Tennessee Williams Play the Glass Menagerie

Glass Menagerie

Methods of Escape in the Glass Menagerie

The three members of the Wingfield family are trapped within the claustrophobic confines of their poverty, sadness, and regret. However, each one of them escapes from the realities of their daily existence by engaging in acts of fantasy. For Tom, the narrator of the play, this escape is found through books, movies, and alcohol. His mother, Amanda, distances herself from her current condition by escaping into memories of a more genteel past. And, even more so than her mother or brother, Laura is incapable of living in the real world and instead chooses to escape from her fears and anxiety by creating a fantasy world that is symbolized by her love of the glass animals. The difficulties each character has in dealing with reality serves to drive them further apart from each other, heightening their isolation and causing them to retreat further inward.

As the play's narrator, Tom is the only character in The Glass Menagerie whose dreams of escape are actually realized. He spends much of the play avoiding his financial and familial responsibilities by behaving like a teenager and sneaking off to the movies. When his mother, Amanda, accuses him of going to the movies far too much, he tells her that his life in the warehouse forces him to seek excitement elsewhere. "Man is by instinct a lover, a hunter, a fighter, and none of those instincts are given much play at the warehouse," (Williams 33) he tells her, illustrating that the fictional worlds afford him the freedom to reinvent himself in a way that conventional life does not. At the play's conclusion, Tom speaks directly to the audience, telling them that he had finally escaped to St. Louis and "followed, from then on, in my father's footsteps, attempting to find in motion what was lost in space" (97). This implies that while he might have physically removed himself from the stifling burden of his mother and sister, he was never able to achieve true freedom.

Tom's mother, Amanda, also strives to free herself from the dull and dingy world of her small, impoverished apartment. However, she accomplishes this in a much different manner, escaping into herself rather than into the fictional worlds of film and books. Although she is aware of the real world, she prefers to spend much of her time talking about her girlhood in the South. As she tells Tom's friend Jim, "in the South we had so many servants. Gone, gone, gone. All vestige of gracious living! Gone completely! I wasn't prepared for what the future brought me" (64). While Amanda recognizes that her days of luxury and comfort are well behind her, she focuses much of her attention on trying to recreate those early years by securing a good husband for her daughter, so that they might all escape their current squalid lifestyle.

Of all of the Wingfields, Laura is the most detached from reality, having already partially escaped from the everyday world through the elaborate fantasies that she creates with her glass figurines. Paralysed by shyness and unable to function in most social situations, Laura can only truly be herself when she is engaged with her fantasy world and not forced to interact with other people. In a sense, the glass menagerie acts as a symbol for Laura herself as she is fragile and easily damaged by unkind words and actions. Her little "ornaments" (82) are beautiful to behold but not intended to have any real practical use; as she tells Jim, "be careful -- if you breathe, it breaks!" (82) Unlike her mother and brother, Laura is incapable of altering her circumstances in any meaningful way, and so must be content to live her life inside her own mind.