The Glass Menagerie Essay
The Glass Menagerie, a short play by Tennessee Williams, is about family dysfunction. The play is centered on the Wingfield family, living in St. Louis during the depression-Era1930. The play consists of five characters who try to escape unpleasant reality and live in their dream world. Mr. Wingfield left Amanda, his wife, with two children years ago to seek pleasure in his life and to escape from his duties towards his family, so Amanda Wingfield is a single, mother of two children, Tom (her son) and Laura (her daughter). She depends entirely on Tom for her and her daughter’s livelihood. She always lives in the fear that Tom would leave her and Laura as her husband did. She tries to fluctuate between illusion of her youth the and real world.
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The glass menagerie symbolizes her fragility, her retreat from real world, and her incapability of facing the reality. So in order to escape from the real world, she lives in the world of glass feeling her at ease and normal. When Jim comes for dinner she give him to see the unicorn, the one that she liked the most and which she never allows anybody to touch. He keeps the unicorn on the table, and they started dancing. While they were dancing Jim accidently knock off the unicorn from the table. Jim apologizes, but Laura says; “Now its just like all the other horses… Maybe it’s blessing in disguise.” (Williams). This means that the breaking of the unicorn’s horn represents the breaking of her shyness, freeing all of the feeling she had bottled up and making her a normal person, or the unicorn horn has broken and changed into a horse that is normal like other animals; therefore, she is trying to change from being different from others to becoming more normal. The breaking of the unicorn is significant as it indicates breaking out of her glass world. However, when she comes to know that Jim is already engaged, the breaking of unicorn seems to be a traumatic event for Laura as it is like breaking her heart. Apart from this, she thinks that she will always be like the broken unicorn in the
The glass menagerie symbolizes her fragility, her retreat from real world, and her incapability of facing the reality. So in order to escape from the real world, she lives in the world of glass feeling her at ease and normal. When Jim comes for dinner she give him to see the unicorn, the one that she liked the most and which she never allows anybody to touch. He keeps the unicorn on the table, and they started dancing. While they were dancing Jim accidently knock off the unicorn from the table. Jim apologizes, but Laura says; “Now its just like all the other horses… Maybe it’s blessing in disguise.” (Williams). This means that the breaking of the unicorn’s horn represents the breaking of her shyness, freeing all of the feeling she had bottled up and making her a normal person, or the unicorn horn has broken and changed into a horse that is normal like other animals; therefore, she is trying to change from being different from others to becoming more normal. The breaking of the unicorn is significant as it indicates breaking out of her glass world. However, when she comes to know that Jim is already engaged, the breaking of unicorn seems to be a traumatic event for Laura as it is like breaking her heart. Apart from this, she thinks that she will always be like the broken unicorn in the