The Glass Menagerie Essay

Amanda becomes a woman bent on finding her daughter either a job or a husband and finding out why her son disappears every night. To help her appear strong and willful, Amanda escapes to her own days as a young girl, finding more than seventeen gentlemen callers, and allows herself to believe her life is stable enough that her daughter and her will be financially taken care of. These facades crumble when she realizes her daughter has never been capable enough to find either a job or a husband. While these expectations of Laura hurt her, they allow her mother to escape to her days of being flaunted over and adorned by men. Once she does see her daughter is struggling, Amanda has to face the fact that her daughter will always be dependant upon her mother. These realities continue to affect how her children act and the results of the

Tom is asked to seek out a potential gentleman caller for Laura, and he decides on a man

The glass menagerie symbolizes Amanda Wingfield's overwhelming need to cling to her past and her fulfilled fear of being alone.  Amanda resents the poverty-stricken neighborhood in which she lives so

            The complexity of Amanda's character directly affects her action and dialogue with her children. In her role as mother she exhibits an overwhelming desire to see her children succeed in life. In trying to push them toward her ideal of success, she at times unwittingly hurts them even though she means well. Her actions often hide her intense love for her children, but it is an important driving force in her motivations. She loves them too well--at times to a point of smothering them (perhaps the reason for the departure of her husband)--which results in her attempt to push them towards all the good things she has known and remembered and away from anything that does not suit her ideal.

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.

Tom’s memories also prohibited him from finding happiness and moving forward, but it also led to the creation of the play. All of the characters have ways to deal with their cruel memories, except Tom. Amanda has her happy days from her youth and Laura has her glass collection. Tom has no sufficient way of escape. He has tried escaping to the movies, but he came to realize that it was not a real way out.

“The Glass Menagerie” by Tennessee Williams, was written in the early forties but could be misconstrued as a present-day play, because of the family dynamic that has changed since the forties but has not been completed replaced. In this play, we are introduced to Tom Wingfield who is the breadwinner for the family, which consists of his mom and sister. Amanda Wingfield who is an overbearing mother that knows no boundaries, and Laura Wingfield who is the sweet, and embarrassingly shy daughter of Amanda. Their family dynamic is like most of ours. The mother loves her kids dearly but struggles with letting go of her old identity, the daughter who allows her disability to determine her happiness and the brother who is obligated to work but would rather drink and party his money away. I’m sure many of us can relate to this family in some form. My favorite character in “The Glass Menagerie” is Laura. I love Laura because I can relate to her in more than one way. I was a shy individual most of my life, but once people got to know me they realized I was no different from them. In the following paragraphs, I will share Laura’s character with you, the similarities between Laura and the glass unicorn and I’ll tell you how the glass unicorn represents Laura.

Jim O’Connor tried to escape his engagement by remembering past images and romanticizing with Laura in a certain scene. Laura was shocked when Jim O’Connor was “the gentleman collar” that Tom invited over for dinner

The pressures of society in The Glass Menagerie push Laura Wingfield to be a shy girl who does not have any contact with the outside world. Laura’s biggest flaw, her slight limp, cause her to shut out the world and become a hermit. Amanda, her mother, pushes her to go to college and find a man whom will take care of her. However, Laura’s insecurities kick in and she just about throws up during her first speed test in college, which shows just how serious her situation is. Her personality shines through her glass animals, whom she cares for with great tenderness. Laura has withdrawn from the real world and gone into a make-believe world which she creates from her set of glass menagerie.

It is fair to say she may be somewhat out of touch with reality due to a slight disability, in which her glass menageries comfort her. Amanda views her daughter, Laura as fragile, like glass. As the title of the play informs us, “The Glass Menagerie,” or collection of animals, is the central symbol. Her collection of glass animal figurines represents the different facets of Laura’s own personality. Comparable to the figurines, Laura is delicate.

Although evident that Laura is fond of Jim, her shyness omits her from initially interacting with

Laura is Tom’s brother and Amanda is their mother. Amanda living in the past, Laura collecting her glass menagerie and Tom going to the movies every night show that each of them try to escape reality. First, Amanda escapes reality by reliving her own past. In the play, Amanda relives her own past to escape her current problems. “I’m not expecting any gentleman callers”

Laura Wingfield, from the classic play The Glass Menagerie, by Tennessee Williams, plays a pivotal and probably the most significant role in the story. She plays a physically and emotionally crippled young woman who unlike the rest of her immediate family, always seems to have a sense of compassion. Laura is always trying to keep peace in the Wingfield apartment, giving us a small sense of her character. The sheer fact that Laura has the least amount of lines in the play only adds to her selflessness. Many aspects of the play are symbols of Laura’s characteristics and tendencies, making Laura the most symbolic figure in the play.

In “The Glass Menagerie,” Laura’s mother is very uptight and is always pushing Laura to find a husband. Since, Laura has been very shy, she was unable to put herself out there to attract male suitors. Her mother also puts Laura in typing school, so that if she can’t find a husband, than at least she can work. However, Laura quits because she got sick in front of the whole class and was extremely embarrassed, so she stopped going. This is what pushed her mother to find a husband even more. Her mother asked her brother, Tom, to ask around his co-workers to see if there are any young bachelors. Tom brought home a man named Jim, and before Jim’s arrival, the apartment was renovated by their mother in order to make Jim feel more comfortable in their home. Laura and her mother prepared all day for Jim’s arrival, Laura was given an extra padding to her bra, “Because, to be painfully honest, your chest is flat” (Amanda 53), as her mother said. When Jim arrives, Laura has been too shy to even be in the same room as him, so she stayed in another room for the first couple minutes. When she finally came out and talked to Jim, she started breaking out of her shell and had a full conversation with him. They talked about high school and how Jim barely knew about Laura’s disformity, she shared her most favorite glass figurine (a unicorn), and danced. However, when they were dancing, since the

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