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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...
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…
Works Cited
Williams, Tennessee. The Glass Menagerie. New York: New Directions, 2011.
Tennessee Williams' "The Glass Menagerie," is a portrayal of the fragile psyches of its characters -- an arrangement of tiny, delicate glass figurines whose essence of life can be shattered very easily. This arrangement takes place in a cramped apartment in St. Louis, inhabited by Amanda Wingfield, her son Tom, and daughter Laura, the husband having deserted the family several years ago. Another character, perhaps the most stable, is Jim
Glass Menagerie Tennessee Williams play, The Glass Menagerie, presents the drama of three family members who live in a world whose values and supporting pillars are shaking as a consequence of the disastrous economic times people went through during the Great Depression. The lack of role models in the micro universe of the Wingfield family as well as their dissolution in the macro universe of the whole American society is deeply
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
Menagerie REVISED Prince, don't ask me in a week / or in a year what place they are; I can only give you this refrain: / Where are the snows of yesteryear? Francois Villon, c. 1461 "Where are the snows of yesteryear?" asks Tennessee Williams in the opening screen of The Glass Menagerie (401), quoting a poem by Francis Villon. Williams explains in the production notes to this famous play that he has left
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
In connection with Williams' feelings vis-a-vis his sister's lobotomy, Jack Tamburri, writing in www.courttheatre.orgbelieves that the narrator in the Glass Menagerie (e.g., Williams) "...Spins a story of regret and abandonment [regarding Laura] that must have mirrored the guilt Williams felt over his own sister's situation." CONCLUSION: The helplessness of Laura as she tries to get through the pain of her physical disability, her shyness, and the razor-sharp barbs thrown at her