Glass Menagerie Metaphor

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 terms of Laura herself, the glass menagerie in the central symbol to the play and represents, not only the different aspects of Laura, that is delicate and fragile, but also how Laura is trapped within a cabinet - within the fantasy world of glass figures. This links into the phrase ‘left on the shelf’, the idea that Laura, being part of the glass collections, has been left away from leading the normal life of romance which she fantasises about with Jim, showing how she has trapped herself on the shelf by being out of touch with reality, trapped within the cabinet. Linking on from the glass figures being symbolic of Laura, the delicacy could be seen as symbolic of her disability, something Laura also believes traps her from being ‘normal’. However, this links onto the next aspect of exploring relationships, and in many ways Amanda is responsible for Laura’s belief that her disability entraps her.

   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.

“The Glass Menagerie” by Tennessee Williams, was written in the early forties but could be misconstrued as a present-day play, because of the family dynamic that has changed since the forties but has not been completed replaced. In this play, we are introduced to Tom Wingfield who is the breadwinner for the family, which consists of his mom and sister. Amanda Wingfield who is an overbearing mother that knows no boundaries, and Laura Wingfield who is the sweet, and embarrassingly shy daughter of Amanda. Their family dynamic is like most of ours. The mother loves her kids dearly but struggles with letting go of her old identity, the daughter who allows her disability to determine her happiness and the brother who is obligated to work but would rather drink and party his money away. I’m sure many of us can relate to this family in some form. My favorite character in “The Glass Menagerie” is Laura. I love Laura because I can relate to her in more than one way. I was a shy individual most of my life, but once people got to know me they realized I was no different from them. In the following paragraphs, I will share Laura’s character with you, the similarities between Laura and the glass unicorn and I’ll tell you how the glass unicorn represents Laura.

The Glass Menagerie means the glass animals collected by Laura. Laura is as beautiful, fragile and vulnerable as the animals. The slight leg disability made Laura sensitive and inferior. As she was afraid to face the teachers and students, she dropped out. Her mother sent Laura to business school to learn typing in order to find a job. But Laura vomited during the speed typing exam as she was too nervous, so she had to drop out again. Laura was afraid of reality and only willing to stay in a fantasy world. Thus, she spent her day at home

Broken Glass and Breaking from the Past In Tennessee William’s 1944 play entitled The Glass Menagerie, Williams employed prevailing symbolism to illustrate Laura’s odd habit and ultimate fate. Laura escaped from reality when she was in the presence of her glass animals, and suffered emotionally due to her physical deformity of one leg being shorter than the other. The figurine in her collection that she admired the most was her glass unicorn, which also served as a powerful representation of her oddness and physical defect. Throughout this essay I will further discuss the significance of the glass unicorn, by giving further detail on the connections made between Laura and the glass unicorn.

In The Glass Menagerie, Laura lives in her own illusion of what she feels like is reality. Laura is a girl with no motivation to pursue a career or relationship. She lives in a world of delicate and fragile glass animals, a lot like herself on the inside. For example, the book says “Whereas fabricating an idealized past becomes Amanda’s compensation for her present existence, Laura’s retreat

The glass menagerie is symbolic of the Laura’s life and personality. Laura resembles the nature of the glass animals due to her being a fragile character. She is extremely shy and can easily break down when is faced with adversity. For example, she is fragile as she sees her high school crush, refused to talk to him, and tripped knocking herself out. The unicorns represents how Laura is different than her peers around her. She stands out due to her shy and crippled nature. Similarly, a unicorn is unique because of its horn among horses. When the horn breaks off the unicorn, it represents that it can now be like the other horses to no longer be different. This is what Laura wants in her life.

Laura spends most of her time with her collection. But the unicorn is Laura’s favorite. The broken glass unicorn represents her being different from others,“I’ll just imagine he had an operation. The horn was removed to make him feel less-freakish! Now he will feel more at home with the other horses, the ones that don’t have horns...”(Williams 86). The unicorn is the outsider of the horses and Laura is the outsider in her reality. Laura wishes she could fit in with her society and not be a freak.But she is comparable to the unicorn because it has to break to fit in. Laura has to break to fit in her society’s

Laura Wingfield, from the classic play The Glass Menagerie, by Tennessee Williams, plays a pivotal and probably the most significant role in the story. She plays a physically and emotionally crippled young woman who unlike the rest of her immediate family, always seems to have a sense of compassion. Laura is always trying to keep peace in the Wingfield apartment, giving us a small sense of her character. The sheer fact that Laura has the least amount of lines in the play only adds to her selflessness. Many aspects of the play are symbols of Laura’s characteristics and tendencies, making Laura the most symbolic figure in the play.

The Glass Menagerie, a play written by Tennessee Williams, portrays the Wingfields’ constant disappointments with reality, love, as well as the hardships that come with having their own image of the ideal human experience. To help the Wingfields get through some of these hardships, they possess many objects and make references throughout the play, which allows their family to escape from reality. Symbols and metaphors such as the glass menagerie, Laura’s nickname, Blue Roses and the glass unicorn affect the theme of the characters refusal to accept reality because those examples affect Laura’s everyday life. One example of a symbol used throughout the book, the glass menagerie, affects the overall theme of the characters refusal to accept

People who are different are sometimes seen as inferior individuals with subordinate lives. Tennessee Williams, playwright of the famous, The Glass Menagerie, exposes these ideas through the development of the character Laura, while tying her to strong symbolic features such as her glass unicorn in order to show the audience everyone has hope. On the surface, Laura is seen as a bleak character with an empty future, but with the symbolism utilized by Williams, Laura’s tremendous strength is revealed as she recognizes her abilities as well as a positive future for herself. At first, the breaking of the glass unicorn can be seen as a troubling experience for Laura, because throughout the play the reader has seen her emotional attachment with

Laura’s glass menagerie represents her own emotional spirit. Laura had a minor physical impairment. Because of her physical appearance, she had a fragile and delicate inner appearance as well, like her glass pieces. Appearing weak to herself, outsiders were not able to see her true inner self and who she really was as an individual. The glass menagerie is a good comparative to Laura’s feelings about herself and how those around her also feel.

Laura instinctively reaches for the glass to reassure herself so that she can try to make the fear her mother has instilled into her head disappear. When Laura gives the broken unicorn to Jim to take as “ a souvenir” (Williams, 130), it reveals a drastic change in her. The broken unicorn represents Laura’s broken heart. The broken unicorn helps to develop her realization of her faux reality and to finally take a step into the real world.

The most important symbol in this play is the title itself, The Glass Menagerie. A menagerie is a collection of wild animals kept in captivity for exhibition; in this case it was Laura’s collection of glass animal figurines. The little figurines, especially the unicorn, represent a number of elements about Laura and the entire play itself. The glass is a symbol of fragility, which is also a key facet to the overall symbolism in this memory play. Like the Menagerie, Laura is unique, delicate, and somewhat childish.