The Glass Menagerie By Tennessee Williams

My parents love to live vicariously through me, especially my mother, and while I understand their inclination to do this, it can make them a bit controlling of my actions. Williams exhibits in The Glass Menagerie the damaging effects of overbearing parents on the mental and emotional growth of their children. In the play, the mother inhibits the development of her children because she tries to control her children’s lives, which takes away the ability to become independent and focus on personal needs. Amanda treats Laura like a child and constantly makes decisions for her, and she and keeps him from enjoying his life.

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.

In the play “The Glass Menagerie” of Tennessee William, he wrote a drama play to emphasize readers about the life is at a standstill the Wingfield family. Through of the Wingfield family, he uses many symbols which represent many things, but the important main symbolization is fire escape that shows three main characters; Tom Wingfield, his fire escape is the way out of Amanda and Laura. Amanda Wingfield, hope gentlemen callers to enter their lives, and Laura Wingfield, who wants in her own world by collecting unicorn animals. They express successfully in the play by using the fire escape portrays each of characters as literal exist from their own reality.

“The Glass Menagerie” by Tennessee Williams is a play about desire to escape and this concept is conveyed through a variety of techniques and ideas shown in this play of exploration by the playwright, Tom Wingfield. First, Jim tries to escape his engagement by having a romantic night with Laura. Then, Tom’s father escapes for the same reasons Tom did. Thirdly, according to Roger Boxill from ‘The Glass Menagerie’ Amanda escapes by reminiscing “Blue Mountain ... And the seventeen gentleman callers.” Fourthly, Laura escapes with romance, going for walks, her “Glass Menagerie, stomach pain, and the broken horn from the unicorn. Finally, Tom escapes by traveling, going to the movies, drinking, and hanging out on the fire escape looking at the moon. Symbolism is also used in many literary works to for shadow or emphasizes an event that is about to happen or already has happened in the story. Hence the title ‘The Glass Menagerie’ in the play foreshadows/emphasizes the event happening or about to happen. The action of “The Glass Menagerie” takes place in the Wingfield family’s apartment in St. Louis, 1937. The events of the play are framed by memory Tom Wingfield is the play’s narrator, and usually smokes and stands on the fire escape as he delivers his monologues.

Tennessee Williams’ play, “The Glass Menagerie”, gives the reader a look into a truly dysfunctional family. At first it could seem as if their lives are normal and the Wingfields are a typical family just struggling to get by. Their problems, however, stem from their own fears after they are deserted by their husband and father. They are unable to effectively communicate with each other and resort to desperate acts. The desperation that the Wingfields hold on to has led them to create illusions in their minds and in turn become deceiving.

The Dysfunctional Family In the play “The Glass Menagerie” by Tennessee Williams, Tom had a plan all of his own to quite his job, and go off and join the merchant marines. Tom hated his job and he felt the pressure of keeping up the family finances, as well as keeping up his sister and mother. Amanda, Toms mother appeared to want to control the family, and often told stories of her past growing up in the Mississippi delta. She claimed she had numerous gentlemen suitors, for example Amanda: “One Sunday afternoon in Blue Mountain—your mother received—seventeen`! — Gentlemen callers!”(1384 s.c 1)

TThis essay will discuss the metaphors associated with the characters in The Glass Menagerie and how each of these metaphors represents a fragment of the American Dream. She is like a piece of her glass collection, too fragile to be brought into the real world without being devastated. Because of her sensibility, she has avoided dealing with people for so long that when she finally tries to socialise with Jim, she fails to see that she is being manipulated. Amanda is a faded Southern belle who is trying to relive her past by using her daughter to mirror her former self. She represents nostalgia for the Old South in the play. Tom is a struggling poet who dreams of real adventures but has to provide support for his family. Jim, despite

Life is stitched together with threads that connect us to one another, but what happens when that string is cut? In Tennesssee Williams’ memory play, The Glass Menagerie, Tom Wingfield the narrator tells the play through his perspective and memory. He takes the audience through a hard time in his life. This includes his southern mother, Amanda Wingfield, who gave birth to both Tom and his sister Laura. As for their father he’s nothing but a Hello and a Goodbye to their family. The play revolves around a mother longing to live in the past, a fragile girl who cannot function in society, and an aspiring poet who spends his days working in a warehouse making ends meet for his family. Because Amanda is Independent, relentless, and able to settle for less, she is stronger than her fragile daughter, Laura.

Over the course of The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams, three major characters are introduced. Tom, the son, and provider of the family, serves as both a main character and the narrator. Tom feels trapped by his mother. He feels that, since his father left long ago that he is the only means for which the family to survive. Tom has a somewhat dysfunctional relationship with his mother, Amanda, and he feels as if she won’t just loosen her grasp on him and let him live his life.

In Tennessee William's The Glass Menagerie and in Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, the characters endure similar crises. In Death of a Salesman, the protagonist, Willy Loman, is in a crisis of interrelated events: he is a salesman who has lost his wage and is not making enough off of commision to pay his bills, he has an unhealthy relationship with his son, Biff, and he is regretful of the decision he has made in the past to have an affair. Similarly, in The Glass Menagerie, the protagonist, Tom, finds himself in a conflict with his family, as he is not allowed the freedom he wishes even though he has to pay the rent. His sister, Laura, escapes from her problems and does not confront her mother when she drops out of business college, instead she pretends to go, escaping to places of entertainment. In both plays, it is revealed that the characters wish to escape from these conflicts: in Death of a Salesman, Willy Loman escapes by daydreaming and in the end for good by committing suicide. In The Glass Menagerie, Tom escapes by going to the movies, and in the end by leaving his family. In both plays the characters are placed in situations of crisis, and their crises are revealed through their continual attempts to escape, and through their interactions with other characters.

As children we have our happiness put before others, such as our parents. When we are young those around us, protect us from the cruel reality of the world and the fact that not everything is sunshine and roses. Others will compromise their happiness to allow for the young to live freely and experience the world in their own happy imagination before they are forced to make compromises for others themselves. When faced with the ability to choose one's happiness over others, and vice versa, the true morals of an individual are revealed. This is shown in the play The Glass Menagerie, by Tennessee Williams. Tom, the main character in this play is given a powerful role in his family as he is the primary breadwinner of the household; as a result,

The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams is a play with references to his own life concerning his sister and mother. During the play there are many reoccurring symbols, each symbol is crucial to the play in order to understand the idea of escape. Through the narrator's perspective, we are able to witness the mainstream family during a war depression era. We see a single mother, unable to accept change and retaining to the past; a sister, who has trouble dealing with reality and lives in a fictional world where she has become fragile and unable to function outside her house within society; and the narrator himself a young hardworking male figure within his house, whom the family depends upon. Tennessee Williams is able to create an eventful

a fight at the end of scene two, it is apparent to Laura that Tom is