Sign Up Now
Get instant access to over 1 million+ study documents
OR
Already registered? click here to login
By creating your account, you agree to our terms of service, privacy policy and student honor code.
Williams and His Work
Williams used the theater as a way to vent his own heart -- as Lahr notes, the playwright produced works that allowed him "to be simple, direct and terrible" (Lahr xiv). Thus, Williams' plays were "an emotional autobiography" (Lahr xiv). Beginning with his first success, The Glass Menagerie, Williams showed that he would draw from his own life and experiences to put something dramatic on the stage to which people would respond. It was his way of talking to the world and opening up.
Some of the unique things we learn about Williams' life are the fact that the more he tried to open up and show his own heart on the stage, the more his real heart disappeared and became a "leftover" thing (Lahr 377). His writing became his real life in a sense, and his real life became a scrap -- a shell. Williams would also clash with his actors, actresses and producers. For example, with Menagerie, he complained that one of the actresses cast did not resemble his mother, who was a lady -- and later with Sweet Birth of Youth, he clashed with Kazan even as he attempted to become one with the directer so that there was no space between them and no gaps between what Williams intended and what managed to get on stage. Williams became paranoid that others...
He wrote about characters full of self-loathing even as he loathed himself. Perhaps one of the reasons for this was his sexual life, which existed at a time before homosexuality was accepted in public.
Thus, it could be that Williams' plays really do reflect his own character, heart and mind -- for just as he struggled to understand himself and present something true on stage, his own personal life never arrived at a place where he might be happy and serene. His feeling was basically like that of Chance or Tom or any of the other characters he wrote about: all fleeing something -- some truth, some unpleasant reality -- home, life, something. Just like Tom turned his back on his home, Williams was turning his back on an idea -- an idea that he could be a real person. He sought real life in his plays, in drama, in the stage; and meanwhile real life eluded him in his own life. His experiences were…
Works Cited
Lahr, John. Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flash. NY: W.W. Norton,
2014. Print.
Glass Menagerie: An Uncertain Reality This essay will examine the ways in which the three main characters in "The Glass Menagerie" soften with harshness of day-to-day living with an insulating blanket of self-deception. This play is one of Tennessee Williams's earliest and most biographical plays (Patterson, 27). "The Glass Menagerie" was written by Thomas Lanier "Tennessee" Williams (1911-1983) in 1944, incorporating his short story "Portrait of a Girl in Glass" with the unproduced
Glass Menagerie Tennessee Williams, His Mother and the Glass Menagerie Tennessee Williams is among the most celebrated playwrights of the 20th century. His family portraits, set to the backdrop of a deteriorating Southern tradition, are a window into human foibles like vanity, insecurity, detachment and personal disappointment. All of these themes are in full display with Williams' breakthrough work, 1944's The Glass Menagerie. A peering insight into the unhappy lives of the
Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams Humankind's destiny has always been driven by fate and circumstances and in dealing with these two, people have ways of changing the outcome while others simply accept what comes their way. Tennessee Williams's The Glass Menagerie is a play that portrays the manners by which the characters handle their situations in life. What they have are not the best of circumstances especially since the play was
Towards the play's end, Tom tells his audience/readers: "Oh Laura...I tried to leave you behind me, but I am more faithful than I intended to be! I reach for a cigarette...anything that can blow your candles out!" This passage from the play showed how, in his fear for his sister and attempt to shield her from the harshness of life, Tom wanted to "blow (Laura's) candles out," an act
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
86). Jim symbolically inspires Laura to accept her individuality and to see that beneath her outstanding traits she is no different from anyone else. His gentility and kindness, borne of Southern culture, help Laura come to terms with herself and her social awkwardness. Laura's personality transformation through Jim's kindness paralleled her symbolic transformation through the unicorn. Had the unicorn not been made of glass, its horn would not have so