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,

In the play “The Glass Menagerie” each of the characters uses different escape mechanisms to avoid real life. Amanda, the mother, consistently tries to live in the past. Laura, the daughter, avoids the real world by using her own escape mechanisms; her glass figures, and her music and taking walks. Tom, the son, is always avoiding the real world by either going to the movies every night, or going to get drunk. Throughout this paper the reader will gain knowledge of how each character escapes from their everyday lives that they are living.

   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.

In The Glass Menagerie, Tennessee Williams beautifully encapsulates man’s desire to escape from uncomfortable emotional and physical situations. Whether he’s showing a young man trapped in a factory job he hates, an aging single mother who mourns for her life as Southern belle, or a young lady who fears that she’ll spend her life alone, he clearly demonstrates these desires and fears for his audience. Williams shows us through the actions of his characters how humans handle a wide variety of uncomfortable situations, and how these situations dramatically influence one’s ability to thrive. The playwright doesn’t seem to believe in the idea of “bloom where you’re planted”, and the desire to escape becomes a major theme of the play, demonstrated across multiple characters in a wide variety of ways. Creative individuals often do not thrive in noncreative, industrial environments. Williams demonstrates this clearly in this “memory play”, which carries many autobiographical element. Tom Wingfield represents his own character, Williams himself, and also serves as a narrator, making him quite the complex character. Williams’s uses Tom to show how an emotionally complex, creative individual can quickly feel trapped and tied down in a factory job, longing to get out, see the world, and pursue a job with more creative elements. Tom’s escapism, drinking, and evening theatrical adventures all reflect the life of the playwright himself, as Williams was known to struggle with alcoholism

“The Glass Menagerie” by Tennessee Williams, was written in the early forties but could be misconstrued as a present-day play, because of the family dynamic that has changed since the forties but has not been completed replaced. In this play, we are introduced to Tom Wingfield who is the breadwinner for the family, which consists of his mom and sister. Amanda Wingfield who is an overbearing mother that knows no boundaries, and Laura Wingfield who is the sweet, and embarrassingly shy daughter of Amanda. Their family dynamic is like most of ours. The mother loves her kids dearly but struggles with letting go of her old identity, the daughter who allows her disability to determine her happiness and the brother who is obligated to work but would rather drink and party his money away. I’m sure many of us can relate to this family in some form. My favorite character in “The Glass Menagerie” is Laura. I love Laura because I can relate to her in more than one way. I was a shy individual most of my life, but once people got to know me they realized I was no different from them. In the following paragraphs, I will share Laura’s character with you, the similarities between Laura and the glass unicorn and I’ll tell you how the glass unicorn represents Laura.

The Glass Menagerie is a memory play narrated by the main character and son, Tom Wingfield. It takes place in their apartment in St Louis, 1937. The father left them years ago leaving Tom to support the family. He works in a shoe warehouse, a job in which he hates and wants to leave, but can't because he has a duty to support the family. His mother, Amanda is loving and caring but nags too much, annoying Tom. She expresses the desire for her daughter, Laura, who is crippling shy, to have "gentlemen callers". Amanda finds out that Laura dropped out of college because of her shyness and she demanded Tom to choose a gentleman caller for her. He chooses Jim O'Connor, a boy who she liked in high school, but was too shy to talk to him before. Tom invites him for dinner and Jim talks to her and gets her to open up a little. He leads her on by kissing her then after tells her he is engaged. He then leaves and Laura gets sad. Amanda yells at Tom, blaming him for it. Tom reveals to the audience that he abandons his family later that night and has been haunted by Laura ever since.

Each character in the Glass Menagerie is living in their own fantasy world, which reflects that during the period of World War II and the Great Depression, the U.S. working people in lower middle class worked hard in different ways in face of cruel reality. Whether live in the past, hide themselves from others, walk out bravely, or even completely escape from the result, they all struggled between the real and were unable to escape the tragic fate. The beautiful fantasy is as beautiful and fragile as the glass menagerie.

Moving on, The Glass Menagerie is a memory play narrated by the character Tom Wingfield who recounts one of his biggest regrets. The play focuses on the climatic decision between his commitment to his family versus his personal desires. Tom remembers that he longed to be free, but has stayed in the family because he

The Glass Menagerie, the characters are all facing some sort of problems. One of the main character in the play is Laura Wingfield. The rest of her family consist of Amanda Wingfield , her mother and her brother Tom Wingfield. Laura lives in a fictional world with her glass figurines. Laura is terribly shy, and has no gentlemen callers. The important thing in the play The Glass Menagerie is the glass figurines. Laura struggles to be social in society . The play takes place during the Great Depression where families struggle to survive.

Tennessee William’s The Glass Menagerie demonstrates subtle plot devices and characters to tell the story (Brinkman 1). The main characters within the literary work comprise of the Wingfield family: Amanda, Luara, and Tom. Despite having three main characters, the main question still stands: The Glass Menagerie belongs to who (Garner I)? Does the story belong to Amanda, Laura, or Tom? With compiled evidence, I believe the literary work belongs to Laura.

The Glass Menagerie is a memory play that is, in a way, a partial autobiography of the life of its author Tennessee Williams. Williams, like Tom, worked in a factory and lived with his mother and sister. With this in mind, it’s no wonder why Tom is so fond of his sister Laura, and always more than happy to do what his mother says when it comes to her. For example Amanda, Tom’s mother, has requested Tom to bring home a gentleman caller for Laura to which he responds:

The Glass Menagerie lures the audience into taking a voyeuristic glimpse into the private lives of the Wingfield family, which consist of Amanda, the domineering mother of two adult children, Tom and Laura, and who welcomes Jim, a “gentleman caller” hosting him to a gay evening in the grandest Antebellum tradition. The contrasts in William’s play are manifested through the character traits of Tom and Jim (the dreamer and the doer), Amanda, dwelling in the past, while colliding with the present, the mother and children, seeking escape into fantasy, denying reality, failing to come to terms with, or acknowledge that psychological and

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 was a well written novel by the author Tennessee Williams because of all the different aspects of the characters’ lives and views of things. For example Laura an older single mother who wants the best for her two grown children, Laura who is 23 years old and Tom who is the older brother. There father Mr. Wingfield abandoned them for long distance traveling and never came back so Laura is taking care of them on her own. Her daughter Laura is shy and quiet girl who has a crippled leg and cannot work because of it and her oldest son Tom is just like his father and wants to get out of Chicago and travel but he works for a factory to provide for his family. At the beginning of the novel it was uninteresting but towards the end it improved. The best part of the novel for me was at the end when Jim came over to the Wingfield’s house and Laura didn’t now it was Jim her high school sweetheart. Throughout the novel there were little hints about what was going to happen like from the characters talking,the subtitles, and the dramatic music that played throughout the play, so it was really easy to understand.

“The Glass Menagerie,” by Tennessee Williams, is a memory play designed to reveal some type of truth by examining the life of a family living in St. Louis. However, what exactly the play is trying to reveal remains unclear even as the play draws to a close. The play ends on a slightly confusing note, with Tom, the narrator, saying “for nowadays the world is lit by lightning! Blow out your candles, Laura - and so goodbye....” (Williams 97) and then Laura blowing out her candles. However, upon closer examination, the meaning and significance of this line become clear. After examining the symbolism around candlelight and natural light, it is evident that the last line of the play is really Tom saying that he is seeing the harsh reality of the world, and therefore he is begging Laura to get rid of her kindness and hope. Only once he relays this message can he say goodbye and let go of her memory, which gives the reader a hint at his motivation for telling this story.