Amandas Failures in the Glass Menagerie - Book Report/Review Example

Amanda’s Failures In Tennessee Williams’ play “The Glass Menagerie,” the story is told of a small family. The father of the family deserted them many years ago and the mother, Amanda, finds it nearly impossible to accept her current conditions. The son, Tom, knows he will never accomplish his dreams while he is supporting his mother and sister and his frustration is taken out in drinking and going to the movies. Laura, the sister, is extremely shy, partly because of her crippling illness (pleurosis) which forces her to wear a brace on her leg and walk with a limp, also disappointing her mother’s expectations. Amanda decides marriage is the only answer for Laura and forces Tom to find a beau for his sister. Unfortunately, the one he finds, while perfectly acceptable to both Laura and Amanda, is already engaged. This leaves Laura with a broken heart, symbolized by the broken unicorn Laura encourages him to keep as a souvenir. The play is a tragedy because Amanda, having had the opportunity to learn from her past, continues to live in a dream-world of her own creation, effectively crushing her children’s chances to create their own dreams. Amanda reveals her dreams in her expectations for her children. She continues to hold out hopes for a good marriage for her daughter in spite of her extreme shyness and poverty. This starts with her own recitation of the quality of her suitors, “My callers were gentlemen – all! Among my callers were some of the most prominent young planters of the Mississippi Delta – planters and sons of planters” (I, 148). Her expectations for her son are that he become like one of these old suitors in spite of his own youth and lack of education or social advancement. These expectations reveal that “Amanda lives in the past and imposes unrealistic rules of conduct upon her children” (Popkin, 1960, p. 46). Immediately upon Tom telling her that he has a friend coming over for dinner, Amanda already considers him her daughter’s future husband. Tom tries to reign her in by stating “Lots of fellows meet girls whom they don’t marry” (V, 184), but Amanda just tells him to “talk sensibly.” This emphasizes Amanda’s tendency to crush the realities of their situation and the ideas of her children beneath her own dreams and memories. Richard Vowles (1958) describes the play’s dreamlike qualities as another element intended to point out this oppression: “One scene dissolves into another. There is, indeed, almost a submarine quality about the play, the kind of poetic slow motion that becomes ballet and a breathless repression of feeling that belongs to everyone but Amanda” (p. 54). Throughout the play, Amanda tells her children beautiful stories from her past which has the effect of dampening her children’s dreams. She indicates girls in her time “knew how to entertain their gentleman callers. It wasn’t enough for a girl to be possessed of a pretty face and a graceful figure – although I wasn’t slighted in either respect. She also needed to have a nimble wit and a tongue to meet all occasions” (I, 148). Laura does not possess the graceful figure her mother deems important nor does she have the sparkling personality her mother values, being too shy to mumble more than a word or two when confronted by strangers. Amanda’s imagined world is made obvious as the family finishes dinner and Amanda sends Laura out into the family room to prepare for the flood of gentlemen callers Amanda expects but Laura knows will not come. Laura’s feelings of inadequacy are captured with her response to her mother’s preparations, “It isn’t a flood, it’s not a tornado, Mother. I’m just not popular like you were in Blue Mountain” (I, 150). Rather than focusing on the strengths actually possessed by her daughter that can be utilized to help ease her out into society, Amanda attempts to force Laura into behavior that is completely alien to her. Rather than dreaming her own dreams, Laura is forced to concentrate on the many ways she has failed to measure up to her mother. Like her blind spot regarding Laura’s shyness, Amanda is equally upset with Tom’s failure to equal her dreams of him. She’s constantly angry with him for not bringing home enough money to support the family despite his youth. When she asks him to find a gentleman for Laura, the pressure is not just to find someone for Laura to meet, but to find someone willing to marry Laura immediately. Although she tells him she wants him to “Find out one that’s clean-living – doesn’t drink and ask him out for sister … To meet! Get acquainted!” (IV, 176), Tom realizes that a simple acquaintance is not what his mother is seeking. While it seems to Amanda that Tom is putting off inviting someone to dinner, it emerges in scene six that Tom is nearly as friendless as Laura. “I had known Jim slightly in high school … He was the only one at the warehouse with whom I was on friendly terms” (VI, 190). That he genuinely tried to find someone for Laura is evidenced in his recollection that Laura had known Jim in high school and had spoken “admiringly of his voice” (VI, 191). However, his “best friend down at the warehouse” (VII, 235) has a surprise Tom didn’t know about, that he was getting married in June, which Amanda uses to blame Tom for once again thinking only about himself. Throughout the play, it can be seen that Amanda has little idea of how to handle having two children who don’t measure up to her dreams. She is incapable of seeing how their desperate living conditions, as well as physical conditions in the case of Laura, have affected her children, causing them to be closed off to the outside world or how her own expectations have thwarted their ability to dream for themselves. She does this by constantly informing her children of their own failures – Tom’s in not being the inhuman paragon of strength she expects him to be and Laura by not being the vivacious thing Amanda used to be in her own youth. By failing to take their individual personalities into consideration, she forces a situation in which both children are sure to fail as well. Works Cited Popkin, Henry. “The Plays of Tennessee Williams.” The Tulane Drama Review. Vol. 4, N. 3, (March 1960), pp. 45-64. Vowles, Richard B. “Tennessee Williams: The World of His Imagery.” The Tulane Drama Review. Vol. 3, N. 2, (December 1958), pp. 51-56. Williams, Tennessee. “The Glass Menagerie.” The Theatre of Tennessee Williams. Vol. 1. New York: New Directions Books: 1971. Read More