Essay on the Theme of Escape in The Glass Menagerie

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,

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

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' 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.

One of the big motivations shown through the characters in The Glass Menagerie is the yearning of escape from the real world. One example shown through Laura’s character is she finds a way to escape reality through her glass menagerie and the old records she plays that once belonged to their father. The mother, Amanda, tries to escape her current life as a deserted wife who must constantly scramble for money by retelling stories of when she was young. Her favorite story to retell regards one day when she received the attentions of seventeen gentleman callers. For her, those gentleman callers represent what her life was and what it could have been if she had not married her husband, “the telephone man who fell in love with long

Glass Menagerie” is a tragic story of the Wingfield family, a dysfunctional family of dreamers

In The Glass Menagerie, Tennessee Williams beautifully encapsulates man’s desire to escape from uncomfortable emotional and physical situations. Whether he’s showing a young man trapped in a factory job he hates, an aging single mother who mourns for her life as Southern belle, or a young lady who fears that she’ll spend her life alone, he clearly demonstrates these desires and fears for his audience. Williams shows us through the actions of his characters how humans handle a wide variety of uncomfortable situations, and how these situations dramatically influence one’s ability to thrive. The playwright doesn’t seem to believe in the idea of “bloom where you’re planted”, and the desire to escape becomes a major theme of the play, demonstrated across multiple characters in a wide variety of ways. Creative individuals often do not thrive in noncreative, industrial environments. Williams demonstrates this clearly in this “memory play”, which carries many autobiographical element. Tom Wingfield represents his own character, Williams himself, and also serves as a narrator, making him quite the complex character. Williams’s uses Tom to show how an emotionally complex, creative individual can quickly feel trapped and tied down in a factory job, longing to get out, see the world, and pursue a job with more creative elements. Tom’s escapism, drinking, and evening theatrical adventures all reflect the life of the playwright himself, as Williams was known to struggle with alcoholism

The theme of Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie is conflict. The play contains both internal and external conflict. The absence of Tom's father forces external turmoil and conflict between Tom the protagonist, and his mother the antagonist. The internal conflict is seen within Tom through his constant references to leaving home and his selfishness. The play is about a young aspiring poet named Tom, who works at a shoe warehouse. Tom is unhappy with is life at home mainly because of his overbearing, over protective mother named Amanda. Tom also has a sister within the play named Laura who chooses to isolate herself from the rest of society. During the play Tom's relationship with his mother is filled with very harsh and abrasive

She struggles with being a recluse in her own home, crippled by her own leg, yet she shows compassion to her counterparts when they exude greed. She is not the main protagonist, but the whole plot revolves around her and her symbols. Every character portrays their own version of Laura onto her in an attempt to project their unfulfilled desires into Laura. The most obvious case is from Amanda, who continuously uses her own youth as a way to try and mold Laura into her former self. Jim on the other hand sees Laura as a unicorn, an exotic creature that does not exist in this world. Just like how unicorns are different from other horses, Laura is different from other girls. The unicorn being glass only furthers how easily Laura takes in the light of other people (their projections on her), and she reflects them out to please the projector. But these projections are fruitless because Laura in fact has a mind of her own, and she acts upon her own will, as shown by her skipping class. When the unicorn breaks, Laura is brought into a pit of despair, fueled by the glass

Laura hesitantly tells Jim that she dropped out of high school because she made poor grades (79). There is a correlation between Laura missing many days of school due to her pleurosis and her poor grades. Blue roses is the nickname that Jim gives Laura because he mishears the word “pleurosis” (17), which was ultimately the cause of her having to drop out of high school. In that manner, the blue roses represent the start of Laura’s academic downfall. Furthermore, Laura was insecure about walking to the back row of a class because of the clumping of her limp, which wasn’t even noticeable according to Jim (81).

In Tennessee Williams' play, The Glass Menagerie, 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 gramophone 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 hero.

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

In Tennessee Williams' play, The Glass Menagerie, Amanda, Laura, and Tom have chosen to avoid reality. Amanda continually attempts to live in the past. Laura's escape from the real world is her glass collection and old phonograph records. Tom hides from the real world by going to the movies and getting drunk. Each character retreats to their separate world to escape the cruelties of life.

The characters in The Glass Menagerie are theorized to be based off of people in Tennessee Williams’s life. The Wingfield family are supposedly similar to Tennessee’s own kin. With that, all of the characters in the play have their strong points and weaknesses in their personalities.

In the play by Tennessee Williams, “The Glass Menagerie,” Williams uses many symbols to help the audience better understand the Wingfield family. Many of the symbols used in the play portray some form of escape from reality. The first symbol revealed to the audience is the fire escape. This represents the connection between the imaginary world of the Wingfield’s and the world of reality. Each character seems to be able to find their escape in their own, personal way. For Tom, the fire escape is the way out of the world that Amanda is forcing on him and a doorway into a world of complete and utter freedom. For Laura, the fire escape is a way into her own world and a literal escape from reality. Amanda perceives the fire escape as a way for gentlemen callers to come in and meet her daughter. This will also help her to escape her own depressing life. In the opening speech Tom says, "I give you truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion" (). Everyone in the play seeks rescuing from their lives, attempting to escape into an imaginary world. In "The Glass Menagerie," Williams ' fire escape portrays each of the character 's need to use it as a literal exit from their own reality.