Modern drama: history, themes, and characteristics

Glass Menagerie

What is a realistic expectation that one person may have for another and what is not? In the "Glass Menagerie," Tennessee Williams portrays the trait of humans expecting others to become what they want them to be not who they really are. Because Amanda was not able to fulfill her own personal goals, she expected Laura to accomplish them instead, regardless of her daughter's lack of ability to do so with her crippled emotional and physical life. Such failure only led to more shattered dreams.

Just as the name of the play implies, Williams focuses on the glass ornaments that Laura, the Wingfield daughter, uses as a means of diversion and surviving her unhappy life. The vulnerability of glass makes it break very easily, as seen when the unicorn shatters. Laura, who already is insecure because of her disability, is made all the more so, because she cannot transform herself into Amanda's dream child. When Amanda was a young girl, she was a popular Southern Belle in Blue Mountain with "seventeen gentleman callers! Why sometimes there weren't chairs enough to accommodate them all," (Williams xx), or so she says. Amanda believed that life would always be this way. However, she ended up marrying a telephone lineman who "fell in love with long distance" (Williams xx) and disappeared with two children left behind.

It is easier for Amanda not to face reality, so she often enters a fantasy world, playing a role she wishes she could play in real life. One half of her knows that she is acting, but the other pretends that she is unaware that she is in the middle of a play. She sees performing for others around her better than facing what she has become, so plays along. One scene in the Amanda's play is that Laura will be able to change her personality, lose her disability and fulfill the rest of her mother's dream. She somehow believes that Laura can change into something she never has been: a well-to-do woman with a loving husband and storybook children with proper manners. Her expectation is anything but realistic. To deal with her mother's insurmountable expectations, Laura disappears into her own fantasy world with the sparkling, clear world of the glass animals. These unique glass figurines give her something positive and of value, which is lacking in her present life.

Unfortunately, Laura, like her mother, cannot always stay in this fantasy world. She has a more difficult time staying in an unrealistic world freeing herself from the pain of her present one. The broken unicorn represents her fractured life; she is not physically whole with her limp and emotional fragility. She clearly recognizes the truth about herself, as she says to her mother: "I'm crippled!" (Williams xx) That is, she cannot complete Amanda's expectation; she cannot be "as popular" as her mother. Every once and a while, she forgets who she is. She forgets that she cannot live up to her mother's or even her own personal expectations. For example, she has fragile hopes that she will shine liker her glass and be something special when Jim comes for dinner. She is instead resigned to her continually despondent and lonely future. It is Jim, the representative of reality, who makes both Laura and Amanda see the world for what it is.