The Glass Menagerie Hopelessness

   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 theme of Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie is conflict. The play contains both internal and external conflict. The absence of Tom's father forces external turmoil and conflict between Tom the protagonist, and his mother the antagonist. The internal conflict is seen within Tom through his constant references to leaving home and his selfishness. The play is about a young aspiring poet named Tom, who works at a shoe warehouse. Tom is unhappy with is life at home mainly because of his overbearing, over protective mother named Amanda. Tom also has a sister within the play named Laura who chooses to isolate herself from the rest of society. During the play Tom's relationship with his mother is filled with very harsh and abrasive

The Glass Menagerie means the glass animals collected by Laura. Laura is as beautiful, fragile and vulnerable as the animals. The slight leg disability made Laura sensitive and inferior. As she was afraid to face the teachers and students, she dropped out. Her mother sent Laura to business school to learn typing in order to find a job. But Laura vomited during the speed typing exam as she was too nervous, so she had to drop out again. Laura was afraid of reality and only willing to stay in a fantasy world. Thus, she spent her day at home

Laura spends most of her time with her collection. But the unicorn is Laura’s favorite. The broken glass unicorn represents her being different from others,“I’ll just imagine he had an operation. The horn was removed to make him feel less-freakish! Now he will feel more at home with the other horses, the ones that don’t have horns...”(Williams 86). The unicorn is the outsider of the horses and Laura is the outsider in her reality. Laura wishes she could fit in with her society and not be a freak.But she is comparable to the unicorn because it has to break to fit in. Laura has to break to fit in her society’s

In “The Glass Menagerie”, by Tennessee Williams, Jim O’Connor calls Laura Wingfield a blue rose and it represents the first feelings of love between Laura and Jim, the delicacy of Laura, and a sense of caution or the impossible. Jim and Laura know each other from high school, and when they once spoke to each other, Laura tells him that she had been absent from school because she had pleurosis, but Jim hears blue roses. From this point on, he calls her blue roses. When they are “reunited”, Jim remembers what he once called her, and once again, he calls her blue roses. Throughout the book, the symbolism of blue rose is shown.

In The Glass Menagerie, one of the characters in named Laura. Laura has the figures of glass that she takes care of. Her mother doesn't want her to be doing that. Her mother tried to do everything to have Laura doing something “I put her in buisness college- a dismal failure! Frightened her so it made her sick at the stomach. I took her over to the Young People’s League at the church. Another fiasco. She spoke to nobody, nobody spoke to her”(Williams 31). Laura was concerned not a modern man because of how shy she was. Yet Laura knew what she was doing. Even though she wasn't the proper woman of that day and age, she knew what she wanted to do. It wasn't that she wasn't able to talk it was the people she was going to talk to.

In both plays it is seen that the characters experience difficulty with recognizing what is a fantasy and what is reality. Amanda and Willy both deny their childrens’ underachievement and blames and accept that the destiny of their kids exists in their grasp. Consequently, they envision their kids as being something they are not, trying to shroud their childrens’ disappointments. Such illusions permit Amanda and Willy to feel fruitful in framing Laura and Biff's lives. Amanda denies Laura as a challenged person and adjusts any individual who trusts her to be along these lines, all throughout the play. Willy impacted Biff's conviction that he had been a sales representative for Bill Oliver. Biff starts to scrutinize this after the meeting that

Therefore, when Laura’s hands over of her glass unicorn to Jim, it shows her ability to overcome emotional conflicts. By doing this, Laura is willing to takes the risk of pain to leave the world of her glass menagerie behind and overcome her fears to become the

In the story “The Glass Menagerie” by Tennessee Williams (rpt. in Greg Johnson and Thomas R. Arp, Perrine’s Literature: Structure, Sound, and Sense, 12th ed. [Boston: Wadsworth, 2015], 1136-1185), there are many symbols that relate to each of the characters in the story. The character with the most symbolism in this story is Laura Wingfield. The most important symbols in the play are the glass menagerie, the unicorn, and blue roses.

In the Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams, Tom Wingfield is living the disadvantageous life of the 1930s. At this time, the Great Depression has begun and WWII is on the way.

The glass unicorn in Laura’s collection, is her favourite figure, it represents her individuality and uniqueness. As Jim points out, unicorns are “extinct” in present times and are lonely because they are different from other animals. Laura is lonely because she feels like she is not well adapted to the real world. In scene seven, the fate of the unicorn is also a scaled down version of Laura’s fate. When Jim dances and kisses Laura, the unicorn’s horn breaks off, and it becomes just another regular horse. This shows that Laura is starting to become normal and adapting to reality. Eventually, Laura gives Jim the unicorn as a “souvenir.” Without its horn it blends into society. The broken figurine is shown to represent everything that Jim has taught Laura and also that she has changed into a normal well-adjusted

To escape the harsh means of reality, humans gravitate to leaving in the past or a dream. Some people fear dreaming, while others live to dream. Tennessee Williams’ play The Glass Menagerie presents three incomparable worlds: dream, reality and memory. The members of the Wingfield family in The Glass Menagerie shield from the reality and choose to live in a dream or a memory. Williams conveys that each character has their own dreams, which are wrecked, by the real world. The whole Wingfield family chooses to live in a dream or a memory and disregards the expectation of the present. Accompanying with many ideas, Williams denotes the uncomfortable situations the Wingfield family faces many times. William explores the nature of dreams, memory,

In the beginning of the Story her dream is unclear she has no motivation to go to school for example she dropout in high school as well has her typing class in the following years. Laura does not act her age. She constantly is distracted with childish things and makes herself appear fragile. The thing she plays with and adores the most is what she is her glass menagerie. Her dream is to be ordinary. We truly find this out when she shows Jim her collection of the glass menagerie. She shows him her most prized possession which is her unicorn. He admires it and quickly changes the subject and asks her to dance with him. She states that she cannot and he says to her that she needs to stop worrying about her leg and she agrees to try. As they are dancing Jim bumps into the cabinet and breaks the unicorn. The horn falls off and instead of freaking out Laura says to him “He is just like the other horses” and then says “Maybe it is just a blessing in disguise”. In my opinion this is a way of her telling Jim that that unicorn was a representation of herself, I believe Laura is saying Jim makes her feel like an ordinary person when no one else could have. Her dream is starting to look like it is finally coming together, she found a man who she seems to be in love with and he makes her confident and feel ordinary. Jim later lifts Laura up and says she’s not like any ordinary girl and then kisses

     Laura is shown in the play as a shy and sensitive person. Laura is like this because she possesses a limp. She magnifies this limp to an extent where it affects her whole personality. Her oversensitive nature makes her think that people notice the limp and thus, she cannot live normally. Her inability to overcome the limp causes her to remove herself from the real world and live in a world of illusions. An imaginary world of glass animals provides Laura’s refuge from reality. But, her illusion is dangerous for her glass menagerie serves as a substitute for life rather than an escape. Her favorite animal in the menagerie is the unicorn, which she calls “freakish.” In one scene, she and Jim are looking at the unicorn. The scene shows freakish breaking and this presents Amanda with a revelation.

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