Role of the Women Is Tennessee William\'s Glass Menagerie

Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams, Laura Wingfield, a grown woman, kneels on the floor playing with glass figurines like a child. She envisions a dismal future for herself that includes total withdrawal from the outside world where bad things constantly happen and positive experiences are rare. The rest of Laura's family, who are kindred-spirits in hopelessness, share Laura's fatalistic view of life. "Unlike most of Williams's other works, which are charged with sensationalism and sex, this story holds the audience by the revelation of quiet and ordinary truths. This play, unique among Williams's dramas, combines poetic and unrealistic techniques with grim naturalism to achieve a gossamer effect of compassion, fragility, and frustration, typical of Tennessee Williams at his most sensitive and natural best." (Bloom, Tennessee Williams's the Glass Menagerie 41)

The Glass Menagerie is the story of the Wingfield's a dysfunctional family that has surrendered to depression and given up on life as being anything more than a means to an end. Amanda, the mother of Laura and Tom who are both grown, tries to encourage her children to seek a better future for themselves than she was able to manage.

The Glass Menagerie is loosely based on the author's own family and deals with a lot of symbolism. The fire escape is the main, recurring symbol throughout the play. It signifies something different for each of the characters. For Tom, the fire escape is a symbol of his retreat from his mother and sister.

For Laura, the fire escape is a symbol of the confines and boundaries in life and for Amanda the fire escape is a symbol of Laura gaining independence, because she thinks that Laura's gentleman caller will someday come and whisk her away.

One of the other important symbols in the play is the glass menagerie itself. The glass menagerie symbolizes Laura's own fragility, like her the glass object can be easily broken. "Laura...can't escape into movies, alcohol, or literature; she simply isn't that violent or decisive. Her retreat is into a world of glass and music. Her father's old phonograph records provide her with escape that the unfamiliar new tunes can't provide...her collection of glass absorbs her time. She spends hours polishing the tiny animals that are as delicate and fragile as she is." (Bloom 36)

The women in the Glass Menagerie appear to be very Victorian in their thinking and actions. This thinking require them to be charming at all times and to rely on men for both emotional and financial support. "The Southern gentlewomen also represent the culture and the gentility, sometimes rather seedy, that disappeared during the decade of World War I. Though at times eccentric, these females are superior to the domesticated housewives and gossips who correspond to the average and the acceptable women. The male counterpart in this conflict is represented by young men who are sometimes attracted to this frustrated gentlewoman but who are sometimes almost emasculated by a domineering mother. The DH Lawrence derivative, the red-blooded symbol of sexual freedom who contrasts to the nondescript intellectual young man, sometimes establishes the conflict that is the essence of the play." (Bloom 80)

Both Amanda and Laura live in a world of their own imagination and are unable to cope the realities of the world. All of their hopes and dreams focus on men who, in reality, have never been there for them. Amanda has been abandoned by her husband and is lost because of it. She needs a man to help her get through life and without one, she is nothing and must live in the past.

The story of Amanda and Laura is largely wrapped up in their dependency on men. "The means which Williams has used to give form to this vision are symbolic rather than literal. His play about the man who came to dinner and failed to satisfy the expectations of two neurotic women depends not so much upon plot or characterization as upon an undercurrent of allusion, the range of secondary associations which, instead of being in the foreground of dramatic action, serve as a background of ironic commentary on the essentially static surface of this memory play." (Bloom10)

In The Glass Menagerie, Williams shines a light on his belief that men and women find reality and meaning in life through relationships with one another. Without a loving relationship, women are nothing and must remove themselves from all decent society and revert to a place within themselves. Without a man, neither Amanda nor Laura feels that they have anything to contribute to the world. Amanda lives in the past and Laura escapes into her own world of glass ornaments. The main focus for both Amanda and later for Laura through her mother's urging, is to find that one special man who can rescue them from themselves. And who will help them find the man who will rescue them? Another man...Tom. Even in this, they must rely on a man to get them what they feel is missing in their lives, and they turn to Tom to set them free. Tom wants to leave home but feels that "to leave home and Amanda is to insure self-preservation, but at the same time to kill something vital within the self." (Crandell, The Critical Response to Tennessee Williams 7)

In essence, the search for a man for both Amanda and Laura is actually the search for reality and truth. Until they find a man that can love them, they remain wrapped up in a world shaped by their own delusions. Amanda constantly nags Laura to stay pretty for her gentlemen callers because without beauty, she will not be able to attract them. And, without a man Laura will not be able to escape her current situation. Without a man Laura will not be successful and will be doomed to wallow in misery and self-pity forever. "Through her timidity, her suffering from the friction between Tom and Amanda, and her retreat into a world of dreams, Laura evokes genuine sympathy; she is the one who must be cared for, loved, and understood. Her charm and delicacy win the audience, just as they have won her brother. Perceptive of others' feelings, Laura senses her mother's need to romanticize her past and so stands as a buffer between the mother and son. For one so sensitive and shy, the clanking brace on her leg is torture." (Bloom 82) Amanda sees Laura's lack of gentleman callers as a failure -- a failure that is both hers and Laura's. "Just as willfully, Amanda ignores present reality. Overanxious to have her daughter, Laura, securely married, she refuses to recognize the girl's painful shyness or to admit to her slightly crippled leg. She insists that Laura not refer to herself as a cripple, that she speak only of a little defect, and that she distract attraction from it by developing charm and vivacity. Amanda has known what can happen to a Southern girl without a home of her own: 'I know so well what becomes of unmarried women who aren't prepared to occupy a position. I've seen such pitiful cases in the South -- barely tolerated spinsters living upon the grudging patronage of sister's husband or brother's wife! Stuck away in some little mouse-trap of a room -- encouraged by one in-law to visit another -- little birdlike women without any nest -- eating the crust of humility all their life!'" (Bloom 81)

All of the characters in The Glass Menagerie are miserable and they all have their own way of escaping from this self-imposed misery. Laura's escape is listening to the victrola and playing with her glass menagerie. These two activities occupy her mind and prevent her from having to deal with reality. When Laura finds herself in any kind of conflict situation, she cannot deal with it so she winds the victrola or plays with the glass menagerie. Even when she is in the presence of a gentleman caller, a man who might free her from her self-imposed hell, she cannot stop herself from doing these things. Possibly she is nervous, so she retreats to her comfort zone, but she may also do this in the presence of a gentleman caller because she feels that she has not right to be happy and is sabotaging her own efforts at happiness.

Amanda's escape from reality is the past. Her memories of the past, and her regular visits from gentleman callers, comfort her. As the reader, you do not know how authentic these stories of gentleman callers are. Are they real stories or is Amanda using them to hide from reality like her daughter uses her glass figurines? Because Amanda reverts to the past for solace, it is possible that she is making up the stories and convincing herself that they are true along with her children.

Tom's escapes in life are drinking, writing poetry and going to the movies. When Tom does these things, he can pretend that he is someone else, and can actually live in his false reality. When he drinks, Tom can give himself permission to not think about life, and permission to not feel responsible for his mother or sister. In a way, Amanda and Laura are using Tom as a surrogate until another man can come along and rescue them.

In one of the most pivotal scenes of the play, Jim who has been invited to dinner as a potential suitor for Laura, finally understands why he was invited. He explains to Amanda that he plans to marry soon, then he quickly leaves. Amanda lashes out at her son, who leaves to go to the movies. "She screams after him that he can go to the moon since he is nothing but a selfish dreamer anyway. The final scene is a tableau vivant of Amanda, looking dignified and beautiful, comforting her daughter while Tom explains that he eventually escaped from the women to follow the pattern of his roving father." (Bloom 33) find it quite fitting that Amanda views Tom as being the selfish one in the family. She feels this way because she obviously is of the mind set that as a man it is Tom's duty to support her and Laura. Tom is the man of the house and Amanda's mind, it is his place to find a mate for Laura since her father is not there to do it. Amanda views Tom not as a son, but perhaps as a substitute husband and father adding to the dysfunction of the family dynamic in the story. "Though Amanda is proud of Tom, she is insensitive to his position. She carps at him continually about his eating habits, his smoking, his going to the movies, his late hours, his boredom with the warehouse job, and his need for adventure. When he tries to explain that man is by instinct a fighter, a hunter, and a lover, his language offends her. Reflecting her early twentieth-century Puritanism, Amanda believes that Christian adults should be concerned with things of the mind and spirit and leave dirty words like instinct for monkeys and pigs. Another argument erupts over a DH Lawrence novel that Tom brought home from the library, for she dismisses this writer as insane and offensive." (Bloom 81)

In many ways, the relationship between Tom and Amanda and Tom and Laura appears to be emotionally incestuous. "The Glass Menagerie seems to derive its continued if wavering force from its partly repressed representation of the quasi-incestuous and doomed love between Tom Wingfield and his crippled, 'exquisitely fragile,' ultimately schizophrenic sister, Laura. Incest, subtly termed the most poetical of circumstances by Shelley, is the dynamic of the erotic drive throughout Williams's more vital writings...the transparency of the incest motif is at once the play's lyrical strength and, alas, its dramatic weakness." (Bloom 3)

Williams portrays the women in The Glass Menagerie in two ways, both of them are unflattering. Amanda is portrayed as the classic Southern Belle who minds her manners in all situations. Amanda constantly feels put upon and her very essence is both tragic and pitiful. She feels that without a husband, she is nothing and that she is doomed to live out the rest of her days clinging to a past that, in all actuality, is simply a figment of her imagination. Laura, like her mother, is emotionally crippled. Unlike her mother however, Laura displays true compassion for her brother Tom and his unhappiness. Laura, who has the least amount of lines in the play, portrays a degree of selflessness and is center of the entire plot of this play. The most prominent symbols -- blue roses, the glass unicorn, the glass menagerie -- all in some sense represent Laura. As a woman she is as rare, peculiar and as delicate as a glass figurine. "Certainly the clearest and most obvious organizing image is the glass menagerie itself, which embodies the fragility of Laura's world, registers so sensitively any changes in lighting, and stands in vivid contrast to the harshness of the outside world, the so called world of reality which can shatter it so easily. Dramatically the glass menagerie is the focus of much of the action of the play...the menagerie is almost too strident a symbol. Williams is almost too insistent at times on the parallel between Laura and her menagerie, between the glass unicorn's losing its horn and Jim's impotence when he tries to bring Laura into the real world.... Williams does not hang the entire play upon his title symbol; instead he gives to the play as a whole a poetic texture and a wealth of ironic allusion." (Bloom 12)