Glass Menagerie What Is Real

Glass Menagerie

What is real and what is fantasy? This is one of the themes in Tennessee Williams' "Glass Menagerie." Like many people, the main characters, Amanda, Laura and, to some extent Tom, were not able to face the dismal realities of life so found other means for personal happiness, although delicate and breakable as glass.

Just a noted in the name of this literary piece, Williams focuses his subject matter on the glass ornaments that Laura, the Wingfield daughter, uses as a diversion from and a means of surviving her unhappy life. The vulnerability of glass makes it break quite readily. Yet, even when shattered, the pieces that remain are very resistant. The three Wingfields' exemplify the features of this glass: Their personal frailties urge them to escape their lives, but they are too tough to completely be destroyed.

Amanda, Tom's mother, goes in and out of her childlike fantasies, as if playing a part. Part of her knows that she is acting, but another part pretends that she is unaware that she is on stage. She finds performing for others better than facing what she has become, so plays along. For just a short time, she can divorce herself from her family and their pain. While playing this role, she imagines a time in the past when she had been a beautiful Southern Belle in Blue Mountain with "seventeen gentleman callers! Why sometimes there weren't chairs enough to accommodate them all." How much of this is actually true and how much is pretense and Amanda's script, is unknown. In fact, she ended up marrying a telephone lineman who "fell in love with long distance" and left his wife and two children behind.

This mental retreat for Amanda is a way of recaptures the innocence and easy times of her youth. It is her means of escape: She has long been a single parent and worried bout raising two children who also have their own heavy baggage to carry. The difficulty occurs when Amanda's present and past become confused. Her fantasies of a time when break into the now of other people's lives, namely her son and daughter. When she fantasizes Laura and Tom can become something different from which they already are, it creates problems for everyone. For example, when Jim comes to dinner, Amanda dreams of him and Laura together. That is, part of her dreams of this. She actually becomes schizophrenic in her beliefs: Half of her believes that Laura and Jim can establish a romantic relationship; the other half pretends that Jim is her own suitor. She again moves back in time: "Now just look at your mother! This is the dress in which I led the cotillion...Evenings, dances!."

Amanda moves backward and forward from past to present, staying in neither location for long. She relies on her fantasies to build up her defenses and accomplish what is needed to raise her family. She also knows her own personal reasons for doing this. For instance, at the end of the play she admits to Tom that she understands self-control and what dreams and escaping are all about, "Go then. Go to the moon -- you selfish dreamer!" Did she once say these words to her husband as well when he disappeared?

Laura, because of her disability, also disappears into a fantasy world as a way to deal with her personal stress. It consists of the clear, shining world of her glass animals. These glass figurines also give her something to love and to fondle that is missing in her present life. The here and now only offers her fragile hopes that she know will break like her glass, as when Jim comes for dinner. The broken unicorn represents her shattered life, because she does not considers herself physically whole with her limp. Yet Laura, unlike Amanda, has a more difficult time escaping into other worlds and free herself from the pain of the present one. She clearly knows the truth about herself, as she says to her mother: "I'm crippled!" She has become resigned to her continually dismal future. Also like Amada, Laura from dreams to reality to rest and redeem herself. She may be fractured, but not totally in shards.