Internal and External Conflicts of the Characters in the Glass Menagerie - Assignment Example

 The Glass Menagerie: Character Analysis Tennessee Williams’ play “The Glass Menagerie” features three primary characters, Amanda, Tom and Laura, and one secondary character, Jim. The three primary characters are members of a small family that has struggled through hard times who have created their own little world. Amanda is the mother. Tom is Amanda’s youngest child and Laura is the oldest. In real life, the family faces a great deal of external problems. Amanda’s husband ran out on the family and made it hard for them to support themselves. Laura is very shy about being around people because of her pleurosis, which makes her walk with a limp that she feels everyone is staring at her. Tom is forced to work at a job he hates in order to support his mother and sister. Each of these characters has invented an internal world that makes them happy. Amanda lives in her past where she lived as a Southern belle. Laura lives within the world of her records and among the figures in her glass menagerie. Tom lives to write and dreams of traveling. For each of these characters, the external life of the real world interferes with their internal worlds and forces them to make changes. Amanda’s first words in the play show that she lives in an internal world of her past. “Amanda Wingfield can never quite extricate herself from the past in order to come to terms with the flow of life in the present, or what that present bodes for the future. Since the past for Amanda dominates the present, the future is untenable (or untenant-able), in spite of her moments of concern for Laura’s future” (Bluefarb, 1963: 513). Although she works from the house, trying to sell magazine subscriptions to her friends, she is not seen as very successful at this and her ability to earn money is founded on the same principles that she attempts to place on Laura. Her external expectations for her children show her inability to exist in the present. Trying to get Jim to like Laura, she immediately gets stuck in listing the Southern values and expectations of the past: “It’s rare for a girl as sweet an’ pretty as Laura to be domestic! But Laura is, thank heavens, not only pretty but also very domestic. I’m not at all. I never was a bit. I never could make a thing but angel-food cake. Well, in the South we had so many servants … I wasn’t prepared for what the future brought me” (VI, 204). Not even the brace on her daughter’s leg or the frank comments of her son can wake her up to the facts. “The memories of the past are beautiful and momentarily comforting, but they have to be beautiful if they are to compensate for the indignities of the present” (Popkin, 1960: 54). External events finally seem to shock her out of the past, at least for a minute, as Jim’s engagement to another girl is announced and she is seen trying to comfort Laura in her final scene. Laura lives almost completely in a world of illusion because she is rarely forced to face reality. She drifts through life in a cloud of her own making. She “takes refuge in her collection of glass animals” (Popkin, 1960: 58) and seems completely trapped “in the jailhouse of her thwarted present – the past dominates as the present or future can never do. The past not only casts its shadow upon the present and the future, but actually determines the course that each of these shall take” (Bluefarb, 1963: 513). Laura’s past has a huge impact on her present because she has continued to live more in her smaller world in her mind instead of the real world. She stopped going to high school because she “made bad grades on my final examinations” (VII, 219) instead of continuing to try. She also couldn’t go back to business school because “I couldn’t go back there. I – threw up – on the floor!” (II, 155). Without an education of any kind, she has restricted herself to being a housewife, but with her shyness and keeping herself at home all the time, she doesn’t have any chance of meeting a man who could be husband. Instead, she spends her time listening to her old records and playing with her glass menagerie like a small child. Like her mother, this shows Laura’s tendency to live in the past, when things were happier. Tom brings Jim home to introduce to Laura as a potential husband, a man who happens to be the one boy Laura liked in school, but, unknown to Tom, Jim is already engaged to be married. This crushes Laura’s dream world in the same way that Jim broke her favorite glass animal and again suggests that the character is now forced to face reality. Tom tells the audience at the end of the play that he followed “in my father’s footsteps, attempting to find in motion what was lost in space. I traveled around a great deal … I would have stopped, but I was pursued by something” (VII, 237). That something turns out to be the images, smells, sounds and other reminders of the sister he left behind, meaning he is also trapped in an internal world of the past. Tom’s heart remains trapped within the small apartment he shared with his mother and sister. During the action of the play, it is seen that Tom is only really happy when he is able to escape into his dream world of his writing. He hates his job and hates his existence at the apartment, but sees it as his duty to remain and take care of his sister and his mother. This does not make the suffering of reality any easier for him, though. When Amanda starts yelling at him for only thinking of himself when he disappears into his books or leaves the apartment for the movies, he bursts: “Every time you come in yelling that Goddam ‘Rise and Shine! Rise and Shine!’ I say to myself, ‘How lucky dead people are!’ But I get up. I go! For sixty-five dollars a month I give up all that I dream of doing and being ever! And you say self – self’s all I ever think of. Why, listen, if self is what I thought of, Mother, I’d be where he is – GONE!” (II, 160). Through this sort of action, Tom’s dreamworld is seen to be the world out there somewhere, the world of Spain and Germany, the places where things are happening while he is forced to stay in place and keep dragging himself through the nightmare of repetition. But he is also caught up in living in the past. This is clear as the entire play is presented as his memory of what happened just before he left home many years ago. In Tom’s case, rather than helping him hide from reality, his memories serve to force reality upon him at odd moments throughout every day by forcing him to remember that he abandoned his sister and mother in the same way that his father had. Each character, Tom, Laura and Amanda, seem very happy as long as they are permitted to live inside their internal world of dreams. Amanda is happy remembering the glories of her youth, Laura happily escapes the present by reliving her early childhood when her father was still at home and Tom’s inner world is full of his writing and his dreams. But each character is also forced to deal with external conflicts that bring them out of their dreamworlds. Amanda must work to support her children even though she doesn’t really know how, Laura must face the truth that she is not the special unicorn of her glass menagerie but is instead just a regular horse after all and Tom, although he gets the opportunity to live out his dreams of travel, finds he cannot escape the reality of his past either. Works Cited Bluefarb, Sam. “The Glass Menagerie: Three Visions of Time.” College English. Vol. 24, N. 7, (April 1963), pp. 513-518. Popkin, Henry. “The Plays of Tennessee Williams.” The Tulane Drama Review. Vol. 4, N. 3, (March 1960), pp. 45-64. Williams, Tennessee. “The Glass Menagerie.” The Theatre of Tennessee Williams. Vol. 1. New York: New Directions Books: 1971. Read More