The Glass Menagerie: Memory, Loss, and Hidden Hope

Introduction: Where Are the Snows of Yesteryear?

"Where are the snows of yesteryear?" asks Tennessee Williams in the opening screen of The Glass Menagerie (401), quoting a poem by François Villon. Williams explains in the production notes to this famous play that he has left in the manuscript a device omitted from the "acting version" of the play (Williams 395): a series of messages projected on screens, some verbal, some pictorial, that prompt and reflect the action on stage. Williams sums up the action in two lines before those notes as preparation for a gentleman caller, and "the gentleman calls" (394). This summary is so understated as to suggest a possible joke, because The Glass Menagerie is such a rich play that those lines hardly describe the complex emotions dealt with by its tormented characters. Such innovations as the screen projections, or the transparent walls Williams employs in The Glass Menagerie, attempt "a more penetrating and vivid expression of things as they are" (Williams 395). The fact that The Glass Menagerie has captivated so many—called by Hale "the great American play," more performed and reprinted than most "in modern theater history" (27)—indicates that Williams was not alone in his obsession with a past he could never recapture but could never fully leave behind.

Characters Caught Between Past and Future

This theme runs through The Glass Menagerie however the reader approaches it. Key speeches and actions demonstrate how character, setting, plot, and dialogue work together to reinforce the theme of a present caught between a future that never stops arriving and a past the characters cannot escape. Every single character looks back at a dream of the past while the future arrives faster than they would prefer and perhaps can handle. Amanda relives her girlhood through Laura's pathetic first date, while Laura herself cannot move past the often-frightening dreams of adolescence. Likewise, Jim finds disappointment after the triumphs of early adulthood, and the present for all of them is a letdown from these past high points. Of course, the entire story is merely a memory belonging to narrator Tom, looked back upon from a future spent running from the events unfolding on the stage.

Plot, Growth, and Accidental Transformation

Tom betrayed his family, just as his father did—yet he inadvertently helped achieve growth for some of them in the process. Laura got her yearbook signed by the captain of the football team after all, even if this required the breaking of her favorite unicorn's horn. Jim encourages Laura to hope, and while she and Amanda return to the pantomime of their humdrum life and fade back into the anonymity of the urban poor all around them, Jim's encouragement achieves a genuine transformation for Laura, even though this means the end of her childhood. This conflict and its resolution were forced upon her by her scheming mother Amanda, who is trying to find Laura a husband better than the father who abandoned them. Nonetheless, even though growth is painful and disappointing, Laura does grow through Tom's reluctant and accidental introduction of Jim into the family scene.

Beyond this glimmer of hope for Laura, everyone else's future consists largely of looking back at better times, as life grows increasingly disappointing without much hope in sight. Amanda's fear for her children's future turns to obsessive nagging that drives Tom to abandon the family just as his father did—the only escape he can see from a futile life in a job with no future. Jim does have a future with his absent fiancée, although his last "engagement" was just "propaganda" (Williams 452) invented by the high school yearbook committee. Jim's enthusiasm about how he and his new fiancée "get along fine" in "a great many ways" (Williams 463) is not entirely convincing.

While her first date may be a dead end for Laura, Williams does not say so explicitly, and so while she and Amanda fade into the background, this does not rule out the possibility that her future may be different if Jim's encouragement helps her grow beyond her fear of meeting new people. Likewise, the intensity of Tom's regret must be balanced by the consideration that his disappointment might have been worse had he spent his life dispensing shoes. Williams also leaves this question unasked: would Tom have been happier had he not run away? A thorough analysis must balance these possibilities.

Conclusion

Many critics have explained their own readings of The Glass Menagerie, but few discuss the possibility for growth that Williams leaves open for Laura. C.W.E. Bigsby explores Chekhov's relevance to Williams and The Glass Menagerie in the Cambridge Companion (29–39). Bigsby quotes the legendary director Stanislavski, explaining that Williams' action takes place internally (31), within the characters themselves. This introspective focus and obsession with the past places Williams within the tradition of Southern writers in the United States alongside Faulkner—a connection also given away by Amanda's continual references to her days as a young lady in the South, and her slipping into an exaggerated Southern accent when speaking to "The Gentleman Caller" (Williams 442) but to no one else.

Some critics focus on the superficial theme of tragedy that is the most obvious element on the surface of The Glass Menagerie and ignore the potential for future growth this essay has tried to reveal (e.g., Janardanan 51). Williams himself wrote in the 1948 preface to the play that struggle is "the sort of life for which the human organism is created" (Williams 1045)—a quality he found had disappeared once he became rich and famous following the initial success of The Glass Menagerie. In this light, Williams' message becomes one of perseverance rather than resignation and hopelessness, with the author speaking directly to his audience. The snows of yesteryear do melt, but the snows of today—or tomorrow—could be just as crystalline for those with the ability to appreciate them rather than remain hypnotized by the past. The past is gone; Williams urges us to move beyond it. And if not, then why would that very question be the first message flashed on his projected screen, preserved in the written version even though not all directors choose to use it on stage?

Works Cited

Bigsby, C.W.E. "Entering The Glass Menagerie." The Cambridge Companion to Tennessee Williams. Ed. Matthew C. Roudane. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997. 29–44.

Hale, A. "Early Williams: The Making of a Playwright." The Cambridge Companion to Tennessee Williams. Ed. Matthew C. Roudane. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997. 11–28.

Janardanan, D. "Images of Loss in Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie, Arthur Miller's The Death of a Salesman, Marsha Norman's night Mother, and Paula Vogel's How I Learned to Drive." Diss. Georgia State U, 2007. 13 Nov. 2007 <

Williams, T. "The Glass Menagerie." Tennessee Williams Plays 1937–1955. Eds. Mel Gussow and Kenneth Holditch. New York: The Library of America, 2000. 393–466.

Williams, T. "The Catastrophe of Success." Tennessee Williams Plays 1937–1955. Eds. Mel Gussow and Kenneth Holditch. New York: The Library of America, 2000. 1044–1049.

Villon, F. (c. 1460). Ballade des dames du temps jadis. Trans. Robin Shirley (1993). Different English Translations of François Villon c. 1461 — Ballade (des dames de temps jadis) (Mais où sont les neiges d'antan?). <