DIRECTIONS: READ the play provided below The Glass Menagerie, then the response should focus on the elements of drama covered in this lesson—especially on the elements of plot and characterization—but should in addition address some of the guiding questions below

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DIRECTIONS: READ the play provided below The Glass Menagerie, then the response should focus on the elements of drama covered in this lesson—especially on the elements of plot and characterization—but should in addition address some of the guiding questions below. 

?1. What does Amanda do to support her family? What might this signify?

2.?What is Amanda's primary criticism of Tom? What is she afraid of? Are her fears true? What irony is associated with this? What is significant about Tom's going to the movies? Is this much different from Laura's escapes, or even Amanda's?

3.?Amanda tells Tom he can join the Merchant Marines only after he does what? Is this an easy prospect?

4.?Why is it ironic that Tom invites Jim O'Connor home for dinner? Is this plot twist possibly a bit too convenient? At the end of the play, what does Amanda accuse Tom of doing? How does Tom respond? ?

5.What judgment does The Glass Menagerie seem to be passing, and on what or whom? Is it effective? 

 

The Story:

 Tom and Laura's father — Amanda Wingfield's husband — abandoned his family some years ago, and Tom tells the audience that he is about to relate a "memory play," "truth in the pleasant guise of illusion." The time Tom recalls is during the Depression, when he lived with his mother and sister in a St. Louis apartment building described as "one of those vast hive-like conglomerations of cellular living-units." Amanda dominated the household as an aging southern belle who retained her girlish charm as well as an eternal optimism and a fierce determination that she and her children would overcome what she insisted on viewing as temporary obstacles. Laura, who had lived at home since high school, spent her days listening to her father's record collection and playing with the glass animals she collected and called her "menagerie." Tom worked in a shoe factory, a job he loathed and therefore barely tended to, instead focusing his passion on writing poetry and his leisure on going to films. 

Tom's recollection of the family's interactions begins with an occasion when Amanda told Tom precisely how to eat his dinner. Tom could not stomach his mother's remarks and responded to his mother's lecture with anger. Amanda then turned to Laura, who was upset by the scene, and coddled her while she also cajoled her to remain "fresh and pretty" for the gentleman callers that Laura knew would never arrive. Amanda ignored both her adult children's frustration and embarrassment, and she proceeded to recall aloud her many beaux who sought her company when she was a girl.

Tom remembers that on another day his mother decided to stop in at the business college Laura was supposedly attending, only to find that Laura had quit school early in the semester. Amanda went home and confronted Laura, accusing her of deception. Laura, disabled from a teenage bout with pleurosis, suffered even greater paralysis from shyness and confessed to her mother that she had spent her hours scheduled for class wandering about the city, taking refuge in the museum, the zoo, and the Jewel Box, a hothouse for exotic plants. Amanda's hurt at the thought that Laura had deceived her turned to anguish at the notion that Laura had forfeited her future, until Laura admitted to having once liked a boy in high school. Immediately, Amanda perked up and launched a plan to ensure Laura's welfare by snaring her daughter an eligible man.

Amanda plotted a liaison for Laura while she also attempted to supplement the family income by selling magazine subscriptions. She chided Tom for his lack of ambition, and her actions and words resulted in repeated, escalating arguments between them. More and more often, Tom fled to the movies for respite. One day while Amanda and Tom fought, Laura fell, causing mother and son to temporarily halt their hostilities. The separate nature of their care for Laura caused further angst, as Tom insisted that his mother recognize Laura's personality and physical impairment in order to accept her as she was, and Amanda recoiled at Tom's words, declaring that Laura's crippled state was but a slight "defect."

Amanda nagged Tom to bring home a "gentleman caller" for Laura, and one evening Tom announced to Amanda that he had invited a man from work to come to dinner the following evening. Amanda's initial excitement turned to panic when she realized that she lacked the time necessary to completely transform the Wingfield apartment in honor of the rare guest. Amanda performed her magic, however, and when the gentleman caller arrived she had restored not only the Wingfield apartment but also herself to a semblance of former glory.

Prior to the arrival of Jim O'Connor, the gentleman caller, Laura discovered that in all probability the man her brother would be bringing home was the same one on whom she had had a crush in high school. When Jim arrived and Laura realized that he was indeed the boy she once knew, shyness and embarrassment overcame her to the extent that she found herself incapable of sharing the meal Amanda pretended her daughter cooked. During dinner, the lights went out, and although Amanda carried forth gaily, noting the romance of dining by candlelight, she knew that Tom had failed to pay the electric bill. What she did not know was what Tom had confessed to Jim — the fact that he had sent the money to the Union of Merchant Seamen as a first step toward leaving home.

After dinner, Jim sought out Laura and engaged her in conversation. Laura learned that Jim was not married, as she had first thought. Jim told Laura that her singular traits made her special instead of defective. They danced, and Laura's self-consciousness turned to romantic hope. Laura's dream shattered when Jim accidentally broke the horn off her favorite glass animal, a unicorn, and as he told her he was engaged to another woman. Laura gave Jim the broken unicorn as a "souvenir." After Jim left, Amanda railed against Tom, first accusing him of having known Jim was engaged and then calling him irresponsible for not having realized the truth.

In the end, Tom again addresses the audience alone. Years and miles separate him from the mother he cannot live with and the sister he could not forget. In the darkness, Tom cries out his anguish that "nowadays the world is lit by lightning!" and that his memory of Laura is but a candle that he must blow out to free himself of her haunting, dreamlike presence.

Critical Evaluation:

Winner of the Drama Critics Circle Award when it opened on Broadway, The Glass Menagerie has become a classic of the American theater. The Glass Menagerie is rich in themes. One of the play's primary interests lies in exploring illusion versus reality. From the beginning, Tennessee Williams, through his narrator, Tom, explains to the audience that this is a memory play, and he emphasizes the irony that truth is often cloaked by illusion.

Amanda represents the past, the pre-World War II era of the South, where she once reigned supreme in a culture that taught her to confuse appearance with substance. Amanda expends her ingenuity in manipulating others to care for her and for themselves, a seemingly selfish but also naïvely altruistic stance that ironically alienates and defeats those she most wants to encourage. Instead of acknowledging her children as individuals both gifted and flawed, she subconsciously denies them their humanity by insisting on their perfection. Tom and Laura retreat — Tom to the movies and eventually to distant lands, and Laura to the world of her imagination, peopled by music and glass animals. Tom and Laura react subconsciously to their mother's demands by avoiding any possibility of success, a stance that ensures their psychological and social defeat.

Tom is every bit the romantic his mother is, despite the fact that he does not realize it. He sees himself as a poet, as an artist whose very soul is stifled by his warehouse existence. In much the same way as Amanda is stuck in the past, Tom survives only on dreams of the future, ironically failing to realize his goals and the satisfaction he covets by dismissing his relationships and work obligations. He and Amanda both love Laura, but Tom believes that Amanda's refusal to recognize Laura's limitations is now what most demeans her daughter. Amanda believes that Tom's failure to treat his sister as the prize Amanda would have her be will seal Laura's sad fate.

Laura, the character who at first appears most divorced from reality, emerges as the only member of the Wingfield family who is in touch with the truth about herself. She understands her limitations, and even as she escapes the business school that does not fit her psychological needs, she seeks refuge in places designed to showcase precious and exotic specimens. Like her mother and brother, Laura takes comfort in illusion, as her preoccupation with her glass menagerie proves. When Jim, who provides Laura with hope, destroys her illusion, Laura realizes that she is indeed ordinary, like her unicorn-turned-horse. She understands the irony of the unicorn's accident and accepts her own altered psychological circumstances. Thus, in spite of the illusion that Laura is the weakest Wingfield, she emerges as the emotionally strongest family member. Laura is also the family peacemaker, the single person who understands the others so well that she refuses to challenge their fantasies, knowing that they, as has she, depend on their illusions to survive.

In the end, Tom leaves St. Louis, but as he so eloquently states, he cannot escape his memory of Laura. "[Time] is the longest distance between two places," he notes. Tom realizes that he cannot start life anew without coming to terms with the past. The audience understands that he is a metaphor for the post-World War II future.

Williams himself stated the play's essential significance best in his 1945 article "How to Stage The Glass Menagerie." He wrote that "Everyone should know nowadays the unimportance of the photographic in art: that truth, life, or reality is an organic thing which the poetic imagination can represent or suggest, in essence, only through transformation, through changing into other forms than those which were merely present in appearance." That one must look beyond the facts to find the truth is Williams's loudest message, an early and significant literary manifestation of the psychological implications of human behavior first noted by Sigmund Freud. The playwright also observes that truth itself is subjective, its delineation ironically depending on a character's and an audience's always-illusory perspective.