The Glass Menegerie vs August Osage County

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,

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.

Wingfield's Absent Father in The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams Mr. Wingfield plays a relatively prominent throughout the play. His decision to leave the Wingfield household has left lasting effects on the rest of his family. This has helped in establishing certain themes and issues in the play. The mentioning of his character in almost every scene throughout the play suggests its role in the action of the play.

   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.

Amanda is a desperate mother who is “clinging frantically to another time and place.”() Caught between the past and the present, she has a hard time coming to terms with the fact her life had passed her by. She hopelessly uses escape

Throughout this novel, the focus of family becomes very inattentive and mysterious. One family such as the Finches remained a whole, had each other’s back, but also had disagreements, as normal families would. This was the only common type family that tried to live under correct rules and laws as well as making sure each individual stayed under one household. As for the others, they seemed to be quite different. The Cunninghams were the country, poor family that never complained about a thing. The Ewells were the spoiled and selfish family that never seemed to do what was right. The Harris’s , Dill’s family from Mississippi, seemed to be careless and unprotected. Some of these groups of relatives relate back to the families in S.E Hinton’s book, “The Outsiders.”

During the 1940's, children's strictly grew up by standards of the parent's. Enduring the constant years of smothering and stuffage, relationships starts to fall apart, especially in families. In order to gain freedom, those children's rebel. Through the analysis of Tom from the Glass Menagerie and Biff from Death of a Salesman, one may recognize that both characters develop the common theme of dreams, hopes, and plans are necessary to survive. Furthermore, Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller explores these themes and the similarities the main character's have in the plays; The Glass Menagerie and Death of a Salesman.

Glass Menagerie” is a tragic story of the Wingfield family, a dysfunctional family of dreamers

In The Glass Menagerie, Tennessee Williams beautifully encapsulates man’s desire to escape from uncomfortable emotional and physical situations. Whether he’s showing a young man trapped in a factory job he hates, an aging single mother who mourns for her life as Southern belle, or a young lady who fears that she’ll spend her life alone, he clearly demonstrates these desires and fears for his audience. Williams shows us through the actions of his characters how humans handle a wide variety of uncomfortable situations, and how these situations dramatically influence one’s ability to thrive. The playwright doesn’t seem to believe in the idea of “bloom where you’re planted”, and the desire to escape becomes a major theme of the play, demonstrated across multiple characters in a wide variety of ways. Creative individuals often do not thrive in noncreative, industrial environments. Williams demonstrates this clearly in this “memory play”, which carries many autobiographical element. Tom Wingfield represents his own character, Williams himself, and also serves as a narrator, making him quite the complex character. Williams’s uses Tom to show how an emotionally complex, creative individual can quickly feel trapped and tied down in a factory job, longing to get out, see the world, and pursue a job with more creative elements. Tom’s escapism, drinking, and evening theatrical adventures all reflect the life of the playwright himself, as Williams was known to struggle with alcoholism

“The Glass Menagerie” by Tennessee Williams, was written in the early forties but could be misconstrued as a present-day play, because of the family dynamic that has changed since the forties but has not been completed replaced. In this play, we are introduced to Tom Wingfield who is the breadwinner for the family, which consists of his mom and sister. Amanda Wingfield who is an overbearing mother that knows no boundaries, and Laura Wingfield who is the sweet, and embarrassingly shy daughter of Amanda. Their family dynamic is like most of ours. The mother loves her kids dearly but struggles with letting go of her old identity, the daughter who allows her disability to determine her happiness and the brother who is obligated to work but would rather drink and party his money away. I’m sure many of us can relate to this family in some form. My favorite character in “The Glass Menagerie” is Laura. I love Laura because I can relate to her in more than one way. I was a shy individual most of my life, but once people got to know me they realized I was no different from them. In the following paragraphs, I will share Laura’s character with you, the similarities between Laura and the glass unicorn and I’ll tell you how the glass unicorn represents Laura.

“The Glass Menagerie” by Tennessee Williams is a play about desire to escape and this concept is conveyed through a variety of techniques and ideas shown in this play of exploration by the playwright, Tom Wingfield. First, Jim tries to escape his engagement by having a romantic night with Laura. Then, Tom’s father escapes for the same reasons Tom did. Thirdly, according to Roger Boxill from ‘The Glass Menagerie’ Amanda escapes by reminiscing “Blue Mountain ... And the seventeen gentleman callers.” Fourthly, Laura escapes with romance, going for walks, her “Glass Menagerie, stomach pain, and the broken horn from the unicorn. Finally, Tom escapes by traveling, going to the movies, drinking, and hanging out on the fire escape looking at the moon. Symbolism is also used in many literary works to for shadow or emphasizes an event that is about to happen or already has happened in the story. Hence the title ‘The Glass Menagerie’ in the play foreshadows/emphasizes the event happening or about to happen. The action of “The Glass Menagerie” takes place in the Wingfield family’s apartment in St. Louis, 1937. The events of the play are framed by memory Tom Wingfield is the play’s narrator, and usually smokes and stands on the fire escape as he delivers his monologues.

In 1983, American playwright August Wilson composed a play using both comedy and tragedy to convey the life experiences of an African-American family in Pittsburgh during the 1950s through the eyes of the play’s protagonist Troy Maxson. Troy Maxson represents many people grandfather or great-grandfather regardless of their race. The reason for this statement is that I noticed that there were people in attendance from various racial and ethnic backgrounds laughing and crying as if they identified with this family. Troy Maxson was a proud, strong and intelligent African-American who had the gift for gab keeps his listeners engage in the conversation. I believe most people have at least one Troy Maxson in their family. Troy felt the pressure

Tennessee Williams’ play, “The Glass Menagerie”, gives the reader a look into a truly dysfunctional family. At first it could seem as if their lives are normal and the Wingfields are a typical family just struggling to get by. Their problems, however, stem from their own fears after they are deserted by their husband and father. They are unable to effectively communicate with each other and resort to desperate acts. The desperation that the Wingfields hold on to has led them to create illusions in their minds and in turn become deceiving.

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

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