Tennessee Williams Mental Illness

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.

Clayton is a thirty-eight year old who is suffering from severe depression. Dr. Marco describes his family as being “dysfunctional”. Both of his parents have addictive personalities. Clayton’s father was an alcoholic, and was mentally and physically abusive. His mother was someone he could always count on until one day after she got tired of his father’s abuse and turned to drugs. Shouting, violence and being talked about were common in his household.

Many stories have a certain event that provides a plot to a story. From a big battle scene to a quest or journey, every good narrative has a conflict. An exception to this recurring plot point is The Glass Menagerie. The play was written in 1944 by the playwright Tennessee Williams. Williams wrote the story without a physical antagonist, but rather an abstract notion of hopelessness that is bestowed upon the characters. Every character in the Wingfield family struggles with this in their own way. With these struggles, the climax of each character can be derived. The Glass Menagerie was written with the theme of the play as a priority, rather than the story being the conductor of the theme.

The Glass Menagerie is a memory play written by Tennessee Williams in 1944 which tells about the life a family of three. This play is an incredible piece because it is based off the life of Tennessee Williams himself; the main characters are Amanda, the mother, Tom, the son, and Laura, the daughter. In Paul Newman’s depiction of the play which has been converted into a film, the film perfectly uses acts out every aspect of the play. Tennessee Williams keeps the audience attentive in his play, that’s why the film was successful. Williams accomplishes this through the character’s glass menageries, Laura’s emergence out of her shell and heartbreak, and the ending.

The Glass Menagerie is arguably the most symbolic and deep plays ever written. The Glass Menagerie isn’t just a story of Laura’s disability, it has a deeper meaning behind it, and it can be easily overlooked by mediocre minds. Although the story revolves around the Wingfield family, Tennessee Williams throws in symbolism that corresponds with his childhood. In a way, he found closure for the loss of his sister Rose through writing The Glass Menagerie. One of the symbols is the play that holds a different meaning for each of the characters is the fire escape. As the play evolves the fire escape brings out Laura’s, Tom’s, and Amanda’s true desires.

Primarily, Tom recognizes his life now, from his life when living with his mother and sister, and realizes that he the reason he abandoned them was to fulfill his needs. Specifically, Tom argues with his mother about his life choices: “Why, listen, if self is what I thought of, Mother, I’d be where he is - GONE!”(3.79-80). Here, Williams reveals a side of Tom that as readers we have never seen before. We can infer that Tom is more interested in doing

“The Glass Menagerie” by Tennessee Williams written in 1944. In many of his plays the circumstances reflect his own life, in the Glass Menagerie this is especially true. His father, a violent traveling salesman, and mother a puritanical, preacher’s daughter. He also had an older sister named Rose, whom he cherished, she suffered from psychological problems which lead to an institutionalized life. The Glass Menagerie represents a somewhat altered image of the Williams family, set in the 1930’s in the Wingfield’s meager apartment; which is in a lower-class tenement building in St. Louis, it’s a “memory play,” in which Tom (after his own real name Thomas) recalls scenes from his youth during the height of the Depression. Outspoken Amanda, Tom’s

Therefore, Tom is a bit willing to cooperate with his mother's notion of finding a gentleman caller for Laura. Amanda's life is not what she had hoped for as a young southern belle who grew up in Blue Mountain. Her means of escape lies in her vivid memories of receiving "seventeen! - gentleman callers" in one day (1977.scene I). The sweet memories of what she could have had far exceed the reality of the path she chose. Out of fear of her own loneliness, Amanda strives to find a way for Laura to escape. When her attempt to educate Laura as a means to escape fails, she turns to marriage. Amanda's revelation that "Girls that aren't cut out for business careers usually wind up married to some nice man" turns into an obsession to find the missing link to Laura's escape from the shadow of her mother's life (1982. scene III).

The Glass Menagerie first opened on March 31, 1945. It was the first big success of Tennessee Williams’ career. It is in many ways about the life of Tennessee Williams himself, as well as a play of fiction that he wrote. He says in the beginning, “I give you truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion'; (1147). The characters Tom, Laura, and Amanda are very much like Williams, his sister Rose, and his mother Edwina. We can see this very clearly when we look at the dialogue, and the relations between the action in the play and the actions in Tennessee Williams’ life.

Amanda Wingfield was a complex character that encompassed many facets of her personality. She longed to have the life she had as a girl and young woman with gentleman callers and being the center of attention; her reality though, was a much more dismal existence with a son who worked at a factory making little money at a job he despised and a daughter that was as emotionally and physically

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

There are many events in Tennessee Williams’s early life that is similar to the details in The Glass Menagerie. Williams had a bad relationship with his father, who was clinically alcoholic (Debusscher 1). Williams’s dysfunctional family plays a role towards his homosexuality (Debusscher 4). A research group discovered that children who have alcoholic parents have a problem with their sexual identity (Debusscher 4). Alcoholism not only affects the victim but the whole family as well (Debusscher 2). He uses fantasy to survive chaos and pain to escape the truth (Debusscher 3). In The Glass Menagerie Williams draws attention to Mr. Wingfield’s alcoholism when Amanda fears that Tom might become a drinker (Debusscher 3). Mr. Wingfield has abandoned the family many years ago (Holditch 2). Though Tennessee Williams's background affects his plays, the time period in America also plays a part in his writings.

Set in the 30’s, The Glass Menagerie, written by Tennessee Williams uses various forms of symbolism to signify numerous different things. The play is set in the apartment of the Wingfield family in the city of St. Louis. Of the Wingfield family, none of them admire staying in the apartment and only dwell due to their state of poverty. The play is the recollection of one of the characters, Tom Wingfield, and his struggle to accept his responsibilities of caring for his mother and sister. Throughout the play as a whole, Williams portrays the aspiration of escaping into an imaginary delusional world by symbolizing the fire escape as a literal departure from their own realities for Tom Wingfield, Amanda Wingfield, and Laura Wingfield.

The Glass Menagerie is a masterfully written play by Tennessee Williams and set in 1930’s America. The text develops themes about betrayal, broken relationships and disloyalty through the use of various stylistic devices to evoke an emotional response from the audience. One may think the text is ancient, as it was released during the 1940’s, however, it holds relevance to modern society, as it illuminates the gender expectations of women. Read on, and it will soon be clear why The Glass Menagerie is deception at its finest.