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,

Amanda Wingfield’s life is turned upside down by her husband’s departure. In her mind it shatters hope for

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.

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 this play, Amanda, wants the best for her children, but should realize that they have their own lives.

   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 play, The Glass Menagerie, by Tennessee Williams is a play that focuses on the flaws of people and the overwhelming feeling that many face throughout their life. Tennessee Williams was quite familiar with this feeling. During his career Tennessee Williams even said:

Have you ever watched a play and been amazed to how real the play appears? Refer to this as realism. Realism tries to create an illusion that makes a certain situation look like that action is actually happening. Realism can also refer to certain social issues. Something that provides to realism is the spectacle. The spectacle is what the audience sees and hears during the play. In the play The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams, there are several different examples of spectacle. These example gives the audience an entertaining value and sets the tone for the plot. During the play, the spectacles that contribute to the realism would be the screen and the music.

The Glass Menagerie, written by playwright Tennessee Williams, is the story of a family torn apart by heartbreak from the past and tragedy from the present. Williams' parallels this play to his true life experience with his own family, which makes The Glass Menagerie an even more tragic version of what happens to a family when love is lost and abandonment is reality. Providing for a family can be an overwhelming responsibility, for there are many pitfalls along the way, some families are able to cope, some are not, and The Glass Menagerie gives us insight into what truly happens to a family when faced with abandonment.

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.

The Glass Menagerie, a play by Tennessee Williams, is set in the apartment of the Wingfield family, housing Amanda Wingfield and her two children Tom and Laura. The father left many years ago, and is only represented by a picture on the living-room wall. The small, dingy apartment creates a desperate, monotonous feeling in the reader. None of the Wingfields has any desire to stay in the apartment, but their lack of finances makes it impossible to move. Escape from this monotonous and desperate life is the main theme throughout the play.

The delays and choices of the Wingfield family are their ways of searching for a purpose in life. In the play, you can see the character’s attempt to delaying choices. However, you can also see how others choices have affected each other. The husband of Amanda, and the father of Tom and Laura left. The abandonment plays through out; however, it is more about his choice of leaving the family behind. You can also realize Tom’s delay of leaving by his nightly escapes. Laura is escaping anything that must do with the “real” world. Whereas Amanda forces her compulsions trying to make her children’s life choices, both Tom and Laura.

Set in St. Louis Missouri prior to World War II, Tennessee Williams reflects back on his deeply tragic and dysfunctional familial experiences in, “The Glass Menagerie”. Williams brilliantly incorporates real aspects of society to reveal how they contributed to the nonreal aspects and the conflicts which affected his family. The real aspects of the play which had a significant impact on the lower middle-class families such as the Wingfields included, the economic hardships surrounding the Great Depression, the fall of the American south, society’s intolerance towards homosexuality, and many threats abroad. Although Williams play was merely a series of hazy memories, the nonreal aspects combined with the major societal conflicts contribute