The Glass Menagerie Analysis

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,

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 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

The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams narrates the story of a dysfunctional Southern family during the Great Depression struggling to achieve their dreams. The novel is written as a memory from Tom Wingfield’s mind as he looks back on his past. Amanda Wingfield, the mother, unable to come to term with the reversal of economic and social fortunes, controls her children’s lives. Laura Wingfield, her daughter, is terribly shy and just wants to stay home, while Tom, Laura’s brother, hates his job. Amanda wants Laura to become get married soon, while Tom wants to escape his boring life and experience adventure. The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams should be added to next year's curriculum because of its insight on distorted reality and

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.

On Sunday, March 11th, I went to see a live production of “The Glass Menagerie” at 2:30 P.M. in downtown Chattanooga. I chose to see “The Glass Menagerie” because it was in Chattanooga, which I thought it would be the easiest place to find a production to go to on the weekend so I did not have to worry about going to one later in the semester. When I was seated, the first thing I noticed was the age group that was attending. It consisted of almost completely of elderly white woman and men. There was only one couple that looked like they were in their late thirties. I felt a little out of place because Chase Pruitt and I were the youngest ones there. We were all seated in uncomfortable black plastic chairs. I was able to find a seat in the second

In Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie, surroundings have molded each character. This fact is especially evident in the character of Mrs. Amanda Wingfield, an aged mother from a traditional southern family, who is constantly controlling the lives of her children. Amanda is crippled with a fear of abandonment and an obsession with finding a man for her daughter since her own husband left the family. Mrs. Wingfield’s overbearing inclinations lead to the overall degeneration of the family.

The glass menagerie is a superb work of art by Tennessee Williams. It is a play that highlights the various realities and desperations of its characters in their response to a confused society. Williams has an admirable talent for creating a play that’s genre is serious and has a tragic ending; yet he keeps the story interesting to the audience whether it be through reading it as a text or in the theater.

Set in the memory of narrator Tom Wingfield, an aspiring writer who works in a shoe factory yet longs to travel beyond the city of Chicago where he provides for his mother Amanda and sister Laura as his father left them in , the Glass Menagerie explores multiple themes through in depth instruction for actors and casual dialogue which follows a simple plot filled with complex ideas and characters. While the mother Amanda expresses concern about their future and worries Tom will follow in his father’s footsteps, foreshadowing the finale of the play, Laura lives isolated in a dream work separate from reality where she faces overwhelming anxiety that she distracts herself from with old records that belonged to her father and now serve her in drowning

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.

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

Born Thomas Lanier Williams III, Tennessee Williams produced multiple Pulitzer Prize-winning play writes throughout his career. However, his breakout play was The Glass Menagerie. After perfecting his play for many years, The Glass Menagerie was first introduced to Broadway on March 31, 1945. As a young writer, Williams lived vicariously through his plays. Throughout this play in particular, there are several allegories that pertain to Williams 's life directly. Although Williams had a relatively happy childhood, his life changed when he was relocated to St. Louis, Missouri. “The carefree nature of his boyhood was stripped in his new urban home, and as a result Williams turned inward and started to write” (bio). Writing plays was a way for Williams to express his frustration within his family. The Glass Menagerie is a representation of a majority of things. Primarily however, it is a play in which Williams tells his autobiography through Tom.

While reading Tennessee Williams play, “The Glass Menagerie”, readers are drawn into the drama and disaster that is the Wingfield family. This book was written very much like an autobiography of Williams life. There were several different film and television versions of this play done thru the years from 1950 to 1987. After watching several different adaptations, Paul Newman’s film adaptation in 1987 is extremely faithful to the written version. Focusing on plot, setting, and character development the audience is introduced to a family with an austere future structured around a series of abandonments, difficulty accepting reality and the impossibility of true escape.

Tom Wingfield is the narrator and dominant character in Tennessee Williams’ timeless play, The Glass Menagerie. Through the eyes of Tom, the viewer gets a glimpse into the life of his family as well as into the depressed era that they live in. His mother is a southern belle who desperately tries to hold onto her past and her position within a society bygone; his sister who is tentative and cripplingly shy lacks the social skillset to function openly in society; Tom himself is a young writer and poet who is continually distraught over his life, which to him lacks adventure and substance. Williams has managed to write a magnificent play which incorporates