Glass Menagerie: Self-Loathing in Gender Roles

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, 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.

In Lorraine Hansberry’s Raisin in the Sun, the reader is given a glance at gender roles in the 1950s, except with a twist. The Younger family has been plagued with lower class in society, so that means that Lena Younger (mama), Ruth, Walter, and even Travis have to work hard and receive little pay. This often causes tension between family members. Similarly, the Wingfield family in Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams struggles for money. Set in the middle of the Great Depression, Amanda Wingfield is trying to find a gentleman caller for her daughter Laura because Laura has trouble working, and they cannot tie down Tom, her brother, forever. The societal expectations on gender roles and class in the 1900s has damaging effects on both the Younger

This leads to the subject of how men have been viewed throughout the course of history. In the past, men have been seen as the protectors and providers of the household, just as women have been most popularly viewed as

   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.

Rather than directly attempting to destroy a man, a women drifts away from demanding anything from her husband. Instead she starts acting like she is unable to do certain things just because she wasn't receiving what she wanted from him, which is also a way of domination. Each example destroys the relationship between the sexes because the expectations of one sex alters one's actions or way of thinking. Nevertheless, both are products of negative affects during one's

Men of the present day aren’t automatically viewed as a head of the household type figure. Men these days often share the responsibility of earning an income for the family. They also help with things such as cooking and shopping.

I will first start out explaining Marks attitude toward gender roles. Mark belongs to an elite group of people at his college, which is where he studies sociology at, and he takes extreme pride in that. He strives to belong to the inner circle of all groups and to be with the most elite of all groups. Mark enjoys being the head of the household and is proud to be the provider. He has a well paying job and can provide for himself and Jane without her having to work, which allows her to dedicate all of her time to fulfilling her duties as a wife. Jane does not accept her role as a woman and housewife. Jane was a scholar and independent woman before her marriage to Mark. After her marriage to Mark she had to assume the role of a housewife. She had to do all of the cooking and cleaning in the house and often sat alone due to Marks absence for work. Jane wanted to be a man in a man’s world, a woman who did not need the permission of her spouse to do anything and could continue her studies without having other duties to fulfill. Contrary to Jane, a character named Mrs.Dimble who is the wife of Mr.Dimble, a member at St. Anne’s, assumes the role of a wife quite gracefully. She is the complete opposite of Jane. Mrs.Dimble completes all wifely duties and even has a maternal sense to her when concerning Mr.Dimble’s students. Jane always perceived Mr. and

    Tennessee Williams has a gift for character. Not many playwrights do, and even fewer possess the unique ability to craft a character as paradoxical and complex as Amanda Wingfield. In The Glass Menagerie, Amanda is a very difficult character to understand because of her psychological disposition. Williams realizes this and provides the reader with a character description in hopes of making the character more accessible to meticulous analysis.

Amanda needs Laura to get married because Amanda had internal pain from when her husband left her and she didn't want her to go through the same thing. Tom told Amanda about a gentleman caller he got for Laura. Amanda's husband used to drink and she is very self-conscious about not wanting Laura's gentlemen callers to do the same. Laura has no autonomy because of Amanda.

In Tennessee Williams’, “The Glass Menagerie” Amanda was a woman who liked to reminisce about the past in order to escape from reality. Amanda was not wicked but intensely flawed. Her failures were centrally responsible for the adversity and exaggerated style of her character. Certainly, she had the endurance and heroism that she was able to support her children when her husband was gone. In her old life, she was once a Southern Belle with a genteel manner who lived on Blue Mountain. This was a place where Amanda’s version of the good old days back when she was young and popular. Amanda was full of charm in conversation that she managed to have seventeen gentlemen caller in a single day.

The Glass Menagerie is a play set in the 1930s, and the 1930s was an era where society expected women to live a domestic life. According to a journal titled “‘Women Who Have No Men to Work for Them’: Gender and Homelessness in the Great Depression, 1930-1934” by Elaine S. Abelson, “Women, unlike men, have never been fully detached from family, domestic life, and a quasi-dependent role” (106). This quote demonstrates that women have long been family-oriented, homebound, and reliant individuals. It is significant because it clearly depicts societal expectations for women in the 1930’s. During this time period, women felt oppressed because society wanted them to stay home, care for the children, cook, clean, and maintain the household; they were subservient to men. In general, a woman was not encouraged to work outside of her home because men were the traditional breadwinners. As a result, it was rare and unacceptable for women to be apart of the workforce. The workforce often discriminated against them because of their gender. This quote reveals important insight into the play by portraying the role that Amanda and Laura have in their family. Being that Amanda and Laura are women, their duty is to live a domestic life in which they accomplish daily household tasks while Tom provides the income. Amanda and Laura are not given the equivalent opportunities as Tom, so they must heavily rely on him.

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