Important Aspects of The Glass menagerie

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The Glass Menagerie
Tennessee Williams
Submitted By : Iqra Aqeel

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As an Autobiographical play
The Glass Menagerie is a four-character memory play by Tennessee Williams which
premiered in 1944 and catapulted Williams from obscurity to fame. The play has strong
autobiographical elements, featuring characters based on Williams himself, his histrionic
mother, and his mentally fragile sister Laura. In writing the play, Williams drew on an
earlier short story, as well as a screenplay he had written under the title of The Gentleman
Caller.
The play premiered in Chicago in 1944. After a shaky start it was championed by
Chicago critics Ashton Stevens and Claudia Cassidy, whose enthusiasm helped build
audiences so the producers could move the play to Broadway where it won the New York
Drama Critics Circle Award in 1945. The Glass Menagerie was Williams's first
successful play; he went on to become one of America's most highly regarded
playwrights.
The characters and story mimic Williams's own life more closely than any of his other
works. Williams (whose real name was Thomas) would be Tom, his mother, Amanda.
His sickly and mentally unstable older sister Rose provides the basis for the fragile Laura
(whose nickname in the play is "Blue Roses", a result of a bout of pleurosis as a high
school student), though it has also been suggested that Laura may incorporate aspects of
Williams himself, referencing his introverted nature and obsessive focus on a part of life
(writing for Williams and glass animals in Laura's case).[2] Williams, who was close to
Rose growing up, learnt to his horror that in 1943 in his absence his sister had been
subjected to a botched lobotomy. Rose was left incapacitated (and institutionalized) for
the rest of her life. With the success of The Glass Menagerie, Williams was to give half
of the royalties from the play to his mother. He later designated half of the royalties from
his play Summer and Smoke to provide for Rose's care, arranging for her move from the
state hospital to a private sanitarium. Eventually he was to leave the bulk of his estate to
ensure Rose's continuing care.[3] Rose died in 1996.
***Tennessee Williams was born in Columbus, Mississippi, in 1911. The name given to
him at birth was Thomas Lanier Williams III. He did not acquire the nickname Tennessee
until college, when classmates began calling him that in honor of his Southern accent and
his father’s home state. The Williams family had produced several illustrious politicians
in the state of Tennessee, but Williams’s grandfather had squandered the family fortune.
Williams’s father, C.C. Williams, was a traveling salesman and a heavy drinker.
Williams’s mother, Edwina, was a Mississippi clergyman’s daughter and prone to
hysterical attacks. Until Williams was seven, he, his parents, his older sister, Rose, and

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his younger brother, Dakin, lived with Edwina’s parents in Mississippi. After that, the
family moved to St. Louis. Once there, the family’s situation deteriorated. C.C.’s
drinking increased, the family moved sixteen times in ten years, and the young Williams,
always shy and fragile, was ostracized and taunted at school. During these years, he and
Rose became extremely close. Rose, the model for Laura in The Glass
Menagerie, suffered from mental illness later in life and eventually underwent a
prefrontal lobotomy (an intensive brain surgery), an event that was extremely upsetting
for Williams.
An average student and social outcast in high school, Williams turned to the movies and
writing for solace. At sixteen, Williams won five dollars in a national competition for his
answer to the question “Can a good wife be a good sport?”; his answer was published
in Smart Set magazine. The next year, he published a horror story in a magazine
called Weird Tales, and the year after that he entered the University of Missouri as a
journalism major. While there, he wrote his first plays. Before Williams could receive his
degree, however, his father, outraged because Williams had failed a
required RO TC program course, forced him to withdraw from school and go to work at
the same shoe company where he himself worked.
Williams worked at the shoe factory for three years, a job that culminated in a minor
nervous breakdown. After that, he returned to college, this time at Washington University
in St. Louis. While he was studying there, a St. Louis theater group produced his
plays The Fugitive Kind and Candles to the Sun.Personal problems led Williams to drop
out of Washington University and enroll in the University of Iowa. While he was in Iowa,
his sister, Rose, underwent a lobotomy, which left her institutionalized for the rest of her
life. Despite this trauma, Williams finally graduated in 1938. In the years that followed,
he lived a bohemian life, working menial jobs and wandering from city to city. He
continued to work on drama, however, receiving a Rockefeller grant and studying
playwriting at the New School in New York. During the early years of World War II,
Williams worked in Hollywood as a scriptwriter.
Around 1941, Williams began the work that would become The Glass Menagerie. The
play evolved from a short story entitled “Portrait of a Girl in Glass,” which focused more
completely on Laura than the play does. In December of 1944, The Glass Menagerie was
staged in Chicago, with the collaboration of a number of well-known theatrical figures.
When the play first opened, the audience was sparse, but the Chicago critics raved about
it, and eventually it was playing to full houses. In March of 1945, the play moved to
Broadway, where it won the prestigious New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award. This
highly personal, explicitly autobiographical play earned Williams fame, fortune, and
critical respect, and it marked the beginning of a successful run that would last for
another ten years. Two years after The Glass Menagerie, Williams won another Drama

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Critics’ Circle Award and a Pulitzer Prize for A Streetcar Named Desire. Williams won
the same two prizes again in 1955, for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.
The impact of success on Williams’s life was colossal and, in his estimation, far from
positive. In an essay entitled “The Catastrophe of Success,” he outlines, with both light
humor and a heavy sense of loss, the dangers that fame poses for an artist. For years after
he became a household name, Williams continued to mine his own experiences to create
pathos-laden works. Alcoholism, depression, thwarted desire, loneliness in search of
purpose, and insanity were all part of Williams’s world. Since the early 1940s, he had
been a known homosexual, and his experiences in an era and culture unfriendly to
homosexuality certainly affected his work. After 1955, Williams began using drugs, and
he would later refer to the 1960s as his “stoned age.” He suffered a period of intense
depression after the death of his longtime partner in 1961 and, six years later, entered a
psychiatric hospital in St. Louis. He continued to write nonetheless, though most critics
agree that the quality of his work diminished in his later life. His life’s work adds up to
twenty-five full-length plays, five screenplays, over seventy one-act plays, hundreds of
short stories, two novels, poetry, and a memoir; five of his plays were also made into
movies. Williams died from choking in a drug-related incident in 1983.
The Glass Menagerie - Escape Theme
"The Glass Menagerie" is set in the apartment of the Wingfield family. By description, it
is a cramped, dinghy place, not unlike a jail cell. It is one of many such apartments in the
neighborhood. Of the Wingfield family members, none of them want to live there.
Poverty is what traps them in their humble abode. The escape from this lifestyle, this
apartment and these relationships is a significant theme throughout the play. These
escapes may be related to the fire escape, the dance hall, the absent Mr. Wingfield and
Tom's inevitable departure. The play opens with Tom addressing the audience from the
fire escape. This entrance into the apartment provides a different purpose for each of the
characters. Overall, it is a symbol of the passage from freedom to being trapped in a life
of desperation. The fire escape allows Tom the opportunity to get out of the apartment
and away from his nagging mother. Amanda sees the fire escape as an opportunity for
gentleman callers to enter their lives. Laura's view is different from her mother and her
brother. Her escape seems to be hiding inside the apartment, not out. The fire escape
separates reality and the unknown. Across the street from the Wingfield apartment is the
Paradise Dance Hall. Just the name of the place is a total anomaly in the story. Life with
the Wingfields is as far from paradise as it could possibly be. Laura appears to find solace
in playing the same records over and over again, day after day. Perhaps the music

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floating up to the apartment from the dance hall is supposed to be her escape which she
just can't take. The music from the dance hall often provides the background music for
certain scenes, The Glass Menagerie playing quite frequently. With war ever-present in
the background, the dance hall is the last chance for paradise. Mr. Wingfield, the absent
father of Tom and Laura and husband to the shrewish Amanda, is referred to often
throughout the story. He is the ultimate symbol of escape. This is because he has
managed to remove himself from the desperate situation that the rest of his family are
still living in. His picture is featured prominently on the wall as a constant reminder of
better times and days gone by. Amanda always makes disparaging remarks about her
missing husband, yet lets his picture remain. Tom always makes jokes about his dad, and
how he "fell in love with long distances." This is his attempt to ease the pain of
abandonment by turning it into something humorous. It is inevitable that the thing which
Tom resents most in his father is exactly what Tom himself will carry out in the
end...escape! Through his father, Tom has seen that escape is possible, and though he is
hesitant to leave his sister and even his mother behind, he is being driven to it. Tom
escapes reality in many different ways. The first and most obvious is the fire escape that
leads him away from his desolate home. Another would be the movies that Amanda is
always nagging him about. She thinks he spends too much time watching movies and that
he should work harder and find a suitable companion for Laura. The more Amanda nags,
the more Tom needs his movie escapes. They take him to another world for a while,
where mothers and sisters and runaway fathers do not exist. As the strain gets worse, the
movie watching becomes more frequent, as does Tom's drinking. It is getting harder and
harder for Tom to avoid real life. The time for a real departure is fast approaching.
Amanda eventually pushes him over the edge, almost forcing him out, but not without
laying overpowering guild trips on him. Tom leaves, but his going away is not the escape
that he craved for so long. The guilt of abandoning Laura is overwhelming. He cannot
seem to get over it. Everything he sees is a reminder of her. Tom is now truly following
in the footsteps of his father. Too late, he is realizing that leaving is not an escape at all,
but a path of even more powerful desperation. Williams uses the theme of escape
throughout "The Glass Menagerie" to demonstrate the hopelessness and futility of each
character's dreams. Tom, Laura and Amanda all seem to think, incorrectly I might add,
that escape is possible. In the end, no character makes a clean break from the situation at
hand. The escape theme demonstrated in the fire escape, the dance hall, Mr. Wingfield
and Tom's departure prove to be a dead end in many ways. Perhaps Tennessee Williams
is trying to send a message that running away is not the way to solve life's problems. The
only escape in life is solving your problems, not avoiding them.

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Why does Amanda nag at tom so much?
Amanda nags her son Tom about the proper way to chew his food, she reprimands him
for going to the movies too much. She returns a book he is reading to the Library
because she thought it was inappropriate. She accuses him of being selfish.
But the most important aspect of Amanda's nagging has to do with Tom finding a suitable
gentleman caller for his sister, Laura.
When Amanda tells her son that Laura has failed at the Business College, and that she is
frightened for her daughter's future, which looks dismal. Tom says:
"What can I do about it? (Williams, p. 35)
She replies:
"Overcome selfishness! Self, self, self is all that you ever think of!"
Tom does invite a gentleman caller for dinner, but on short notice, Amanda goes into a
rant.
"Preparations! Why didn't you phone me at once, as soon as you asked him, the minute
that he accepted? Then, dont' you see, I could have begun getting ready!" (Williams, pg.
42)
When the gentleman caller, Jim O'Connor, turns out to be engaged to be married,
Amanda berates Tom for not knowing this important fact about his friend.
"You don't know things anywhere! You live in a dream; you manufacture illusions!"
"That's right, now that you've had us make such fools of ourselves." (Williams, pg. 95)
It is Amanda's constant nagging that finally pushes Tom out of the apartment for
good. He abandons his mother and sister, never to see them again.
Amanda believes that Tom should be the provider for the family, much as a husband
might do. Because Tom is the only son, Amanda believes he should feel obligated to
provide for them. Tom and Laura's father left them long ago Amanda still believes that
he'll return someday (he won't!), as she keeps his picture hanging on the wall. Tom does
not feel he should be the provider and protector because he has his own aspirations and
dreams. Too much pressure is put on him by Amanda and it finally gets to him. She
nags him to no end about virtually everything he does, which would drive anyone
crazy. Eventually, Tom realizes that if he wants to ever have a chance of being able to
have his own life, he must leave both his sister and his mother. He feels particularly
guilty about having to leave Laura.

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Similarities between Tom and his father:
Tom is like his father in that he wants to run away from his problems. He tries to escape
through drinking and movies. Of course, Amanda, his mother, is nagging and hard to
please. She finds fault with Tom and possibly is the reason he wants to leave home.
Understandably, Tom is under much pressure. He has to support his mother and sister. In
return, his mother complains and insists that he help her find a suitor for Laura. Tom does
his best. He brings home Jim. Jim and Laura share an intimate moment before Jim
reveals that he is engage.
Learning of Jim's engagement status, Amanda attacks Tom for not knowing that Jim was
engaged. Tom has taken all he can take. He runs away from home. The play is his
memory of his mother and Laura.
Amanda's relationship with Tom is difficult. Tom longs to be free - like his father - to
abandon Amanda and Laura and set off into the world. He has stayed because of his
responsibility for them, but his mother's nagging and his frail sister's idiosyncrasies make
the apartment a depressing and oppressive place. Tom also hates his job. His only escape
comes from his frequent visits to the movies, but his nightly disappearances anger and
baffle Amanda. He fights with Amanda all the time, and the situation at home grows
more unbearable.
Amanda, sensing that Tom wants to leave, tries to make a deal with him. If Tom and
Amanda can find a husband for Laura, a man who can take care of her, then Tom will be
free of his responsibility to them. Amanda asks Tom to bring home gentlemen callers to
meet Laura. Tom brings home Jim O'Connor, a fellow employee at the warehouse. He is
an outgoing and enthusiastic man on whom Laura had a terrible crush in high school. Jim
chats with Laura, growing increasingly flirtatious, until he finally kisses her. Then he
admits that he has a fiancé and cannot call again. For fragile Laura, the news is
devastating.
Amanda is furious, and after Jim leaves she accuses Tom of playing a cruel joke on them.
Amanda and Tom have one final fight, and not long afterward Tom leaves for good. In
his closing monologue, he admits that he cannot escape the memory of his sister. Though
he abandoned her years ago, Laura still haunts him.
Tennessee Williams”s Ideas About Illusion and
Reality in “The Glass Menagerie”

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In the memory play, The Glass Menagerie, two contradicting themes display their
significance. They are the ideas of illusion and reality. In The Glass Menagerie, every
character seems to live in a world of fantasy created by their illusions. And through these
characters, Tennessee Williams was trying to portray his ideas about illusion and reality.
From my point of view, Williams was trying to express his idea of reality as a harsh, but
inevitable truth that everyone wants to avoid and illusion as a defense and deviation from
this bitter and harsh reality of life.
Let’s take a look at Amanda while keeping William’s ideas of reality and illusion in
mind. In The Glass Menagerie, Amanda would babble on to her children, Tom and Laura,
about the marvelous conversations and adventures that she enjoyed with her gentlemen
callers. However, the key point is reality, in which Amanda doesn’t have any more
gentlemen callers waiting ambitiously for her love. Amanda is aware of this harsh but
true reality, but she tries to put herself into an illusion of her memories of gentlemen
callers to deny the truth. As this illusion continues on, Amanda gets farther and farther
away from reality and develops characteristics such as narcissism and meticulousness
that she considers affectionate and ladylike in her fantasies. So, it can be seen that
Williams’s has expressed his ideas about reality and truth through the characteristics and
actions of Amanda.
Another character in The Glass Menagerie that displays William’s idea is Tom. Tom
mostly talks about his torrid passion for movies, writing, and adventure throughout the
play and makes fervent statements about how he will embark on an adventurous journey.
Ironically, this is an illusion that Tom uses to deny the truth. Reality shows us that Tom is
actually nothing more than a worker in a shoe company who enjoys writing poems and
watching movies. But since Tom doesn’t feel very satisfactory about his current life, he
tries to deviate from reality by creating an illusion that he is a part of some adventure
such as war and must embark on a new life for his adventures. However, Tom doesn’t
realize that this illusion he put up against reality is slowly digressing him into a world of
fantasy filled with impractical adventures. This builds up tension between him and
Amanda, his mother, and the act of leaving the house at the end of the play can be
interpreted as Tom completely denying reality and starting on the road of illusion. Again,
Williams has show his ideas regarding illusion and reality via the characteristics and
actions of Tom.
In conclusion, I comprehended Williams’s idea of reality as the inevitable but harsh truth
and illusion as a defense and deviation from this severe reality. Although many other
understandings regarding Williams’s ideas of reality and illusion may exist, I chose my
understanding since the characters in The Glass Menagerie seemed to showed explicit
evidence in their characteristics that support my statement. Nevertheless, I would be more

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than excited to hear about what others have to say about this topic since it is always
interesting to compare my thoughts and perspectives with those of others.
The Symbolism of the Glass Unicorn: Revealing and Unveiling Laura’s Strength
In the Glass Menagerie, Williams utilizes powerful symbolism to illustrate
Laura’s peculiarity and eventual fate. Laura, who suffers emotionally from a physical
disability of one leg being shorter than the other, desperately seeks retreat from reality by
escaping to her blissful world of glass animals. Significantly her favorite figure in the
collection, the glass unicorn is a powerful representation of her peculiarity and
abnormality. When Jim violently breaks the unicorn’s horn, the unicorn becomes like the
other horses, acting as a smaller-scale version of Laura’s eventually shattering jolt into
normalcy. This incident can be interpreted as a detriment to any normalcy that Laura
previously possessed, as Jim takes advantage of her fragility and destroys her uniqueness.
Although, it seems more likely that the shattering of the glass animal reveals and endows
Laura with the strength to grow into an emotionally healthy person, by attempting to live
in the real world and choosing to leave behind the world of the glass menagerie.
The glass unicorn in Laura’s collection functions as a powerfully symbolic embodiment
of her peculiarity and singularity. Among the collection of glass animals, the ornament
provides a retreat, void of tension, when she can’t handle the pressures of reality. Laura
explains to Jim, “He stays on a shelf with some horses that don’t have horns and all of
them seem to get along nicely together” (Williams 1096). Similar to her glass ornaments,
Laura’s fragility is illustrated in her conversation with Jim when she says, "Glass is
something that you have to take good care of" (Williams 1094). Furthermore, she
subsequently reiterates to Jim, "Oh, be careful—if you breathe, it breaks!" (Williams
1095). Furthermore, in the most realistic moment of Laura’s life, Jim “breaks” the glass
unicorn and, symbolically, Laura as well. Representative of thrusting normalcy upon
Laura, Jim bumps into the unicorn on the table, causing the horn to break off. Laura
observes, “Now it is just like all the other horses” (Williams 1097). By giving the
hornless unicorn to Jim as a “souvenir”, Laura significantly exhibits the extent of her
affection for him, and illustrates the suitability that the unicorn now only has for Jim.
Through the shattering of the unicorn, it can be inferred that Laura’s
transformation is a painful experience that destroys any normalcy that previously existed
in her. As she presents the unicorn to Jim as a gift, once he has “broken” both of them,
Laura is symbolically removing herself from the company of the glass figurines. The
broken horn can be perceived as the turning point that eliminates the escape that the
figurines previously offered Laura, possibly leaving her in her own helplessness and

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loneliness. Laura’s fragility can be understood as her flaw; Jim takes advantage of her
delicacy, by apologetically breaking part of her. Laura’s trusting vulnerability is
exemplified when she exclaims, in handing Jim the unicorn, “Go on, I trust you with
him!” (Williams 1095). The violence of the severance exemplifies Laura’s inability to
enter normalcy without somehow shattering. The Broken unicorn, thus, may become an
embodiment of Laura’s shattered dreams. In addition, the horn is the only unique
characteristic that sets the unicorn apart from the other horses. After they dance, Jim says
to Laura, “Has anyone ever told you that you were pretty? Well, you are! In a very
different way from anyone else. And all the nicer because of the difference, too”
(Williams 1098). Thus, the unicorn’s broken horn can signify a loss of uniqueness,
destroying that which made her beautiful. Jim’s attempt to confer confidence upon her
can be perceived as failure, as he leaves her broken. Finally, it may be interpreted that
handing the broken unicorn over to Jim may be giving herself up to him, although all she
says is, “A-souvenir” (Williams 1100). The neutrality in many of the lines may leave
room for the reader to interpret the text as such, yet the text is clearly not neutral.
One way to interpret the shattering of the unicorn is to perceive it as a painful
experience that leaves Laura broken. However, it seems more likely that the incident
reveals Laura’s hidden strength. Although the figurines offered Laura a retreat, it seems
more probable that this world she continuously escaped to did her harm. In pointing out
that unicorns are “extinct in the modern world” (Williams 1096), Jim reveals Laura’s
loneliness in her difference from the other horses. Furthermore, her inability to face
reality deters her from becoming normal, and becomes the basis by which her existence is
ill-adapted in the world in which she lives.
Laura’s reaction to the unicorn’s broken horn reveals her strength, as she regards
it as a positive event, saying, “I’ll just imagine he had an operation. The horn was
removed to make him feel less-freakish! Now he will feel more at home with the other
horses, the ones that don’t have horns” (Williams 1097-1098). Laura’s giving the unicorn
to Jim, therefore, represents her ability to overcome her emotional disabilities and feel
more “at home” with other normal girls. Although she must somehow be shattered to
make the conversion, her true strength is revealed through her delicate nature:
symbolically, glass represents fragility, but it can also be of great strength. Also, her
“freakish” traits and peculiarities seem to be more constraining than exceptional, as she is
desperately struggling to find her place in society, and failing to do so.
In handing over the broken unicorn, Laura symbolically accepts that she must endure the
prospect of pain to become an average, content person, saying, “Maybe it’s a blessing in
disguise”, (Williams 1097). Her ability to take the risk of the pain and step out of her
comfort zone to experience heartbreak and adventure in this new world of love proves
that she is deceptively stronger than she realizes. Jim validates the risks she takes when
he exclaims, "Love is something that—changes the whole world Laura!" (Williams
1100). As a result, Laura is the only character who is able to grow into an emotionally

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healthy person, by choosing to leave behind the world of the glass menagerie and attempt
to live in the real world.
Williams utilizes powerful symbolism in the Glass Menagerie, to illustrate Laura’s
peculiarity and eventual fate. Laura escapes to her blissful world of glass animals, as she
desperately yearns for an escape from reality. When Jim violently breaks the unicorn’s
horn, the unicorn acts as a smaller-scale version of Laura’s eventually shattering jolt into
normalcy, as it becomes just like the other horses. As Jim takes advantage of her fragility
and destroys her uniqueness, this incident can be interpreted as a detriment to any
normalcy that Laura possessed. Although, it seems more likely that the shattering of the
glass animal reveals and endows Laura with the strength to grow into an emotionally
healthy person, as she willingly takes the risk of pain to leave the world of glass behind
and overcomes her fears of being normal.