The Glass Menagerie By Tennessee Williams

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 novel Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison depicts the many aspects of self-actualization, and the difficulties of growing up in a maltreated life. The story revolves around generations of black family in the south during the segregation of whites and blacks. The character of Macon Dead jr., suffers from a sheltered life. Macon jr., is unaware of his family’s history, and the cruel reality of mistreatment during segregation. In the sheltered and confusing environment Macon jr., lives pushes him to find the authentic individual within himself. Macon jr., evolves through the descriptions, events, and experiences of others. But, who is responsible for making Macon jr.,’s journey of self-actualization to be so slow and difficult. His parents, Macon Dead sr., and Ruth Foster Dead, represent the obstacle hindering Macon jr., from his true authentic identity. Many of Macon jr.,’s major problems are a direct result of his parents suffocating mistakes.

In the books Candide, The Glass Menagerie, Their Eyes were Watching God, and My Name is Asher Lev written by Voltaire, Tennessee Williams, Zora Neale Hurston, and Chaim Potok, they are all discernibly different stories, yet they all appear to share the common theme of perseverance in varying degrees to find that happiness is not always awaiting them. I have found that the various symbolic language combined with each author’s different style of writing not only makes each story unique, but they also affect each reader’s perceptions.

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.

Every person has one illusion or another. Occasionally to the point where it becomes difficult to even recognize what is real from false itself: “If something is there, you can only see it with your eyes open, but if it isn't there, you can see it just as well with your eyes closed. That's why imaginary things are often easier to see than real ones.” (Norton Juster) Every character in The Glass Menagerie, written by Tennessee Williams, tries to find some sort of solace in order to escape the brutality of reality.

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.

Discovering a Stolen Identity: Milkman’s Attempt to Find what was Stripped from his Enslaved Ancestors in Song of Solomon

Most importantly, he was left aloof as there was no direction to follow, no lofty goal to reach, no barrier to break open. “His life was pointless, aimless, and it was true that he didn’t concern himself an awful lot about other people. There was nothing he wanted bad enough to risk anything for, inconvenience himself for. …He was bored. Everybody bored him. The city was boring. The racial problems that consumed Guitar were the most boring of all.”(Morrison 107) Milkman pays no heed to the problems that others of his race must face as they don’t directly affect him; therefore he has no obligation to even consider them and separates from his own race. Guitar, Milkman’s friend, finds purpose in rectifying the position that society has place on him and his fellows by joining the Seven Days cult which sees to avenging the killings of black men through killing a white person. Milkman disagrees with their philosophy and Guitar’s justification of “loving his race”, viewing it as simply murder. Having neither goal for personal achievements nor the betterment of his society, Milkman is left lost within himself until Pilate begins to set in motion the awakening of her nephew in her interactions.

"Mr. Smith had seen the rose petals, heard the music, and leaped on into the air"

I chose to write a scene from the book Cat on a Hot Tin Roof by Tennessee Williams in a straightforward and ambivalent tone including Gooper and Mae. In addition to that, throughout the scene, I tried to maintain the style of writing similar to Tennessee Williams. I tried to use vigorous diction like Tennessee Williams does in his plays to make the conversation have pace.

In his poem The Tuft of Flowers, Robert Frost tells the story of a lonely man who is turning grass in a field after a mower has cut it down. Though the man at first believes he is completely alone and that all other people are too, he later reevaluates that position, concluding the opposite- that connections exist between everyone and everything and that nobody is ever alone. Frost argues that one is never truly alone as all people are connected to each other. Initially, the speaker in the poem feels lonely and unconnected to the world around him, “I must be, as he had been, — alone,” (ln 8).

Amanda Wingfield was a complex character that encompassed many facets of her personality. She longed to have the life she had as a girl and young woman with gentleman callers and being the center of attention; her reality though, was a much more dismal existence with a son who worked at a factory making little money at a job he despised and a daughter that was as emotionally and physically

Through Amanda’s inability to separate the real from the fantasy, William’s proves that Amanda’s main coping mechanism is to retreat from reality. Amanda’s role as the forgotten southern belle also impacts her relationship with her daughter Laura, who suffers from crippling social anxiety and an inferiority complex as a result of her disability.

Dramatic tension is a figurative device an author would use to add tension to conflict between characters. In Arthur Miller’s play, All My Sons, dramatic tension is created by using theoretical devices and language, utilizing conflicting character personalities, dramatic irony, and character development, to exhibit dramatic tension in order to keep the audience engaged in the play.

All My Sons is a play by Arthur Miller which is set after the second world war but brings in information concerning things that took place during the war. It is about a successful businessman, Joe Keller, who during the war, in the name of fulfilling his so-called familial obligations, fails to recognise the importance of society when making decisions as he is blinded by lust for money (Ternate, 2016) and his strong desire to save his business for his son to take over. This review aims to describe and give personal responses to the book. Arthur Miller’s All My Sons, ‘explores a man’s possible obsession with family and how he uses it to justify his wrongdoings’.