The Glass Menagerie Drama Reaction Paper

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,

I believe that the unhappiness that Tom felt could simply have been solved by the actions of his father. Had Tom’s father not have left, the circumstances could have been extremely different. Tom’s mother may not have been as controlling and Tom would not have had to work at the warehouse to pay the bills. There is a lesson that can be learned from Tom’s story: try your hardest and never give up. There are many instanced in The Glass Menagerie in which people simply quit because they were unhappy. Tom’s father’s abandonment of his family may have seemed like a simple solution to him as he left, but the effect of his choice to leave had a lasting impact on the people who loved him. So, in the wise words of Amanda: “Try and you will succeed,”(4. Amanda) because, eventually, the effort that is put into something will have a reward waiting at the finish

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.

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.

Tom’s sympathy with Laura and Amanda prevents him from deserting his family, keeping him in his monotonous warehouse job. However, the photograph of Tom’s father compels him to leave, sparking his desperation to quit his job to explore the world. This hesitation to stay or leave is the direct cause of his trips to the movies. When Tom goes to the movies, he can escape reality while also staying and supporting his family. When Tom gets bored of the movies, he no longer has an escape from his dreadful reality, which forces him to leave. The photograph of Tom’s father mocked him for his entire life, and brought out Tom’s true desire which he had hidden for such a long time.

She is hoping to depend on Tom, that he will change her life around for her. She is a child with to big of an ego to see that not everything will fall into the path she wants it

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.

Amanda comments sarcastically, at the end of the play, that Tom shouldn't think about his poor mother and sister (Williams, T.G.M., 9.114.1-3).  She tries to push her problems off on him rather than deal with them herself.  By laying the blame on Tom, she feels as though she did nothing wrong and that the family’s problems have been caused by others. If the two women had just accepted that they were also to blame, they could have moved on with their lives.

Everyone in the family sticks to their societal role, Tom takes care of the Amanda and Laura, Amanda does some work, but she does do a lot of work in the house, and Laura is attempting to find someone to marry so she does not have to go to work. When Amanda was younger, she tells the reader that she always had gentleman callers, and she is always hoping that Laura will get gentleman callers. An example of Amanda projecting this belief onto Laura is when Amanda says “"Resume your seat, little sister – I want you to stay fresh and pretty – for gentlemen callers! (1.14)”. However, having to take care of his sister and living with Amanda causes tension in Tom’s life. Tom works in a factory, as most men did in the 30s, and this meant that he worked long hours for little pay. Tom wanted to be a poet, but he had to keep working because he had to support his family. Amanda puts a lot of pressure on Tom to be there for his sister, to be his older sister’s guardian, and she gets upset when Tom is out late drinking and going to the movies as his

   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.

Amanda needs Laura to get married because Amanda had internal pain from when her husband left her and she didn't want her to go through the same thing. Tom told Amanda about a gentleman caller he got for Laura. Amanda's husband used to drink and she is very self-conscious about not wanting Laura's gentlemen callers to do the same. Laura has no autonomy because of Amanda.

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

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