The Glass Menagerie - Essay Example

The Glass Menagerie: Character Analysis The play, “The Glass Menagerie” shows a family who chases the American Dream although the dream proves to be an illusion. Written by Tennessee Williams, the main characters are Amanda, Tom and Laura. As the play progresses, each character can be seen to live in their own world. They try to protect their own internal dreams and struggles against the intrusions of the outside world. Tom, the narrator of the story, is seen to be caught up in a world in which he is trapped taking care of his female relatives despite his dreams of traveling and writing stories. Amanda is caught up in the pleasant memories of her youth and the dreams of the Southern belle, hoping to find the same kind of young adulthood for her own daughter and is incapable of considering that her own daughter’s circumstances are vastly different from the circumstances of Amanda’s own youth. Laura, a shy girl with a decided limp as the result of childhood illness, is extremely shy and considers herself incapable of facing the outside world. She prefers to live in the world of her childhood with her music and her glass figurines despite the fact that she needs to find some means of supporting herself in her future. All three of these characters can be seen to live primarily in an internal world of their own creation that directly conflicts with the world outside and makes it difficult for them to confront real-life issues. Despite his attempts to escape his past, 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, proving through the very act of telling the play that memories cannot be escaped regardless of how hard or fast you run. While Tom is now a member of the merchant marine and an accomplished traveler, living out the internal dreams of his youth in a way he had never thought possible while living in his mother’s apartment, this outward show of personal dream fulfillment is revealed as little more than an illusion of its own. In truth, Tom’s heart remains trapped within the small apartment he shared with his mother and sister. 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. His memories constrain the illusions he is able to conceive, forcing him to ‘come clean’ and tell what has happened in his life. At the same time, this final production of “truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion” (I, 144) is itself an illusion for Tom, who feels in its telling he will escape the memories that have been haunting him, “Blow out your candles, Laura – and so, goodbye” (VII, 237). However, in the preservation of the story in printed word, the reality is that Tom will never escape these memories, either because he was never going to forget or because the play would always be there to remind him. To bring forward the effect of memory and internal worlds as opposed to external worlds of reality, Williams continues to allow Tom to separate himself out from the action from time to time to narrate and point to specific ideas or events, catch the audience up on what has happened in the interim between two scenes or make other comments. In describing how the concept of memory is achieved, Richard Vowles (1958) describes its dreamlike qualities, “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” (54). By keeping the concept that almost the entire play is a memory belonging to Tom in clear focus through this otherworldly light, Williams is able to illustrate how memory has served to shape Tom’s life, never permitting him the escape he sought through the merchant marine. Like Tom, whose internal and external worlds continue to collide at almost all times, Amanda regales her children with stories about when she was young, in the process pointing out the various ways in which Laura is a failure as a daughter and Tom is insufficient as a provider. Although this is not necessarily done in a mean way or with deliberate intentions, as she discusses her own days of youth, Amanda continuously points out the various ways in which Laura does not measure up to her expectations. 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). Amanda’s preference for living in her internal world is made obvious as the family finishes dinner and Amanda sends Laura out into the family room to prepare for the “flood, there must have been a tornado” of gentlemen callers prepared to spend the evening vying for Laura’s attention. “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). Despite his continuous efforts to provide for the family, Amanda also harps on Tom for his failures to provide both adequate financial support for the family and for not having brought home any ‘gentlemen callers’ for his sister, failing to realize in the process that Tom is too busy with work and too solitary of a man to have many friends. In the end, though, she is forced to come face to face with both her children’s limitations as Laura collapses in tears after Jim’s departure and then with the running away of Tom. Laura is the only character permitted to live almost totally within her internal world of music and glass figures. She seems 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 feelings of inadequacy within the real world are captured with her response to her mother’s preparations after dinner: “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 insists there is only one way of accomplishing her goals and that is through determined charm and wit, attempting to force Laura into behavior that is completely alien to her and erasing any source of self-confidence Laura might have had and forcing her into the world of her mind. This can be traced as she first dropped out of high school because she “made bad grades on my final examinations” (VII, 219) and then dropped out of business school: “I couldn’t go back there. I – threw up – on the floor!” (II, 155). Her options have become severely limited which finally becomes clear to her when Jim, the only individual she ever thought of as a marriage possibility, announces that he is already engaged. Thus, all three characters experience at least a temporary lucidity from the illusory worlds they live in as a result of the power of their memories. For Tom, the play itself becomes the release of his memory that allows him to find a sense of temporary closure on his past. For Laura, stuck in a steady haze in the present, the realization of her thwarted hopes and dreams from the past allows her to consider new ideas brought in by the very hero she envisioned, although not in the way she had imagined. For Amanda, the wake-up call doesn’t come until the end of the play, when she finally acknowledges the truths of the present, “Don’t think about us, a mother deserted, an unmarried sister who’s crippled and has no job!” (VII, 236). While the duration of this reality check may not be measured in the play or in real life, the suddenness of it, for all the characters occurring in the final scene of the play, serves as a wake-up call for the audience as well, to start examining the various areas in which their nostalgic dreams of the past are clouding their perception of the present or the future and preventing them from truly and effectively addressing the issues of the day. Works Cited Bluefarb, Sam. “The Glass Menagerie: Three Visions of Time.” College English. Vol. 24, N. 7, (April 1963), pp. 513-518. Williams, Tennessee. “The Glass Menagerie.” The Theatre of Tennessee Williams. Vol. 1. New York: New Directions Books: 1971. Vowles, Richard B. “Tennessee Williams: The World of His Imagery.” The Tulane Drama Review. Vol. 3, N. 2, (December 1958), pp. 51-56. Read More