The Glass Menagerie

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• Essay on The Glass Menagerie

  ...The Glass Menagerie Tennessee Williams "Choose a play in which a central character behaves in an obsessive manner. Describe the nature of the character's obsessive behaviour and discuss the influence this behaviour has on your understanding of the character in the play as a whole." "The Glass Menagerie" is a play written by Tennessee Williams. The play is semi-autobiographical, told from the point of view of the writer. It is a memory play set in the home the Wingfield family. The play is about a young man, Tom, who lives with his mother, Amanda and his sister, Laura. The play explores the various struggles of each individual during the great depression. The characters all have their flaws and motives which help us to understand them and sympathise or agree with them. All the characters in the play behave in some sort of obsessive manner; however, Amanda behaves most strongly this way. Amanda Wingfield is one of the main characters and plays a great role in the readers understanding of the play as a whole. She behaves in a very obsessive manner throughout the play and this creates conflict between the other characters. In Scene one, we are introduced to Amanda's obsessive and controlling behaviour. As Tom eats at the dinner table, Amanda continuously pesters him, telling him how to eat his food. "Don't push with your fingers. If you have to push something, the thing to push with is the crust of bread…So chew...

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• The Glass Menagerie Essay

  ... 6 November 2013 “The Glass Menagerie” is a play by Tennessee Williams about the lives of a troubled family the Wingfield’s who are living together under one roof in 1944 Chicago. The family consists of the mother, Amanda Wingfield, and her son Tom and daughter Laura, both whom are grown up and in their twenties. Amanda’s husband and Tom and Laura’s father abandoned them a long time ago. Along with the absence of the father in the family, there is a host of additional issues that each member of the family possesses. Amanda constantly is found clinging to the past and Laura and Tom both have problems progressing in their own lives and seem to have no direction or sense of purpose in their lives whatsoever. Critics Sam Bluefarb and Nada Zeineddine also take aim at families issues with reality and direct their attention at all of the members of the family having trouble living in the present and dealing with the realities of their lives. Moreover, in “The Glass Menagerie” by Tennessee Williams, Amanda Wingfield’s extreme inability to accept and adapt to reality has emotionally crippled her children and prevented them from growing and being happy in their own lives. Throughout the story Amanda constantly demonstrates behavior that shows she can’t accept reality. Bluefarb asserts that Amanda is “incapable of inhabiting the present other than in terms of the past” and Amanda constantly is found reminiscing and...

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• Glass Menagerie Essay

  ...Alena Nekrashevich Professor DiAngelo English 112/001 4 December 2012 An Escape from Confinement The Wingfield family in Tennessee Williams “The Glass Menagerie” is one that is held together by the bonds of illusion, dysfunction, and entrapment. Amanda Wingfield lives in a lower middle-class apartment that Williams tells us is "symptomatic of the impulse of this largest and fundamentally enslaved section of American society to avoid fluidity and differentiation and to function as one interfused mass of automatism" (Williams, 1945, 400). Amanda and her two children, Laura and Tom, are enslaved in different ways. Amanda is a slave to a past when the bloom was not off the rose, so-to-speak. Tom is enslaved by pity for his mother and sister that keeps him working in a warehouse job he hates as he is a poet. Laura is enslaved by her illusions. There is a constant struggle between reality and illusion in this play, something ironic in light of the fact that Williams attempted to avoid realism. As Downer (1960) notes: "As a writer he is basically a poet, and he has done much to develop the possibilities of poetic expression in a theater that was created as a home for relentless realism" (222). Laura's development through the play influences the evolution of the idea, that one must escape enslavement to have the chance for a fulfilling existence. The truly dysfunctional family of the play didn’t...

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• The Glass Menagerie Essay

  ...The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams Tom abandoned his family in order to pursue his own future. The play is centered around the theme of family starting with the father of Laura and Tom abandoning the family when they were just children and finally Tom’s selfish abandonment of his family who is entirely dependent on him. In The Glass Menagerie, family means obligations. This play raises questions of duty and responsibility to your other family members, and for the most part in gender specific roles. We see that it is the job of the male to bring home money, and the daughter to look pretty and get married. This also features the notion of abandonment, as a father leaves the family behind. There is also the notion of children taking after their parents; Tom leaves the family just as his father did, and Amanda wishes her daughter were as popular as she used to be. We see fighting between mother and son over both trivial matters, such as dinner etiquette, and larger issues, such as work and life goals. Lastly, this play examines the relationship between sister and brother, as Tom feels both protective and later regret with regards to his sister Laura. We can sense Tom’s feelings of being trapped, the fact that he is contained in only one location along with his family. The fire escape, of course, is crucial, being a means of escape and all. It‘s kind of hangs out there like a constant foreshadowing of Tom’s...

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• The Glass Menagerie Essay

  ...The Glass Menagerie Surrealism is an early 20th century art movement promoting the idea that the "real world" is within the inner consciousness of the human mind. It stated that art should be built from the full expression of this inner consciousness without any editing. Within this scene of The Glass Menagerie Tennessee Williams used dreams, memories, and surrealism in order to portray the complex relationship between the family members. Scene six involves Tom bringing Jim O'Connor over for dinner at his home. Tom’s role in The Glass Menagerie—as a character whose memories the play documents and as a character who acts within those memories—underlines the play’s tension between objectively presented dramatic truth and memory’s distortion of truth. Unlike the other characters, Tom sometimes speaks to the audience directly, looking to provide a more detached explanation of what has been occurring onstage. But at the same time, he displays real and sometimes juvenile emotions as he takes part in the play’s action. It shows how the nature of recollection is itself problematic: memory often involves confronting a past in which one was less virtuous than one is now. Because The Glass Menagerie is somewhat autobiographical, and because Tom is a stand-in for the playwright himself (William's given name was Thomas, and he, like Tom, spent part of his youth in St....

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• The Glass Menagerie Essay

  ...The Glass Menagerie By Tennesse Williams About the Author Tennessee Williams based “The Glass Menagerie” on "Portrait of a Girl in Glass," a short story he wrote in 1943 and published in 1948. Both works drew upon Williams's own experiences. When he was growing up, he was close to his sister, Rose, who resembled the fragile and psychologically disturbed Laura Wingfield in "The Glass Menagerie." His mother resembled Laura's mother, Amanda. Williams himself resembled Laura's brother, Tom Wingfield. Williams was even nicknamed Tom in his youth. Plot Summary Tom begins by introducing the play as a memory play of his own memory of his past. He introduces the character. The start of the play shows the Wingfield family eating dinner. Amanda keeps telling Tom to chew is food, and Tom gets thoroughly annoyed and leaves the table to smoke. Amanda tells her story of 17 gentleman callers. The next day, Laura is sitting at her desk in front of the typewriter chart when Amanda comes in angry. She asks Laura about the business college and tells Laura she found out that she dropped out. Laura explains that she couldn’t handle the class and went walking every day. Later Amanda sits with Laura and asks her about a boy she liked. Laura points out Jim in the yearbook. Later, Tom gets into an argument with Amanda. Amanda cannot understand why Tom goes to the movies every...

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• Glass Menagerie Essay

  ...Glass Menagerie Outline 1 Summarizing Sentence: Amanda Wingfield is the most prominent and dynamic character in the play. I. Amanda begins the play with the first impression of being overprotective and critical of her children A.In the play she appears to be a constantly worried about her families future. 1. She comes up with foolish ways to some how secure their lives. a. She asks Tom to find Laura a gentle man at the factory B. Even as grown ups she would try to control them and teach them lessons 1.” Honey, don’t push with your fingers. If you have to push with something, the thing to push with is a crust of bread. And chew chew!” 2. Argues that Tom is spending to much of his time at the movies 3. Nags at him to help find someone for his sister C. She uses Laura to relive her past when she was married to Mr. Wingfield 1. In her younger days, she was a typical Southern Belle, brought up in a genteel family and pampered by her seventeen beaux. a. When Jim comes over for dinner her southern accent comes into play 2. she continuously repeats thestory of the "one Sunday afternoon in Blue Mountain" D. Amanda went from having it all to struggling to help her children succeeded so they could one day have a better life 1. She encouraged both her children to enroll in activities so that they could improve themselves a. An example would be Laura attending business school 2. Amanda always tries to get Laura gentleman callers II. After Laura...

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• The Glass Menagerie Essay

  ...The Glass Menagerie Laura Wingfield In Tennessee William's play, The Glass Menagerie, the character of Laura is like a fragile piece of glass. The play is based around a fragile family and their difficulties coping with life. In this play, Williams uses the theme of escape as a major part of this story. All of the characters are incapable of living in the real world. They use various methods to try to escape the problems in their lives. “The Glass Menagerie projects not a series of violent confrontations leading to a catastrophe, but a vision of lonely human beings who fail to make contact, who are isolated from each other and from society, and who seem ultimately abandoned in the universe” (Stein, 1964). Through an examination of Laura one can see the various ways she tries to escape the world in which she is living. In the beginning Laura seemed normal enough, going to business school and practicing her typing and shorthand at home. Then the plot unfolds and it becomes clear that she is not normal at all. She is unable to even take a typing test without getting so emotional that she gets sick. She then retreats not to her home but the streets where she wanders day after day hiding her failure in business school from her mother. Until she gets sick with a cold and has to stay home. Her wandering took her to a museum and the birdhouse, and a zoo. All of these places she...

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