The Glass Menagerie By F. Scott Fitzgerald

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,

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.

The repercussions of attaining or lacking money changes based on the situation of the person possessing it . One could use money as an instrument to create happiness in spite of its vile nature. On the other hand one could be corrupted by it based on what it 's used for or the impact it has on that person 's character. Based on my personal experiences money has always been the one factor that restrains my family from experiencing constant happiness. But that 's not necessarily the same situation for every family. In “The Glass Castle” the Walls family drifted further apart in result of coming across money. The glass castle was an exciting book with a very unique and adventure seeking family. Rex Walls sand Rose Mary Walls were the parents of Jeanette, Lori, and Brian Walls. Initially the family was poor but over time their wealth would increase and decrease creating a series of complications that the family had to face. While encountering wealth, due to the passing away of Rose Mary’s mother who left her a large house in Phoenix and some money, the family felt out of place because they 've become so accustomed to their lifestyle of struggling. “City life was getting to dad. “I’m starting to feel like a rat in a maze,” he told me. He hated the way everything in Phoenix was so organized, with time cards, bank accounts, telephone bills, parking meters, tax forms, alarm clocks, PTA meetings, and pollsters knocking on the door and prying into your affairs.” (106) Their father

In The Glass Menagerie, Tennessee Williams uses the theme of escape to help drive the play forward. None of the characters are capable of living in the real world. Laura, Amanda, Tom and Jim use various methods to escape the brutalities of life. Laura retreats into a world of glass animals and old records. Amanda is obsessed with living in her past. Tom escapes into his world of poetry writing and movies. Jim also reverts to his past and remembers the days when he was a high school hero. Mr. Wingfield is referred to often throughout the play. He is the ultimate symbol of escape. This is because he has managed to remove himself from the desperate situation that the rest of the family is still

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.

In the play, The Glass Menagerie, by Tennessee Williams, Williams uses many symbols which represent many different things.?Many of the symbols used in the play try to symbolize some form of escape or difference between reality and illusion.?The first symbol, presented in the first scene, is the fire escape.?This represents the "bridge" between the illusory world of the Wingfields and the world of reality.?This "bridge" seems to be a one way excursion.?But the direction varies for each character.?For Tom, the fire escape is the way out of the world of Amanda and Laura and an entrance into a world of new dimensions.?For Laura, the fire escape is a way into her own world. A way to escape from reality.?Amanda perceives the fire escape as a way

In a dystopian society where life consists of television walls and the burning of books, deep, underlying themes surface throughout the course of the novel. These themes can be connected to each other with one thing: fire. Ray Bradbury uses fire to show the intellectual discourse in this futuristic society overrun with technology by using characters and other symbols to show the downfall of a society where entertainment and “snap endings” are increasingly valued. At the beginning of the novel, Montag meets a young girl, Clarisse McClellan: the symbol of innocence. She represents how technology has destroyed most of the innocence within the world. The phoenix, as explained by Granger, represents mankind, rising from the ashes, in a way representing the transformation Montag goes through. A symbol represented throughout the whole novel is the parlor walls. They represent a distraction from reality so people don’t need to have independent thought. Ironically, they end up getting burned down by none other than the fire.

The masterful use of symbolism is delightfully ubiquitous in Tennessee Williams’ “The Glass Menagerie.” He uses a collection of dim, dark and shadowy symbols that constantly remind the audience of the lost opportunity each of these three characters continually experience. This symbolism is not only use to enlighten the audience to their neglected opportunities to shine, but it is also repeatedly utilized to reinforce the ways in which the characters try in vain to cross over turbulent waters into a world of light and clarity. It is thematically a wrenching story of life gone by, and the barren attempts to realize another reality that is made more poignant by symbolic language, objects, setting, lighting and music. The characters are

The signal fire was a symbol of civilization, and the boys' attempts and willingness to return to society and real life. Fire is used like a GPS it tells us throughout the book how close or how far away the boys are from society, and when they've given up all hope of being rescued. At the beginning of the book, the boys set up a fire at the highest point on the island. This fire is to be a signal to flag down any ships that might be passing by and then could rescue the lost children. This fire burns strongly for

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 novel, Great Expectations by Charles Dickens, uses the symbolism of fire during the incident at Miss Havisham's home. This symbolism represented many things, mainly Miss Havisham's personality and her life.

The author, William Golding, uses a huge amount of symbolism to reflect society of the outer world with the island. Symbols of fire, the conch and water are described all throughout the novel. Fire represents hope, strength and knowledge, but it also represents disorder and destruction, switching from good and useful to evil and uncontrollable.

Symbolism plays a fundamental part in Tennessee Williams’s play, “The Glass Menagerie”. Examples of the use of symbolism include the fire escape, as an escape from the family, the phonograph, as an escape from reality, the unicorn, as a symbol for Laura's uniqueness and the father’s photograph, representing something different to each character. Through recognition of these symbols, a greater understanding of the play’s theme is achieved.

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