Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie
Plot Summary
Tom, the narrator and protagonist, introduces the play as a memory play based on his memories of his mother Amanda and sister Laura. Because the play is based on recollection, Tom warns the audience that what they see may not be accurate.
Amanda Wingfield, a middle-aged faded Southern beauty, lives in a dismal St. Louis apartment with her son Tom, in his early twenties, and his somewhat older sister, Laura.
Amanda, although being a survivor and pragmatic, longs for the comforts and adoration she recalls from her days as a feted debutante.
She is especially concerned about the future of her daughter Laura, a young woman with a limp (a result of a bout of pleurosis) and tremulous fear of the outside world. Tom works at a shoe warehouse to help support his family.
He is frustrated by the routine and boredom of everyday life, and he struggles to write despite spending much of his spare time — or so he claims — going to the movies at all hours of the night.
Amanda is obsessed with finding a suitor (or, as she puts it, a “gentleman caller”) for Laura, her daughter, who has dropped out of both high school and a subsequent secretarial course due to crippling shyness and who spends much of her time polishing and arranging her collection of small glass animals.
Under pressure from his mother to locate a caller for Laura, Tom asks Jim, a work acquaintance, to dinner.
Amanda spruces up the flat, makes a beautiful meal, and converses coquettishly with Jim, nearly reliving her youth when she had a plethora of suitors vying for her attention.
Laura realizes that Jim is the boy she was attracted to in high school and has often thought about since, despite the fact that their relationship was never more than a distant, taunting acquaintanceship.
Laura is initially struck with shyness and is unable to join the others at dinner, claiming to be ill. But, after dinner, Jim and Laura are left alone in the living room by candlelight until the power is restored. (Tom hasn’t paid the electricity bill, implying to the audience that he’s saving the money and planning to leave the house.)
Jim senses Laura’s sentiments of inadequacy as the evening unfolds and pushes her to think more highly of herself. He and Laura are doing a quiet dance when he brushes up to her glass menagerie, knocking a glass unicorn to the floor and cutting off its horn. Jim then compliments and kisses Laura.
Once Jim informs Laura that he is engaged to be married, Laura requests that he accept the broken unicorn as a gift, and he departs. When Amanda learns that Jim is getting married, she turns her rage on Tom and cruelly lashes out at him, despite the fact that Tom was unaware that Jim was engaged.
Tom appears surprised by this, and it is possible that Jim made up the story of the engagement because he believed the family was attempting to set him up with Laura, despite his lack of romantic interest in her.
The play ends with Tom saying he left home soon after and never returned. He then bids his mother and sister farewell and requests that Laura extinguish the candles.
The Glass Menagerie’s Characters
Amanda Wingfield is an English teacher.
A faded Southern belle who grew up in Blue Mountain, Mississippi, who has been abandoned by her husband and is trying to raise her two children under difficult financial circumstances.
Amanda pines for the comforts of her youth and wishes for the same for her children, but her devotion to them has made her almost “hateful” towards them, as she admits at one point.
Amanda Wingfield’s son is Tom Wingfield. Tom works in a shoe warehouse to support his family, but he is dissatisfied with his job and wishes to be a poet.
He is sleep-deprived and irritated, making it difficult for him to write. Yet, he escapes reality by going to the movies every night. Tom is both bound to and burdened by his family, and he yearns to flee.
Wingfield, Laura
Tom’s elder sister and Amanda’s daughter. She walks with a limp due to a childhood ailment, and she has a mental fragility and inferiority complex that has secluded her from the outer world.
Her collection of glass figurines represents the creation of her own universe. Laura could be represented by the unicorn because it is unique and fragile.
O’Connor, Jim
Tom and Laura’s high school friendship. During his time at Soldan High School, Jim was a popular athlete and actor. Jim’s fortunes have deteriorated in the intervening years; at the time the play takes place, he is working as a shipping clerk in the same shoe warehouse as Tom. His desire to shine again is communicated through his studies of public speaking, radio engineering, and self-improvement beliefs similar to those of Dale Carnegie.
Wingfield, Mr.
Amanda’s absent spouse, as well as the fathers of Laura and Tom. Mr. Wingfield was a handsome, charming man who worked for a telephone company and eventually “fell in love with long-distance,” quitting his family 16 years before the action of the play.
Mr. Wingfield is constantly mentioned by Amanda, despite the fact that he does not appear onstage, and his photo is prominently placed in the Wingfields’ living room. This unnamed character appears to be influenced by Williams’ father.
Themes in The Glass Menagerie
Tennessee Williams’ drama “The Glass Menagerie” examines the ties between family members as well as the battle to accept reality. Among the subjects explored in the play are:
Illusion against Reality: The drama contrasts the protagonists’ illusions with the harsh realities they experience. Amanda, Tom, and Laura all have different ways of escaping reality and dealing with their problems.
Their illusions, however, are broken as the play unfolds, and they are forced to confront the terrible truths of their positions.
Escape: The drama depicts the yearning to escape reality as well as the battle to find meaning and purpose in one’s life. The narrator, Tom, feels confined in his employment and his family circumstances, and he yearns to leave his humdrum life.
Laura, on the other hand, withdraws into her own world of fantasy and fantasies to escape the realities of her life.
Memory: The play also looks at the power of memory and how it affects the present. Tom’s narration is a reflection of his former recollections and how they inspired his current position.
Amanda, like many other people, lives in the past, reminiscing about her youth and glory days while neglecting the realities of her current condition.
Disillusionment: The issue of disillusionment is explored in the play, as the characters’ illusions are destroyed and they are forced to confront the harsh truths of their life.
Tom is unhappy with his career and his family situation, while Amanda is unhappy with her life and how it has turned out. Laura’s fantasies are shattered when she discovers she would never be able to escape her infirmity.
The issue of the American Dream and the challenges of working-class families to achieve it is also explored in the play. Tom works in a warehouse to support his family, but he aspires to be a writer and escape his monotonous existence.
Amanda desires a better life for her children, but her efforts to accomplish this goal are ultimately futile.
Ultimately, “The Glass Menagerie” is a play about the intricate relationships between family members, the struggle to accept the truth, and the human urge to escape the harsh facts of life.
The Glass Menagerie’s Dramatic Techniques
Tennessee Williams has given The Glass Menagerie a very new twist by not splitting it into Acts. The Glass Menagerie, unlike other classical and nineteenth-century dramas, is not split into Acts. It is made up of seven scenes.
Despite the fact that the play contains a collection of scenes, these scenes are brought together in a tight unity.
Tennessee Williams appears to have been focused with the immediate necessity to capture the unity of action. He strives to maintain the illusion of fluid action continuity. His motivation for not splitting the dramatic action into acts is to maintain the action’s unbroken unfolding.
There’s another reason as well. The Glass Menagerie is a recreation of Tom’s memories. It is quite tough to split the action when reenacting memories. Memory content is not amenable to structural partition. The substance of memory unfolds in an unbroken and uninterrupted manner.
That is why the dramatic action stayed uninterrupted. Tennessee Williams handled the strategy of circumventing the notion of separating the action into Acts efficiently in The Glass Menagerie.
Tennessee Williams’s second powerful strategy is the psychological reality technique. This strategy assisted the playwright in paying close attention to the arrangement of conversation. The dialogue in The Glass Menagerie was written by Williams in such a way that it exposes character.
The personality of the characters in this drama is revealed through snippets of dialogue. When we read the play with an analytical eye, we see elements that show that some characters are still immature. The clumsiness of some characters, their awkwardness, is revealed as the dialogue progresses.
Amanda Wingfield constantly reminds her son Tom to chew his food thoroughly before swallowing it in this play. Amanda’s frequent admonitions to Tom lead us to believe that Tom is suffering from an unknown imbecility.
Amanda constantly tells Laura to act as if nothing has happened to her, as if she is physically undamaged. We can deduce from Amanda’s advice to Laura that Laura had a deeply ingrained flaw in becoming an extrovert.
Williams paid close attention to the art of depicting characters’ psychological reactions due to the technique of psychological realism.
Towards Amanda’s much-more-repeated-admonishment (Rise and Shine, don’t smoke, and don’t go to a movie) Tom Wingfield reacted violently. He called his mother witch.
From this sort of angry irritation made by Tom, we catch a glimpse of what kind of psychological makeup Tom Wingfield has. Once we trace the psychological makeup of the psychological realism.
The third crucial technique Williams adopted is the technique of using the same character of the play as the narrator. Because this play is a memory play, it is customary of the playwright to make one of the characters the narrator.
Because The Glass Menagerie is a modernist play, which defies the illusionist conventions, it is pretty imperative to include one commentator.
To insert a brief hint of commentary upon the conventional theatre personnel is to declare the innovative and the distinctive dimension of the play. In the brief introduction Tom remarks:
”Yes, I have tricks in my pockets, I have things up my slave. But I am the opposite of a stage magician. He gives you illusion that has the appearance of truth. I give you truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion.”
The fourth virile technique handled by Williams in The Glass Menagerie is the technique of using music, lighting, legend, screen play and images. These various elements help to embody the alive and fresh moment of the past in the memory of the narrator.
To bring into the prominence the pathos and plight of characters Williams introduced legends and images. For instance, when Laura was bringing out her past life in school from the chamber-box of her memory, the image blues-rose came.
When Amanda was recklessly persuading Tom to stop hankering for a movie and adventure, the legend of Jolly Roger came. In this technique helped the playwright to catch the emotional intensity of the present by virtue of legend and screenplay.
Last but not the least, Tennessee Williams made use of an indirect technique of ending the play as though a new play in the life of character is going to begin. The play opens with the narrative commentary delivered by Tom Wingfield.
It ends with the interior monologue of the frequently frustrated Tom Wingfield. Thus, the play is given a sense of closure and completion from the view point of Tom Wingfield. Thus, its structural compression is tantamount to the structure of Tom’s painful moment in his painful memory.