Essay The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams

In The Glass Menagerie, by Tennessee Williams, and A Doll House, by Henrik Ibsen, each protagonist faces the difficulty of society’s rule. Tom, being the “man of the house”, provides for his family and is depended upon. Were as Nora is co-dependant of her puppet master of husband Torvald. Despite their differences, Tom and Nora parallel the flaws in their common daily lives.

The characters that come alive in Williams' works represent people from his life. Amanda Wingfield from The Glass Menagerie holds strong resemblance to Tennessee's mother Edwina Williams. Williams described his mother as "a woman whose endurance and once fine qualities continued to flourished alongside a narrowness of perception and only the dimmest awareness of human feeling (Susquehanna. "Biographical Criticism)." Amanda easily mirrors this description of Edwina because of her selfishness concerning Laura's being unattached; Edwina was much like Amanda, getting numerous gentlemen callers as a young woman. Laura Windfield in The Glass Menagerie is very much like Williams' sister Rose Williams. Rose was institutionalized for having schizophrenia and was not able to interact with the outside world. Having pleurisy, Laura was also kept from being a part of the world she longed for. By using examples of people from his own life in

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 allows the main characters in the plays, A Streetcar Named Desire and The Glass Menagerie, to live miserable lives, which they first try to deny and later try to change.  The downfall and denial of the Southern gentlewoman is a common theme in both plays.  The characters, Blanche DuBois from A Streetcar Named Desire and Amanda from The Glass Menagerie are prime examples.  Blanche and Amanda have had, and continue to have, many struggles in their lives.  The problem is that Williams never lets the two women work through these problems and move on.  The two ladies are allowed to destroy themselves and Williams invites the audience to watch them in

Amanda loves Laura and Tom tremendously. From what we are shown in the story, her children

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

    Tennessee Williams has a gift for character. Not many playwrights do, and even fewer possess the unique ability to craft a character as paradoxical and complex as Amanda Wingfield. In The Glass Menagerie, Amanda is a very difficult character to understand because of her psychological disposition. Williams realizes this and provides the reader with a character description in hopes of making the character more accessible to meticulous analysis.

Amanda had stated herself, “Everyday I think why I am still here?” She says this because she was constantly being bullied and harassed online to the extent that she no longer believed she should be on this earth. She also stated, “I felt like a joke in this world… I thought nobody deserves this.” By her being bullied and harassed by the blackmailer and the blackmailer continuously being a problem she believed nobody really understood her and only seen her as the girl who showed her breasts online to a stranger.

Amanda Wingfield, in The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams, is extremely self-assured, devout to the past, controlling, and delusional. She is faced with raising two children during the Great Depression after being deserted by her husband and is keen on keeping her children close. This is mainly due to the fact that she is still haunted by her husband leaving her. Unfortunately, she uses guilt and criticism to manipulate her children to keep them close and control their lives. Amanda’s browbeat attitude and behavior is the reason she is forsaken by Mr. Wingfield, and is now swaying her son, Tom, a similar way.

The Glass Menagerie Being too self-conscious can deprive one from doing many things. Whether it is making friends, getting a job or finding love, worrying too much about oneself can end badly. In the play The Glass Menagerie, by Tennessee Williams, Laura was very self-conscious. Laura had a disease called pleurosis, which caused one leg to be longer than the other. She was so worried about how she was viewed by others that she missed out on living a fulfilling life.

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.

    The Stagnant Lives of Blanche DuBois and Amanda Wingfield    "All of Williams' significant characters are pathetic victims--of time, of their own passions, of immutable circumstance" (Gantz 110). This assessment of Tennessee Williams' plays proves true when one looks closely at the characters of Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire and Amanda Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie. Their lives run closely parallel to one another in their respective dramas. They reject their present lives, yet their methods of escape are dissimilar. Both women have lost someone they cared for, and so seek to hold, and unintentionally suffocate, those they have left.

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

As the play is a memory play the lighting is usually quite dim to give