GEAS2103 Literary Appreciation: Term Essay Outline CUI KE JUN, April (13635670) Essay topic: Compare and contrast the conflicts faced by the protagonists in the two texts. Discuss how they are forced to submit to their parents. In literature, the conflict moves the story forward. When the story is to end the protagonist’s favor, the conflict occurs. It is what the major character must face with and hopefully defeat. What behind conflict is want. The author always creates situations where the characters crave something. Laura in The Glass Menagerie is the tragic heroine and so does the woman called Emily in the story of A Rose For Emily. Both of them have external conflicts with their parents, in other words, they are forced to submit to …show more content…
She never understands the fear, the self-abasement in her daughter’s heart and just keeping pressing her. Similarly, the conflict occurs in A Rose For Emily. Emily’s father deliberately wants to keep his daughter single. So he has been chasing away all of his daughter’s suitors. The father wants her to company with him with full of attention. And after he died, Emily can find her love. However, it is to be regretted that she has already past her prime time. Her father took her to a quite solitary place forever. Emily has spent the past years living like a hermit. In this story, according to the comment by the narrator, there is a statement that is “after her father’s death she went out very little; after her sweetheart went away, people hardly saw her at all”(Faulkner, 1930). In order to achieve the story goal, a writer is supposed to use the conflict as an important element in literary creative writing. It is useful to entertain his readers. Williams and Faulkner successfully did this by creating these conflicts. Conflict in The Glass Menagerie tells the theme about the difficulty of accepting reality and escape. Everyone in this family are facing with this difficulty. And Laura is the one who can not go into the reality most. She stays with her glass animals from day to night and just live in her own world full of illusion and even doesn’t touch the outside world. Just as the description from Bernard, she
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 is one the major writers of the mid-twentieth century. His work includes the plays, The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire. One theme of The Glass Menagerie is that hopeful aspirations are followed by inevitable disappointments. This theme is common throughout all of Williams' work and throughout his own life as well. It is shown through the use of symbols and characters.
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.
The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams is a play that focuses on people’s imperfections and how being overwhelmed can effect a person’s daily life. Tom, Laura, and their father were constantly overwhelmed and acted the way they did because of it. When Williams says:
The masterful use of symbolism is delightfully ubiquitous in Tennessee Williams’ “The Glass Menagerie.” He uses a collection of dim, dark and shadowy symbols that constantly remind the audience of the lost opportunity each of these three characters continually experience. This symbolism is not only use to enlighten the audience to their neglected opportunities to shine, but it is also repeatedly utilized to reinforce the ways in which the characters try in vain to cross over turbulent waters into a world of light and clarity. It is thematically a wrenching story of life gone by, and the barren attempts to realize another reality that is made more poignant by symbolic language, objects, setting, lighting and music. The characters are
For decades, the “lost” and socially alienated characters in Tennessee Williams’ plays have remained some of the theatre’s most memorable characters. Many feel The Glass Menagerie is Williams’ best drama and his characters are the most
The world is crafted through humanity’s perceptions, shaped by their shared experiences of the world, yet differentiated by each individual experience. Within The Glass Menagerie, by Tennessee Williams, the ideas of overwhelming truth, individual perceptions, and the flaws of humanity are all explored. Through the various characters, with a specific focus on Tom’s narration, Williams argues that the truth is only a subjective idea that is created through the perceptions of humankind, molded through humanity’s flaws.
In Tennessee Williams's drama The Glass Menagerie the setting and dramatization in the play are used to convey each member of the family's hopes, desperations, and fears. He uses symbols throughout the story to add a deeper meaning and give his characters a sense of mystery. Also, though maybe inadvertently, The Glass Menagerie actually parallels the people and events in Tennessee Willliams's life.
“The Glass Menagerie” by Tennessee Williams is a play about desire to escape and this concept is conveyed through a variety of techniques and ideas shown in this play of exploration by the playwright, Tom Wingfield. First, Jim tries to escape his engagement by having a romantic night with Laura. Then, Tom’s father escapes for the same reasons Tom did. Thirdly, according to Roger Boxill from ‘The Glass Menagerie’ Amanda escapes by reminiscing “Blue Mountain ... And the seventeen gentleman callers.” Fourthly, Laura escapes with romance, going for walks, her “Glass Menagerie, stomach pain, and the broken horn from the unicorn. Finally, Tom escapes by traveling, going to the movies, drinking, and hanging out on the fire escape looking at the moon. Symbolism is also used in many literary works to for shadow or emphasizes an event that is about to happen or already has happened in the story. Hence the title ‘The Glass Menagerie’ in the play foreshadows/emphasizes the event happening or about to happen. The action of “The Glass Menagerie” takes place in the Wingfield family’s apartment in St. Louis, 1937. The events of the play are framed by memory Tom Wingfield is the play’s narrator, and usually smokes and stands on the fire escape as he delivers his monologues.
Thesis: Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie demonstrates human struggles with accepting the hard truths of reality, creating tendencies to retract to disappointing illusions.
Four years after it was last on Broadway, the The Glass Menagerie returns and a new crowd waits with excitement at the entrance of the Belasco Theatre to see the fresh take on play. Sam Gold’s new Broadway production of Tennessee Williams’s play opened on March 9 and the audience were presented with the unexpected. No curtain, the cold concrete floor, the grim black wall with pipes all over it, and a rectangular dining table with a few apples on it. That was the extent of all decorations on stage, but at least Gold kept all the characters: Tom, Amanda, Laura, and Jim.
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.
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
The Glass Menagerie, by Tennessee Williams, contains multiple themes. While there are many themes, the theme that holds the piece together is illusion versus reality.