This essay examines the theme of escape as the central driving force in Tennessee Williams's play The Glass Menagerie. It traces how each member of the Wingfield family seeks refuge from an oppressive reality: Amanda through nostalgic fantasy, Laura through her glass animal collection, and Tom through nightly outings and ultimately physical departure. The essay pays particular attention to Tom's trajectory — his frustration with the warehouse job, his identification with a stage escape artist, and his final, guilt-laden exit — arguing that while Tom alone achieves literal escape, he remains haunted by the memory of his sister Laura, making his freedom deeply ambiguous.
In The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams, the theme of escape helps drive the play forward. Amanda Wingfield, the mother, escapes the reality of her hard and narrow life by remembering better times, possibly without great accuracy. Laura, Amanda's daughter, escapes by playing with her collection of glass animals — the "menagerie" of the title. Tom, Amanda's son, is the only member of the family who has a genuine chance of truly escaping the life they have led, but if he chooses this path, he will be leaving Amanda and Laura behind, just as his father did many years before.
Tom and Laura's father is an important character in the play even though he never appears. Tom describes him as "a telephone man who fell in love with long distances" (The Glass Menagerie, Scene 1). The father's picture, shown in his World War I uniform, is placed prominently in the family's living room; in that uniform, the sense of his being perpetually away is unmistakable. The father's absence establishes the theme of escape from the very beginning of the play.
Tom will follow in his father's footsteps, leaving his mother and sister to fend for themselves. He works in a shoe factory and knows that Amanda and Laura depend on his income, yet he also knows he cannot spend his life bearing sole responsibility for them. He is a dreamer who wants to write poetry, and he tries to communicate to his mother and sister just how frustrated he has become. With his sister he is far more gentle than he is with his mother. He says to Amanda:
"Listen! You think I'm crazy about the warehouse? You think I'm in love with Continental Shoemakers? You think I want to spend fifty-five years down there in that — celotex interior! With — fluorescent — tubes! Look! I'd rather somebody picked up a crowbar and battered out my brains — than go back mornings! I go! Every time you come in yelling that Goddamn 'Rise and Shine!' 'Rise and Shine!' I say to myself, 'How lucky dead people are!'" (The Glass Menagerie, Scene 3)
Tom goes out every night — to the movies or a show — to escape the trap of his home life. Even in his gentler conversations with Laura, the theme of escape is never far away.
In Scene 4, Tom describes to Laura a magic trick performed by an escape artist, and the imagery is unmistakably self-referential:
"But the wonderfullest trick of all was the coffin trick. We nailed him into a coffin and he got out of the coffin without removing one nail.... There is a trick that would come in handy for me — get me out of this two-by-four situation.... You know it don't take much intelligence to get yourself into a nailed-up coffin, Laura. But who in hell ever got himself out of one without removing one nail?" (The Glass Menagerie, Scene 4)
"Tom leaves but guilt over Laura lingers"
"Tom's freedom is shadowed by inescapable memory"
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