Glass Menagerie the Autobiographical Pretenses

Glass Menagerie

The Autobiographical Pretenses of the Glass Menagerie

A textual analysis of Williams' work must be entered with a thorough understanding of his biographical experiences. Though these do not form the basis for an analysis of his literature, which may stand up to critical scrutiny apart from the figure of the writer, the details of Tennessee Williams' life form a compelling backdrop for the settings, subjects and ideals purported within his work. Thus, a consideration of the biographical context of the 1945 play, The Glass Menagerie, will be useful and illuminating as we venture to interpret the moral intentions this work.

This is certainly true from a consideration of his childhood and early adulthood in St. Louis. Williams would feel himself quite personally alienated by the aggressive, almost archaic behavior of the blue collar classes in this southern city. As such though, St. Louis would be a veritable incubator for the birth of Williams' imaginary south. "Remembering the South as a kind of "prelapsarian Paradise" (xii), Williams later transformed memories of people he met or knew into immortal characters, and their distinctive use of southern speech became, in Williams's romantic imagination, a medium of poetic expression at once universal in appeal and importance." (Holditch et al., 1)

Most significant among the figures that would become his archetypal southern models would be his sister Rose. Her relevance to the direction of his career cannot be overstated. Afflicted by grave emotional disturbance even as she served to influence Williams tremendously in both disposition and intellect, Rose's descent into schizophrenia would provoke one of the determinant events in his life.

His "transfer to the University of Iowa took him away from home in the fall, so he was absent when Rose's doctors convinced her parents that a prefrontal lobotomy was the only possibility for cure. Williams blamed his mother, who in turn claimed that her husband, Cornelius, made the final decision. Clearly, however, the family shared the burden for what happened to Rose, and no matter what he said, Williams would seek many times to exorcise his guilt over Rose's illness." (O'Connor, 3) This is an important moment in his life, for without question, Rose's figure looms like a ghost in the world of the playwright. Her mental illness haunts the author, and indeed, so many of his figures.

More even than this, though, the presence of such a stigma, shared guilt and volleyed recrimination within a family can be observed to have deprived Williams of the refuge which a home should be. As a consequence, home is so often a place made intolerable by the resentment gravitating around its inhabitants in his plays. Tom's disposition in The Glass Menagerie depicts home as nothing less than a prison to his desires, emotions and ambitions. More so, Williams would battle throughout his life with his own mental illness, perhaps never fully succumbing to and yet never fully overcoming his affliction. The forced mental incapacitation of his sister can perhaps be seen both in his frequent depiction of society as quite literally forcing normalcy upon individuals to the point of their destruction and in his evident fear that he will, like his sister, be reduced thusly. In The Glass Menagerie, the self-induced isolation of Laura stands in parallel to the mostly perceived isolation of Tom. These siblings suffer from symbiotic emotional illnesses that, if we are to understand Williams' works taken together, are indicative of a home itself shrouded in an unhealthy blanket of stunted relationships and the chilling void of empathy.

The Glass Menagerie would be the first of his plays to achieve widespread critical and popular success, with a series of Pulitzer Prize and Drama Critic Circle recognitions distinguishing his period of greatest literary achievement. Ultimately though, the text seems through the actions of a character such as Tom, to function as a statement of resistance against the ordinary confines which his family life seemed to have thrust upon Williams. In The Glass Menagerie Williams provides a narrative that is deeply tied to the static moments defining the despairingly mundane lives of its primary characters. Its approach to the family of three, whose broken home would itself be indicative of its social context, renders a unit of individuals insulated within their respective psychic conflicts. Laura's crippling insecurity, Amanda's pitiable illusions of refinement and Tom's genuine detachment from his family conspire to form a brutal picture of the fractured family unit. This is perhaps best contended by the notation in Pagan's text, that "at the end of The Glass Menagerie, Tom cannot help thinking of the life that he left behind as 'the cities swept about [him] like dead leaves, leaves that were brightly colored but torn away from the branches." (Pagan, 53) Here, Pagan seemes to reinforce the idea that Williams, through a character like Tom, is willfully separating himself from his family but remains driven by a sense of awareness, perhaps even guilt, related to his inextricable attachment to this family history.