The Glass Menagerie Research 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,

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 masterful use of symbolism is delightfully ubiquitous in Tennessee Williams’ “The Glass Menagerie.” He uses a collection of dim, dark and shadowy symbols that constantly remind the audience of the lost opportunity each of these three characters continually experience. This symbolism is not only use to enlighten the audience to their neglected opportunities to shine, but it is also repeatedly utilized to reinforce the ways in which the characters try in vain to cross over turbulent waters into a world of light and clarity. It is thematically a wrenching story of life gone by, and the barren attempts to realize another reality that is made more poignant by symbolic language, objects, setting, lighting and music. The characters are

One of the big motivations shown through the characters in The Glass Menagerie is the yearning of escape from the real world. One example shown through Laura’s character is she finds a way to escape reality through her glass menagerie and the old records she plays that once belonged to their father. The mother, Amanda, tries to escape her current life as a deserted wife who must constantly scramble for money by retelling stories of when she was young. Her favorite story to retell regards one day when she received the attentions of seventeen gentleman callers. For her, those gentleman callers represent what her life was and what it could have been if she had not married her husband, “the telephone man who fell in love with long

Laura's glass menagerie seems to be the play's central symbol. "Laura's collection of glass animal figurines represents a number of facets of her personality. Like the figurines, Laura is

Thomas Lanier Williams, born in Columbus, Mississippi to Edwina Dakin and Cornelius Coffin Williams, became one of the nations greatest playwrights. He was born on March 26, 1911 in his grandfather, Reverend Walter E. Dakin's, Episcopal Church. William's mother, Edwina, was a lively and colorful woman. She married a man whom contradicted her lifestyle. That man was Cornelius Williams, a gruff, pistol dueler with a violent temper. He was a lieutenant in the Spanish American War and a descendent from frontiersmen. Cornelius and Edwina married and continued to live in Mississippi. Cornelius had a job as a traveling salesman. Thomas became sick with diphtheria at age five which is how his love for literature bloomed. He lived in Mississippi until

German writer Gertrud von Le Fort once said, "Symbols are the language of something invisible spoken in the visible world." The Glass Menagerie author, Tennessee Williams, does just that by using symbols to show the main themes in the play. Some of the main themes, represented by symbols, Williams uses are memories, living in the past, hope, feeling trapped, insecurity, and adventure and escape. Writers use symbols to help bring meaning and emotion to the story. Symbolism helps the play or story become more powerful and memorable to the viewer or reader.

Thesis: Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie demonstrates human struggles with accepting the hard truths of reality, creating tendencies to retract to disappointing illusions.

Have you ever watched a play and been amazed to how real the play appears? Refer to this as realism. Realism tries to create an illusion that makes a certain situation look like that action is actually happening. Realism can also refer to certain social issues. Something that provides to realism is the spectacle. The spectacle is what the audience sees and hears during the play. In the play The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams, there are several different examples of spectacle. These example gives the audience an entertaining value and sets the tone for the plot. During the play, the spectacles that contribute to the realism would be the screen and the music.

This is Laura talking about her unicorn. She keeps the age of it, and takes very good care of it. It shows how much her collection means to her and how she thinks of them as real people. The glass menagerie provides Laura an outlet from the real world. By collecting and playing with her glass menagerie, Laura escapes the real

The society in The Glass Menagerie is exceptionally intricate. Her own mother, Amanda, is very demanding of her and wishes her to have a gentleman caller. Amanda believes all young women should have dozens of gentlemen callers. She judges a woman’s worth by the amount of attention she receives from men and boasts about herself back then, "One Sunday afternoon in Blue Mountain – your mother received – seventeen! – gentlemen callers! Why, sometimes there weren’t enough chairs to accommodate them all. We had to send the nigger over to bring in folding chairs from the parish house" (Williams 8). Laura lives in a society that believes a man will support a woman. However, her own father runs out on their family and leaves Amanda

Human beings have been on the earth for over 2000 years. Throughout classes children learn about cave men, hunter and gatherers, Europeans, asians, and americans. Children learn about so many different cultures and time that they sometimes forget what the modern man actually is. The modern man in some people's views is someone who is socially accepted, has their own freedom, and have love that they need/deserve.

***The characters within The Glass Menagerie are almost all a part of the same family creating a family dynamic that effects the way the characters are developed. A majority of Amanda's part within the play of The Glass Menagerie consists of her providing a recollection of her past and enforcing her perceptions of those experiences onto her children. Most of her speech within the play is monologues of her reflecting upon her past. The Glass Menagerie is considered to be a memory play making a connection to Amanda's constant reflection on her past to the fact that this is a memory play one can observe that Amanda is the personification of the memory within the memory play. Amanda's constant recollection of the past effects the character development of Laura, tom, and of course herself.

Throughout life, people subconsciously unveil attributes about themselves by way of symbols. A symbol indicates a greater meaning than the literal implication and represents ideas, emotions, or states of mind of a person. Symbolism in the theatre can be accomplished through costumes, color, props, characters and movements. In Tennessee Williams play, The Glass Menagerie, symbolism is uniquely used. The fire escape in the house and the glass menagerie are two vital figures in the play that reveal qualities about the characters and connect to the idea of escape.

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