The Glass Menagerie - Essay Example

C. He feels like a trapped animal that finally escapes its shackled existence. III: Amanda Wingfield’s illusionary world. A. Amanda is an old Southern belle who cannot accept her new status. B. She is partially guilty for her children’s faults. C. She tries to live in the present and past, unsuccessfully. The Difficulty of Accepting Reality Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie offers a minimal approach at the cost of an abundant plot and dramatic realism, so that he can portray “the totality of experience… through symbolic implications, psychological action and lack of other distractions” (Bloom 19).

His characters face such transformation that they find it impossible to relate to and cope with their present reality. Each member of the Wingfield family is unable to overcome this difficulty and each one of them withdraws into a private world of illusion where they find the comfort and meaning that the real world does not seem to offer. The physically and emotionally crippled Laura lives in a private world populated by glass animals, which are, just like her own inner self, dangerously delicate: “Oh, be careful - If you breathe, it breaks!

” (Williams 64). Despite her problems, she harshly contrasts the other members of her household, with their selfishness and grudging sacrifices, by exalting pure compassion. She is also compared to a unicorn, a mythical being which is being referred to as extinct by Jim, and is also lonely, just like Laura due to its uniqueness. Once broken, it loses its magical traits and becomes just an ordinary horse which she gives to Jim as a souvenir, because it does not belong to her imaginative glass menagerie world any more, an enticing world grounded on fragile illusions.

Unlike his sister, Tom is capable of functioning in the real world, as it is noted in his holding down a job and talking to strangers. He reads literature, he writes poetry and dreams of higher things in life, of escape and adventure. Yet, he is inextricably bound to the squalid, petty world of the Wingfield household, as this is the only thing we get a deeper insight into. He bares his thoughts on his sister, mother, his warehouse job, precisely the things he claims he wishes to escape from.

It becomes all too obvious that he has no more motivation than his sister in trying to obtain personal success, romantic relationships or even ordinary friendships, but just retreats into fantasies that literature, movies and drunkenness provide for him, until finally he leaves both his mother and sister behind, because as Williams puts it: “to escape from a trap, he has to act without pity” (Williams xiii). Their mother Amanda’s relationship with reality is the most complicated one. As an aged Southern belle who has lost all the major traits of one, she is partial to real world values and longs for social and financial success.

She cannot accept her new status in society, Laura’s peculiarity, the fact that Tom is not a real and successful businessman, and that she herself might be partially responsible for the flaws of her children. She yearns to make things better for all of them, yet she does it in all the wrong ways. Her retreat into illusion is in many ways more pathetic than that of her children’s, because she wistfully distorts reality, while at the same time, being painfully convinced she is not doing so.

She tries desperately to hold on to both worlds, that of the present and the past, but realizes that both are crumbling beneath her