The Glass Menagerie And For Whom The Southern Belle Tolls

In The Glass Menagerie, by Tennessee Williams, and A Doll House, by Henrik Ibsen, each protagonist faces the difficulty of society’s rule. Tom, being the “man of the house”, provides for his family and is depended upon. Were as Nora is co-dependant of her puppet master of husband Torvald. Despite their differences, Tom and Nora parallel the flaws in their common daily lives.

Williams wrote about his life. The Glass Menagerie is a very autobiographical play. A Streetcar Named Desire, although meant to a play that anyone can relate to, also contained characters and situations from his life. In both plays, the characters are drawn from his life. The other relationship

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,

The loss of her husband causes Amanda to develop a dependence on her children. She wants Tom and Laura to become successful. Amanda complains that Tom does not earn enough money at the shoe factory. She wants him to attend night school so he can attain a better career.

Nora and her husband have just found money through her husband’s raise at the bank, but Noar is unhappy with her relationship with Herman.  “I mean that I was just passed from Papa’s hands to yours. You arranged everything according to your own taste, and so I had all the same taste’s” (Isben 1606). Nora is not happy with where she is in the relationship. She is just being led like cattle, but she is now leaving so she will not have to deal with it anymore. “I’m leaving right now” (Ibsen 1606). There are similarities and differences in these aspects between the two plays. Tom in The Glass Menagerie is also sympathized for, but he is not the center of attention until the end of the play. Laura and Jim are the center of attention. This is until the audience finds out Jim and his girlfriend Betty are “going to be married the second of June” (Williams 1656). The tone in this play can be seen as gloomy. Not one character in this play has found what they want in life. Tom wants happiness, his mother wants a good man, and Laura wants a husband to love her. Tom in The Glass Menagerie wants to better his career and life, and Nora in A Doll’s house wants to better herself and pay back the debt she owes to Krogstad. In the end they both achieve their goal.In The Glass Menagerie Tom leaves to find a better life for himself, but he is then left with thinking about his sister and how he did her wrong. “Oh, Laura, Laura, I tried to leave you

When I had finished reading each book once, each story appeared to have such contrasting meanings. For example, Candide initially gave me the impression that his innocence dwindles consistently as he experiences countless people who have suffered outrageous hardships, deceptions, and the people who dole out these miseries. The Glass Menagerie was a bit complex to understand because I was not accustomed to reading books in play format, but I thought that it was trying to establish the mother’s relationship with her children. I could relate to this due to the fact that being a teenager along with my brother, we have disagreements on almost everything and what mothers may want best for their children. Also, Amanda -- mother to Laura and Tom -- tries her best to instill values she thinks is essential in Laura’s gentleman caller and Tom due to her horrid experience with her husband who “gave up his job with the telephone company and skipped

The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams and Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller are two of the twentieth century’s best-known plays. The differences and similarities between both of the plays are hidden in their historical and social contexts. The characters of The Glass Menagerie and the Death of a Salesman are trapped by the constraints of their everyday lives, unable to communicate with their loved ones and being fearful for their future. There are a lot of comparisons that exist, especially between the settings, symbolism and characterization drawn between the two plays. The contrast comes form the ways that the characters choose to deal or not with the harsh circumstances of life.

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 allows the main characters in the plays, A Streetcar Named Desire and The Glass Menagerie, to live miserable lives, which they first try to deny and later try to change.  The downfall and denial of the Southern gentlewoman is a common theme in both plays.  The characters, Blanche DuBois from A Streetcar Named Desire and Amanda from The Glass Menagerie are prime examples.  Blanche and Amanda have had, and continue to have, many struggles in their lives.  The problem is that Williams never lets the two women work through these problems and move on.  The two ladies are allowed to destroy themselves and Williams invites the audience to watch them in

Both Death of a Salesman, and The Glass Menagerie have many things in common. They are both great plays, and both concern dysfunctional families. But there is a deeper similarity to these great literary works. The similarity between the parents. Due to Willy Loman and Amanda Wingfield's lack of coping skills, as well as their inability to let go or accept their past, their children are ill-equipped to deal with the future.

   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 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 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

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