desire to create poetry stems from his fear of being stuck in a job where he feels he won’t make a difference, that isn’t taking him

The Glass Menagerie, a play by Tennessee Williams, is set in the apartment of the Wingfield family, housing Amanda Wingfield and her two children Tom and Laura. The father left many years ago, and is only represented by a picture on the living-room wall. The small, dingy apartment creates a desperate, monotonous feeling in the reader. None of the Wingfields has any desire to stay in the apartment, but their lack of finances makes it impossible to move. Escape from this monotonous and desperate life is the main theme throughout the play.

The Glass Menagerie is an autobiographical story. All the characters have some relation in the real-life family of Tennessee Williams. The author of The Glass Menagerie tries to tell us the story throughout one of the characters memory. The scenes of The Glass Menagerie do not function nor try to give us a traditional plot but instead they give us a piece of line or timeline that the author once lived through.

The Glass Menagerie is one of Tennessee Williams most famous play. A sort of autobiographical play that closely resembles Williams’s life before stardom.

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.

Have you ever felt like just running away from all of the things that worry you, scare you, and make you shiver? In The Glass Menagerie the characters only way out of the house is through the fire escape, it also symbolizes the ability for the characters to escape their daily lives and have some time to themselves. The movie theatre is a way for Tom to escape his home life, this place feeds Tom’s hunger to escape. After Laura left the University she used to go to the museum, it seems as if has a deeper meaning than just her hiding away from her mom, but it is a place where she used to escape from everyone and the the world around her. The need for the characters to escape in the play The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams, he gave them these locations like the fire escape, movie theatre, and the museum which he created for their escape.

The Glass Menagerie is a play written by Tennessee Williams the book talks about the hardships faced by the single women and how they care for their children. The play has four characters. Amanda Wingfield is a woman from Mississippi whose husband moved the family to St. Louis and abandoned her and her two children. Laura has been left disabled by disease, and Tom is a would-be poet. Amanda's life is a mixture of reality and fantasy; she has struggled to support her children, who are now grown, but she refuses to acknowledge Laura’s disability and dreams of a happy married life for her. Each member of the Wingfield family is unable to overcome

The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams had ordinary people in an ordinary life that closely resembled the influences of Williams’ personal life while having reoccurring themes and motifs throughout the story. The play has been done by many with some variations in the scripts and setting while still clinging to the basic ideas of the original play.

In The Glass Menagerie, by Tennessee Williams, the Wingfield family tries to escape from their humdrum reality. The Wingfield family consists of Amanda, Tom, Laura, and a nonexistent father. Tom and Laura’s father is a traveling business man that is never there to support their family. They feel that their life in their St. Louis apartment is undesirable. None of the characters are capable of living in the real world. What the characters do not realize is that they cannot run away from their problems. Through a struggled attempt to preoccupy their minds from their reality, the characters feel trapped in their accommodations. The Glass Menagerie is a memory play, meaning that the narrator, Tennessee Williams, is portraying the events of the play via thoughts that are drawn from his memory. Williams develops his theme of the impossibility of true escape by comparing it to his life through the setting, plot, and characters.