In Tennessee William’s work “The Glass Menagerie”, a theme that is well developed is feeling trapped. Williams and Tom, both share similarities. This theme fits well with Tom, Laura, and Amanda. They each have a feeling in which they are trapped. The family overcomes many obstacles from their past. They are not a perfect family and often bicker with each other in the house sometimes. This family is like every other family, there are times when you don’t get along and times when you do. The family has to deal with the father/husband leaving, Laura’s leg with one being slightly shorter than the other, and one income in the house. Because of the obstacles the family faces, Tom, Laura and Amanda all feel trapped in their circumstances in various …show more content…
Tom is Amanda’s son and Laura’s younger brother. He connects well with the theme of feeling trapped. Tom is the father figure of the household. He is trapped by the responsibility of having to assist his mother and sister. “.. [Tom] had to quit college to work in the shoe warehouse. Trapped in the mechanical job of typing orders eight hours a day” (Hale). He works at the shoe warehouse to bring in the income to support the family. Tom has to pay for the water bill and the electricity bills. His income goes to his mother and sister and he doesn’t get to spend it on himself. After being the father figure for so long, he’s becomes tired of it. “Honey, don’t push with your fingers. If you have to push with something, the thing to push with is the crust of bread. And chew-chew! Animals have sections in their stomachs which enable them to digest food without mastication, but human beings are supposed to chew their food before they swallow it down” (Williams 1167). He gets annoyed with his mother Amanda, when she complains about the way he eats. He gets annoyed by the fact that she keeps telling him how to eat his food. Her annoyance kills his appetite and he no longer enjoys his dinner. Tom starts looking for ways to escape his mother and sister. He believes that if he leaves them he will be happier. He wishes to spend more time writing poetry and traveling. In fact, sometimes he writes poetry while working. In order for …show more content…
Laura was born with one leg slightly shorter than the other. She calls herself crippled. Her mother tells her she is not crippled, just born with a defect. After throwing up on the floor, Laura was too embarrassed to go back. Laura dropped out of her business college only after attending a few days. Instead of going to college, she walks around the park, goes to the art museum, and the zoo. Laura does this to convince her mom that she is still attending college when in reality she isn’t. “Tom’s painfully shy and physically crippled sister Laura hides in a fantasy world of glass animals” (Moe). She lacks the self-esteem for friends and communication. She has trapped herself in a world of glass figurines. Her mother calls them her glass menagerie. Amanda asks Tom to find Laura a gentleman caller from his job. Tom finds a man by the name of Jim O’Connor, who happens to be Laura’s high school crush. Jim is the best possible choice for Laura. When she finds out its Jim, she faints. 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. Her unicorn stays on the shelf with a group of horses. Laura
Tom is on the verge of gaining everything he wants such as the inheritance from Judge Driscoll. Just as being able to gain everything he wants Tom is still also vulnerable to losing everything him has. He is a literate man who lives free his whole life and owns slaves instead of being a slave. Tom’s mother is willing to sell herself to slavery in order to help her son but by sacrificing her freedom through love she finds out that she is betrayed by her son. Her only requests were to be sold up the river and to be bought back in order to allow Tom to pay his debts back.
The family lives in a household with no father, they are always just scraping by, and they don’t always get along. Tom’s sister is a socially awkward girl who can’t seem to find the right guy for her. Throughout the book her mother pressures her into getting a nice guy to get married to so he can support her. As the play develops you can see that Tom doesn’t want to stay with his family anymore, but is too scared to hurt them. The story is a very real and depressing look into some people's lives.
A common core value found in family is the dependance on one another through the sacrifices, bond, and blood shared together. When times get tough, a family member is expecting that the others will be by their side to help fight and give support. In The Glass Menagerie, Tennessee Williams shares his perspective on family responsibilities through the use of personal experience of living in a broken home without a father. As with being either the only son or eldest son in the family, there is a stigma that the son should step up in carrying out the duties and responsibilities when the father is not present. For Williams, however, every individual in the family should be held accountable for his or her own action regardless of the situation.
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.
In The Glass Menagerie, Tennessee Williams uses the theme of escape to help drive the play forward. None of the characters are capable of living in the real world. Laura, Amanda, Tom and Jim use various methods to escape the brutalities of life. Laura retreats into a world of glass animals and old records. Amanda is obsessed with living in her past. Tom escapes into his world of poetry writing and movies. Jim also reverts to his past and remembers the days when he was a high school hero. Mr. Wingfield is referred to often throughout the play. He is the ultimate symbol of escape. This is because he has managed to remove himself from the desperate situation that the rest of the family is still
He rants to his mother that he has “no single thing…that I can call my OWN!” (981). He also reveals he lives a double life by working at the warehouse he loathes, and going to gambling casinos. What I find to be the most important thing to Tom is his need for adventure. He wants to escape the household.
In Tennessee Williams' play, The Glass Menagerie, none of the characters are capable of living in the real world. Laura, Amanda, Tom and Jim use various methods to escape the brutalities of life. Laura retreats into a world of glass animals and old gramophone records. Amanda is obsessed with living in her past. Tom escapes into his world of poetry writing and movies. Jim also reverts to his past and remembers the days when he was a hero.
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
At the onset of the book, Young Tom has just been released from prison and is interested in making up for lost time and enjoying himself. He is a strong family support during the journey but is among the first to begin reaching out to a larger family. At the end he has focused on the plight and abuse of all the homeless farmers and recognizes that they must
Laura hesitantly tells Jim that she dropped out of high school because she made poor grades (79). There is a correlation between Laura missing many days of school due to her pleurosis and her poor grades. Blue roses is the nickname that Jim gives Laura because he mishears the word “pleurosis” (17), which was ultimately the cause of her having to drop out of high school. In that manner, the blue roses represent the start of Laura’s academic downfall. Furthermore, Laura was insecure about walking to the back row of a class because of the clumping of her limp, which wasn’t even noticeable according to Jim (81).
We also see the relationship between physical and mental fragility, as it seems that Laura’s shyness arises from a physical defect of her crippled leg. Quote:"A blown-up photograph of the father hangs on the wall of the living room, to the left of the archway. It is the face of a very handsome young man in a doughboy's First World War cap. He is gallantly smiling, as if to say "I will be smiling forever.” A blown-up photograph of the father hangs on the wall of the living room, to the left of the archway.
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
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
The Glass Menagerie is a portrait of the Wingfield family the hysterical Amanda, her writer son, Tom, and her crippled daughter, Laura. It mythologizes Williams's guilt-ridden attempt to flee his mother in order to claim his artistic destiny, but it is also Edwina's narrative of the Williams family a saga of hatred, abandonment, abuse, self-sacrifice, and endurance. Tom works in a factory and tries to escape his mundane life by finding adventure through the movies he goes to see. Jim a friend who works with Tom is always looking to make something more of himself by taking classes to get a better job to get away from the factory. Amanda is the mother who attempts to escape her life or at least being responsible for her own life forcing Tom
This is when we are faced with the ethnical dilemma of Tom wanting to escape his mom and sister just like his father did when he was just a child and does it through adventuring at night. Tom is a hardworking man, who is trying to