The Glass Menagerie Research Paper

   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 Glass Menagerie symbolizes Laura. Tom really cares about his sister Laura. He is motivated by anger. Tom goes out to drink and watch movies just to get

Laura Wingfield has chosen to hide from reality in the play The Glass Menagerie. She seems to live in a world of her own, and hides from everything and everyone outside of the apartment. Laura is terrified of anything new or different. Her mother sent her to business college, but Laura was so afraid that ‘The first time [they] gave a speed-test, she broke down completely – was sick at the stomach and almost had to be carried into the wash –room.’ (p 243). Laura uses her limp as an excuse to hide from the world. She believes that her slight limp makes her crippled and that she cannot be a part of the real world because of it. Laura’s glass menagerie and the victrola act as things which protect her from the real world in the play. Whenever she is

Tennessee Williams illustrated the significance of the glass unicorn in a symbolic fashion. The glass collection Laura possessed and felt so fondly of, was more than just an oddity. Williams used the glass to represent the fragility in Laura and as a standard for the decorative items that women might possess. The glass unicorn was fragile and delicate, just as Laura was. This fragility was physically obvious in the glass; as Laura said, "If you breathe, it breaks!"

In The Glass Menagerie, Laura lives in her own illusion of what she feels like is reality. Laura is a girl with no motivation to pursue a career or relationship. She lives in a world of delicate and fragile glass animals, a lot like herself on the inside. For example, the book says “Whereas fabricating an idealized past becomes Amanda’s compensation for her present existence, Laura’s retreat

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.

Although Laura does exist within the realm of the play, she does not possess a sense of what is real. As Tom puts it in the opening aside "[Jim] is the most realistic character in the play, being an emissary from a world of reality that we [Tom, Amanda, and Laura] were somehow set apart from" (30). Laura's obsession with the glass unicorn therefore becomes symbolic of her total disassociation with the world of reality. The unicorn and Laura also share a sometimes cripplingly extreme shy demeanor. According to legend, unicorns will only appear before a pure and chaste maiden, refusing to associate with any other humans.

The glass menagerie symbolizes a zoo and the craziness which represents Laura and her behavior when she sees Jim for the first time in many years. When Laura does see Jim, they get to talking about her old nickname, Blue Roses, which symbolizes the parts of Laura’s character that he sees in her but she does not see. Laura does not understand how Jim sees her for more than her disease because she cannot see herself beyond her disease. Lastly, the glass unicorn, which symbolizes mysteriousness, brings out the mysteriousness in many characters like Jim, for example, who has a mysterious and unknown fiance.

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

With a glass collection, just a small mistake can break the entire collection of figures. The smallest things can affect Laura because she is so delicate. When Tom gets mad and breaks some of her glass pieces, Laura cries out (scene 3, 130-132). The collection, to Laura, is like another world, and she is in her own world where she is able to console herself with her glass collection and old phonograph.

She slowly starts opening up to Jim more, by mentioning how she went to all the performances he was in. Laura tells Jim about her glass collection, which she never lets anyone touch. “Oh be careful-if you breathe, it breaks (Williams 1204)! Laura is just as fragile as the glass figurines. Laura doesn’t want to pick favorites, but the unicorn one is her favorite and her oldest one.

In The Glass Menagerie, Laura Winfield is like a fragile piece of glass, like many of her glass animals in her collection. The whole play is based around a dysfunctional family and their challenges adapting to life. Laura, with her physical and mental disabilities, isn’t able to survive in the world, so she isolates herself. She makes a whole world to herself inside the apartment filled with her symbolic glass figurine collection. (Her unicorn, in particular.) There is one time, in particular, when she seems to be improving. This is the scene where Jim O’Connor visits and she is finally coming out of her shell and likes being around him. The scene sticks out to the others because Laura never possessed the capacity to much consider a conversation

In the screenplay, The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams, characters struggle with the acceptance of reality. With the inability to handle reality, the Wingfield family barricades themselves in a fragile world of illusions and dreams. As in most cases, appearance is not what it seems.

Since she has a disability, Laura finds it hard to communicate with the outside world around her and secludes herself within her fantasies that center on her animal figurines and musical demos. While scolding her daughter for quitting business school, Amanda exclaims to Laura: “So what are we going to do the rest of our lives? Stay home and watch parades go by? Amuse ourselves with the glass menagerie, darling? Eternally play those worn-out phonograph records your father left as a painful reminder of him” (Williams 1637). Laura receives harsh

As well in the story Tom, Lauras brother, and Amanda do not get along very well, by the insists of helping her find Laura a future gentleman caller. The man Tom brings home for Laura is Jim O’Connor. As all of them sit down for dinner Laura quickly realizes that Jim is her long time crush from high school. At the end of dinner Jim releases to everyone that he is engaged and must go. This once again sparks another argument between Tom and Amanda ending in a fight that would last forever as Tom walks out on Amandaand Laura.The Glass Menagerie in my interpretation was incredible, until the ending. The Williams wrote this story, in the back of my head I thought there would be a happy ending. Unfortunetly