The Glass Menagerie Gender

Tennessee Williams is regarded as a pioneering playwright of American theatre. Through his plays, Williams addresses important issues that no other writers of his time were willing to discuss, including addiction, substance abuse, and mental illness. Recurring themes in William’s works include the dysfunctional family, obsessive and absent mothers and fathers, and emotionally damaged women. These characters were inspired by his experiences with his own family. These characters appear repeatedly in his works with their own recurring themes. Through The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire, Tennessee Williams presents the similar thematic elements of illusion, escape, and fragility between the two plays, proving that although similar, the themes within these plays are not simply recycled, as the differences in their respective texts highlight the differences of the human condition.

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.

If there is any signature kind of character that marks Tennessee Williams’s plays, it is without a doubt the faded Southern belle. The Glass Menagerie’s Amanda Wingfield, the mother of Laura and Tom, is a perfect representative of this type, not unlike Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire, also by Williams. A proud and effervescent woman, Amanda passionately holds on to memories of a happier time, of days long gone by. Generally, a faded belle in a Tennessee Williams play is from a wealthy Southern family, raised by parents with traditional beliefs, and has suffered an economic or social, or both, downturn of fortune at some point in her life. Like Amanda, these women all have difficulty accepting a status in society different than what they are used to, as

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.

The character Amanda Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie is the victim of abandonment by her husband and her son after the play. The audience is never introduced to her husband, because he left before the play began. Amanda constantly wishes, she had chosen a wealthier husband over the attractive man who ended up leaving her. She never could live the life she dreamed of, so she forces her fantasies of a wealthy and successful lifestyle on her children. “That innocent look of your father’s had everyone fooled! He smiled—the world was enchanted! No girl can do worse than put herself at the mercy of a handsome appearance!” (Williams 46). Since her son, Tom escapes work to go to the movies, and her daughter Laura flunked out of business school, she

In Tennessee Williams’, “The Glass Menagerie” Amanda was a woman who liked to reminisce about the past in order to escape from reality. Amanda was not wicked but intensely flawed. Her failures were centrally responsible for the adversity and exaggerated style of her character. Certainly, she had the endurance and heroism that she was able to support her children when her husband was gone. In her old life, she was once a Southern Belle with a genteel manner who lived on Blue Mountain. This was a place where Amanda’s version of the good old days back when she was young and popular. Amanda was full of charm in conversation that she managed to have seventeen gentlemen caller in a single day.

In the 1930s males were raised to be the provider for their families, and the head of the households. Females where raised to be housewife and caretaker for the house. In Tennessee Williams “The Glass Menagerie” gender plays a major role on how societies view females and males. Women in this time period obtained little power while men were the dominant ones. That made Amanda depend on her son Tom the sole provider for his family for their finically stability. Amanda’s high expectations of her son for the family security made it harder for Tom to live up to his dreams. In “The Glass Menagerie,” Tennessee Williams blatantly makes assumptions about the gender roles in the 1930s by making the

When analyzing The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams and A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry, common ground can be established between both works. This is because The Glass Menagerie and A Raisin in the Sun are two plays that highlight the significance of gender roles. They specifically make a point of the ways in which gender roles impacted individuals during the 1930s and 1950s. Society established gender roles to create a set of norms everyone should follow. These norms determine one’s behavior based on his or her true sex or the sex he or she associates with. However, issues arise when people feel pressured and forced to live up to society's expectations. In The Glass Menagerie and A Raisin in the Sun, the concept of gender roles ignites feeling of oppression and inferiority in not only women, but also men.

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

Neil Gaiman, a renowned English author, questioned the thought-provoking line, “If you were trapped in an impossible situation, in an unpleasant place, with people who meant you ill, and someone offered you a temporary escape, why wouldn't you take it?” Gaiman advocates towards the idea of when life becomes stressful, people tend to find a “temporary escape” to alleviate anxiety and avoid the harsh realities of the world. In his play, The Glass Menagerie, placed in St.Louis during the Great Depression, Tennessee Williams creates a story that demonstrates this theme of escapism. Tom Wingfield, an aspiring poet who steals away from his mundane life with alcohol and going to the movies, narrates a memory illustrating the familial tensions between him, his mother Amanda, and his younger sister, Laura. Amanda is stuck in an imaginary time loop, constantly reminiscing about her golden days in Blue Mountain, where she attracted seventeen gentlemen callers. Her state of mind was caused by her marriage to a man who chose world travel over his family. Now, she takes comfort in governing her children’s lives and reliving her youth. Tom’s extremely reserved 23-year-old sister, Laura, has lived a reclusive life due to insecurities about her limp. She seeks safety through tending to her treasured glass menagerie and listening to music from a Victrola. Utilizing a myriad of recurring motifs such as the Wingfield apartment fire-escape and deception in his play, Williams spins a tale that

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

    Plagued with addiction, health issues, emotional distress, and a rough upbringing, Tennessee Williams was able to put these ailments to the side and carry a career as an accomplished author, poet, and playwright (“Biography” 1-2). In Tennessee’s novella The Glass Menagerie, a story of a family’s struggles taking place in St Louis, Missouri, 1937, much of the story’s plot and characters have a strikingly similar reality to that of Tennessee and his own personal life. In particular, one of the main characters and the story’s narrator Tom Wingfield shows a life with close correlation to that of Tennessee’s. It can be concluded that Tennessee Williams uses his art and talent for writing as an outlet to express his emotional pain. Williams shows that emotional pain can be expressed through the process of art by the tension Tom’s mother creates, the love for reading and writing, and the need for adventure.

Famous American playwright Tennessee Williams’ play The Glass Menagerie, which was published in 1945, tells the story of a family that refuses to accept or escape reality and thus retreats into their individually fabricated worlds that they have created in which they can find comfort and meaning that the real world does not seem to offer them. This is Williams’ most famous play and also believed to be an autobiographical piece, reflecting his own family members and Williams received a New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for The Glass Menagerie. None of the characters find much solace in reality for a variety of different reasons from social anxiety to feelings of being unfulfilled. They find it difficult to carry on their everyday lives and