The Glass Menagerie

Recent scholarly criticism has remained convinced that The Glass Menagerie is "Tennessee Williams's most autobiographical play, accurate to the imaginative reality of his experience even when it departs from facts in detail" (Parker 3) and that "No one who has reviewed even the bare details of his biography can overlook the obvious similarities between the record of his early life and the events described in The Glass Menagerie" (Presley 86); the playwright's official biographer also contends that "Tennessee Williams had still to prove that this was not a writer's single autobiographical (emphasis mine) success" (Leverich 585). It is futile to dispute the resemblance between biographical facts and dramatic fiction in this play and yet it is worth pointing out that a number of features of the play are not attested in reality and, conversely, that well-established aspects of Williams's early adulthood are not reflected in the play. Mrs. Edwina Williams, the playwright's mother, pointed out the many differences between the Williamses and the Wingfields (149-150, 174-175), and Cornelius Williams, the father, is recorded as having failed to discern any similarity between Amanda and Edwina and having resented the accusation of abandoning a family from which, on the contrary, he felt he had been psychologically excluded and ultimately physically exiled (Leverich 567); moreover, literary models other than the members of the Williams family—D.H. Laurence's characters in Sons and Lovers or Hart Crane, as man and poet—can be discerned as in filigree through the texture of the Wingfield saga (Debusscher 167-188). Therefore, without disregarding the personal, documentary nature of the material but giving equal weight to the omissions, the discrepancies, and the additions—the dramatic strategies—I suggest that The Glass Menagerie be termed "autofictional," i.e. the result of a conflation of real life and fantasy, the poetic (re)arrangement of fact within fiction, the imaginative... [continues]

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