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Analysis of Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on October 12, 2020 • ( 0 )

Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie (1944) was regarded when first produced as highly unusual; one of the play’s four characters serves as commentator as well as participant; the play itself represents the memories of the commentator years later, and hence, as he says, is not a depiction of actuality; its employment of symbolism is unusual; and in the very effective ending, a scrim descends in front of mother and daughter, so that by stage convention one can see but not hear them, with the result that both, but especially the mother, become much more moving and even archetypal. The play is also almost unique historically, in that it first opened in Chicago, came close to flopping before Chicago newspaper theater critics verbally whipped people into going, and then played successfully for months in Chicago before finally moving to equal success in New York.

The setting is the Wingfield apartment in a shabby tenement building, in Saint Louis, Missouri, in the year 1937. The set has an interior living room area and an exterior fire escape.

Tom Wingfield is in the fire-escape area outside the Wingfield apartment. He explains the concept of a memory play. He enters the interior setting, where his mother, Amanda Wingfield, and his sister, Laura Wingfield, who wears a brace on her leg, are seated at a table, waiting to eat dinner. All aspects of the meal are mimed, and as Tom seats himself, Amanda begins to instruct him on how to eat politely. Tom abruptly leaves the table to have a cigarette. Laura rises to fetch an ashtray, but Amanda tells her to stay seated, for she wishes Laura to remain fresh and pretty for her prospective gentleman callers. Amanda recalls her Sunday afternoons in Blue Mountain, Mississippi, where she received and entertained countless callers. Amanda asks Laura how many callers she expects to have, and Laura explains that she is not expecting any callers.

In the interior of the Wingfield apartment, Laura sits alone, polishing her glass figurines. Hearing her mother approach, Laura quickly hides her collection and resumes her place behind a typewriter. Amanda reveals that she has discovered that Laura has dropped out of secretarial school. Laura explains that she became ill during the first week of school and was too ashamed to return. Amanda pleads with Laura, asking her what she is going to do with her life. Amanda fears that Laura will be dependent on the charity of others for the rest of her life. Amanda warns Laura that there is no future in staying home playing with her glass collection and her father’s phonograph records. She implores Laura to set her sights on marrying. Laura confesses that she had liked a boy named Jim O’Connor in high school, but she is certain that he must be married by now. Laura acknowledges her disability as her primary obstacle in forming relationships. Amanda dismisses this claim and advises Laura to cultivate aspects of her personality to compensate for her disadvantage.

The same location as scene 2. Tom addresses the audience. He explains that Amanda has become obsessed with finding a gentleman caller for Laura and has begun selling magazine subscriptions to generate extra income. Amanda has a telephone conversation with a neighbor, trying to convince her to renew her subscription to The Homemaker’s Companion . Tom and Amanda quarrel about his habits, his writing, and his books. Amanda accuses Tom of being selfish and of engaging in immoral activities. Tom swears at his mother and bemoans his fate of working in a warehouse to support his mother and sister. In the heat of the argument, Tom accidentally crashes into Laura’s glass collection, shattering it to pieces on the floor. Amanda refuses to speak to him until he apologizes. Laura and Tom collect the shattered glass from the floor.

The same location as scene 3. Tom returns home from a movie and talks with Laura. She asks him to apologize to Amanda. Amanda sends Laura out on an errand so that she may speak with Tom alone. She and Tom make peace. Amanda warns Tom of the danger in pursuing an adventurous life. Amanda raises the subject of Laura and the need for Tom to bring a nice young man home to meet Laura. Amanda promises Tom that she will let him do as he pleases and leave after he has provided for Laura’s future. Amanda begs him to secure a nice man for Laura first. Tom grudgingly agrees to try to find someone. Amanda happily returns to soliciting magazine subscriptions.

On the fire escape, the exterior of the Wingfield apartment, Amanda suggests that Tom be more mindful of his appearance. She makes a wish on the new Moon. Tom tells her that he is inviting a gentleman caller for Laura to the apartment the following evening. Amanda inquires about the character of the gentleman caller. Tom describes Jim’s qualities and characteristics, and Amanda determines that he is suitable to call. Tom warns Amanda not to be too excited, because Jim is unaware that he is being invited for Laura’s benefit. Tom expresses concern that Amanda has unrealistic expectations of Laura. Amanda refuses to accept the reality of Laura’s condition. Tom goes to a movie and Amanda calls Laura out onto the fire escape. Amanda urges Laura to make a wish on the new Moon.

On the fire escape and in the interior of the Wingfield apartment, Tom speaks directly to the audience and explains the nature of his friendship with Jim. Tom makes Jim feel important because Tom can recall Jim’s high school glory days. In the living room, Amanda and Laura prepare for the arrival of the gentleman caller. Amanda dresses Laura and discovers one of her own former gowns. At the mention of the name Jim O’Connor, Laura refuses to participate in the evening’s events. Amanda chastises Laura and orders her to answer the door when the doorbell rings. Laura freezes with anxiety as Amanda forces her to welcome Tom and Jim. Laura hides in the kitchen while Amanda converses with Jim O’Connor. Tom goes to the kitchen to check on supper. Amanda summons everyone to the table. Laura maintains that she is sick and lies on the couch for the duration of the dinner.

In the interior of the Wingfield apartment, the lights in the apartment suddenly go out. Amanda quickly lights candles, asking Jim to check the fuses. Finding that the fuses are fine, Amanda asks Tom whether he has paid the electric bill; he has not. After dinner, Amanda asks Jim to keep Laura company. She gives him a candelabrum and a glass of wine to give to Laura. Amanda forces Tom to join her in the kitchen to wash the dishes. Settling down on the floor beside Laura, Jim asks her why she is so shy, and Laura asks whether Jim remembers her. She explains that they had singing class together in high school and reminds him that she was always late because of her disability. Jim confesses that he never noticed her limp and admonishes Laura about being self-conscious. Laura takes out her high school yearbook and Jim autographs it for her.

Laura shows her glass collection to him and Jim marvels over her delicate figurines. Hearing music from the nearby dance hall, Jim asks Laura to dance. She hesitates, but Jim persuades her to join him. They stumble into the coffee table, breaking Laura’s favorite figurine, a unicorn that she has had for 13 years. Jim apologizes, and Laura consoles him. Struck by Laura’s charm and delicacy, Jim kisses her. He chastises himself for his hasty action and informs Laura that he is engaged. Laura gives him the glass unicorn. Amanda gleefully returns to the living room with a pitcher of cherry lemonade. Jim apologizes and announces that he has to leave to collect his fiancée at the train station.

Amanda is horrified by the news and calls Tom out of the kitchen. She accuses him of playing a cruel joke on the family, but Tom explains that he had no knowledge of Jim’s engagement. Amanda again chastises Tom for selfishness and for lack of concern for his abandoned mother or his disabled sister. Tom finally leaves the Wingfield apartment for good. The lights fade on the interior setting, leaving Laura and Amanda in candlelight. Tom appears on the fire escape and offers the audience details of his departure and journey away from his family. He explains that no matter how much distance is between them, he can never forget his sister. He instructs Laura to blow out her candles, and she does.

A scene from The Glass Menagerie /New York Public Library

The Glass Menagerie began its life as a screenplay, The Gentleman Caller . This script was an adaptation of Williams’s short story “Portrait of a Girl in Glass.” The script of “The Gentleman Caller” was submitted to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) in the summer of 1943. Williams had hoped that this script would impress studio executives and ultimately relieve him from other contractual obligations at MGM such as writing what he scathingly termed a “celluloid brassiere” for the actress Lana Turner. MGM was less than amenable to Williams’s idea. They declared that the popular film Gone With the Wind (1939) had served up enough Southern women for a decade (Spoto, 97). In an oddly ironic twist, this response and its implicit preference for fiction over reality resonated with the play’s central theme.

Stylistically, The Glass Menagerie reflects its prehistory. The screenplay-turned-stage-script shows a number of elements more familiar, and perhaps more suited, to the cinema than to the theater. In theatrical terms, Williams’s approach is Brechtian: It uses devices meant to create what the German playwright and dramaturge Bertolt Brecht, a contemporary of Williams’s, called the “alienation effect.” In The Glass Menagerie , these devices constitute a sometimes disjointed sequence of tableaux (or scenes) rather than the more conventionalthree-act structure; a narrator/commentator (Tom) who also is a character in the play and steps in and out of the action; Williams’s scripted suggestions of legends to be projected onto gauze between the dining and front rooms, “to give accent to certain values in each scene”; the very strictly defined music, which assigns specific pieces or themes to certain scenes, especially in relation to Laura; and the lighting, “focused on selected areas or actors, sometimes in contradistinction to what is the apparent center.”

For Brecht, the alienation effect served to remind the audience that what they saw on stage constituted the real world. Williams takes this concept a crucial step further, in that he turns alienation— the conscious or unconscious loss of a person’s feeling of connection with his or her surroundings—into the mainstay of the play: It becomes a way of life for the characters. Brecht tries to prevent his audience from escaping into illusion. Williams forestalls his characters’ conquest of “a world of reality that [they] were somehow set apart from.” None of the characters is truly able to cope with the demands of everyday life; therefore, all seek refuge in their own dream world, to such an extent that illusion itself becomes subjective reality.

In this the characters are not alone. Williams declared this denial of reality symptomatic of an era during which individuals would seek out “dance halls, bars, and movies, and sex that hung in the gloom like a chandelier and flooded the world with brief, deceptive rainbows,” in order briefly to forget about their lives and their troubles. But the diversion cannot last, and the conflict between fact and fiction, reality and make-believe, remains irreconcilable. This is the central theme of The Glass Menagerie . From it emerge two related themes: the impossibility of escape and the trap of memory—or of the past in general.

The play is memory in more than one sense. As is much of Williams’s work, The Glass Menagerie is poignantly autobiographical. However, this is by far his most autobiographical work. In July 1918, Williams’s father, Cornelius Coffin Williams, exchanged his job as a traveling salesman for a managerial post with the International Shoe Company in Saint Louis, Missouri. Cornelius, his wife (Edwina Dakin Williams), and their two children, Rose Isabel Williams and Tom, left Clarksdale, Mississippi, to take up residence in what then was the fourth-largest city in the United States and a major industrial center.

From their initial quarters at a boardinghouse they moved into and out of a succession of apartments, including one at 4633 Winchester Place in downtown Saint Louis. The apartment had “two small windows, in the front and rear rooms, and a fire escape [that] blocked the smoky light from a back alley” (Spoto, 16). The wording may be less poetic than Williams’s stage directions for The Glass Menagerie , but it accurately describes the Wingfield home, and the Williams’s tenement at 4633 Winchester Place in Saint Louis later became known as the “Glass Menagerie Apartments.”

For Rose and Tom, both delicate and accustomed to the rural gentility of Mississippi and the relative stability their maternal grandparents had helped to provide, the relocation and its effects on their home life proved traumatic. Tom was seven years old at the time of the move, old enough to recognize that “there were two kinds of people, the rich and the poor, and that [the Williams family] belonged more to the latter” (Tynan, 456)—with all the ostracism this entailed. Although the play’s references to the Spanish civil war and the bombing of Guernica in April 1937 set The Glass Menagerie nearly two decades later, during the depression, the social and economic context and its bleak inescapability are virtually the same.

The family’s reduced circumstances were due to Cornelius Williams’s compulsive drinking and gambling, and the domestic situation was worsened by a string of illnesses and operations Edwina Williams had after the birth of the Williams’s youngest son, Dakin Williams. Caught between a volatile father and an infirm mother, Rose and Tom each found their own ways of escaping into safer fantasy worlds. Tom fled into literature, at first reading voraciously (much to his father’s distaste), but when his mother gave him a typewriter, he started to write poetry. The consequences for Rose, however, were far bleaker. By the early 1920s mental illness began to manifest itself through psychosomatic stomach problems and an inability to sustain any social contact, which turned her enrollment at Rubicam’s Business College into a debacle. Her condition worsened over the next 15 years, until, in 1937, her parents agreed to a prefrontal lobotomy, which left Rose in a state of childlike, almost autistic detachment. Tom, studying at the State University of Iowa by then, was informed only after the disastrous procedure. From that point on, the spirit of his sister “haunted his life” (Spoto, 60).

It also haunts The Glass Menagerie . Though physically rather than mentally disabled, Laura Wingfield is painfully shy and socially inept, and she wears her physical difference as a stifling protective cloak. Nicknamed “Blue Roses” in a clear reference to Williams’s sister, she has stomach pain caused by nervous self-consciousness when exposed to strangers, and she visits the penguins at the zoo instead of attending classes at Rubicam’s Business College. The focus of her life, to the exclusion of everything else, is her collection of glass animals, which serves as a symbol of her (and Rose’s) fragility. When Jim O’Connor accidentally breaks her glass unicorn, the loss of the horn offers a subtle but nonetheless striking reminder of Rose’s lobotomy. As Laura states, her unicorn “had an operation” to make it “less freakish.”

Rose is not the only member of the Williams family to appear in The Glass Menagerie . With the exception of Dakin, all of the Williamses are cast. Williams himself infuses his namesake Tom, the trapped poet-narrator, who hides in a closet to write and dreams of joining the merchant marine. Tom is a warehouse worker for Continental Shoemakers, and his job fills him with the same desperate frustration that caused Williams to suffer a nervous breakdown after his father withdrew him from college and forced him to work at the International Shoe Company between 1932 and 1935. Cornelius Williams, an alcoholic and a former telephone company employee, is clearly identifiable as the absent head of the Wingfield household, “a telephone man who fell in love with long distances.”

A more oblique and more sinister reference, which plays on Cornelius’s middle name, illustrates Tom’s/Williams’s attempts to break away from the presence of the father. Recounting his nightly exploits to Laura, Tom launches into the tale of Malvolio the Stage Magician and a coffin trick, “the wonderfullest trick of all. . . . We nailed him into a coffin and he got out of the coffin without removing one nail.” For Williams, his father, Cornelius Coffin Williams, was a flesh-and-blood opponent; for the character, Tom Wingfield, he is a photograph over the mantel and the mirror his mother relentlessly holds up to him. This disembodied specter is all the more oppressive because it cannot be fought or escaped. Condemned to stay at home because his father ran away, Tom looks for vicarious adventure, always fancies himself on the brink of moving, but has no idea when or where. When he finally does make a break, it is at the expense of taking the past with him. True escape is as impossible for him as it was for Williams: Laura/Rose constantly haunts him.

Completing the family analogies, Tom and Laura’s mother, Amanda, is a replica of Edwina Dakin Williams. Both have pretensions to be Southern belles, both claim to have been pursued by countless gentleman callers only to marry “this boy,” both are capable of prattling incessantly, and neither can cook or bake anything apart from angel food cake. They also share a dangerously tenuous grasp on reality that materializes in their aspirations for Laura and Rose, respectively. Both mothers are convinced that their daughter’s problem—be it lameness or schizophrenia—will dissolve if only she finds the right man. In the autumn of 1933, Edwina invited a family friend, “the very handsome Jim O’Connor” (Spoto, 43), as a prospective suitor for Rose. The experiment concluded in only one brief visit, which apparently upset Rose greatly. In the same vein, Amanda badgers Tom into inviting his shoe company colleague, and former high school basketball hero Jim O’Connor, as a gentleman caller for Laura. This attempt leads to an equally devastating result. Jim, brimming with self-satisfied optimism and bent on self-improvement, has nothing in common with Laura. He has genuine affection for her and does manage to draw her out, but the relationship cannot go further, because he is engaged to someone else. This revelation occurs just as Laura is beginning to believe that her high school crush on Jim could be fulfilled. In other words, the Gentleman Caller breaks her illusions and her spirit as easily and as casually as he has broken her glass unicorn.

The Glass Menagerie is Tom’s recollection of the events culminating in the visit of the Gentleman Caller. Everything in the play happens in and from memory. Insight and perspective are counterpoised by that peculiar trick of memory that diminishes some things and enlarges others, according to their importance. Such distortion always serves to sharpen and explain. Likewise, Tom’s account, always slightly unreal, always slightly over the top, veers between caricature and canonization.

Reminiscent of the brittle translucency of glass, Laura is imbued with a “pristine clarity” similar to that found in “early religious portraits of female saints or madonnas.” In stark contrast to Laura’s otherworldliness, Amanda and her idealized Southern girlhood—grotesquely laden with jonquils and suitors—clash with the everyday contingencies of cold-calling, mastication, a disabled daughter, and an absconded husband in a way that is both painfully comical and brutally revealing. Even Jim cannot escape from the exaggeration of memory. Having failed “to arrive at nothing short of the White House by the time he was thirty” (53), he is shown to wallow in the sweet smell of former basketball glory, yearbook pictures, and the admiration of a shy, lonely girl. “Try and you will succeed” is the futile battle cry Jim and Amanda share in the face of stagnation.

Because he is an outsider and inhabits the real world, Jim is raised to a symbol of hope, “the longdelayed but always expected something that we live for.” For Amanda expectation does not stop here. Roger B. Stein makes a convincing case that Jim has been cast as a Christ-like savior figure or, at the very least, as Moses about to lead the Wingfield family to the promised land of harmony and happiness (Stein, 141–153). There is no such land, of course, and only Amanda has promised it. The pivotal scene between Jim, the flawed suitor, and Laura exposes this fallacy. “Unicorns, aren’t they extinct in the modern world?” he asks when Laura shows him her favorite glass animal. The unicorn is a mythical animal and an alien even in the unreal world of Laura’s glass menagerie. In fact, it is so strange that Jim cannot recognize it as what it is without being prompted, just as he is unaware of the real reason why he has been invited to dinner. At this point the unicorn stands for the Wingfields’ combined dreams of escape: Amanda’s hope of the miracle cure of marriage for Laura, Tom’s longing for adventure and motion, and Laura’s tentative, naive, and unformed dream of love. The shattering of the glass unicorn heralds the collapse of those dreams as much as it heralds the personal shattering of Laura. Unicorns are extinct in the modern world, Jim is engaged, and escape from reality is impossible. Tom’s last monologue underscores this fact. His own break from home has only succeeded in setting him adrift and the sole guilty resting point he has left are his memories. Ironically, it is precisely those memories that prevent his true escape, because they forever tie him to the past.

With The Glass Menagerie , Williams set out to create a new kind of “Plastic Theatre,” a highly expressionistic language of the stage that would replace what he saw as the stale conventions of realism. He succeeded, thereby revolutionizing American theater. Within two weeks of opening on Broadway in 1945, the play won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award. Claudia Cassidy, present at the Chicago premiere, had predicted The Glass Menagerie ’s success: “It was not only the quality of the work as something so delicate, so fragile. It was also indestructible and you knew right then” (Terkel, 144). Cassidy was correct about the play’s indestructibility, although for a long time, critics either failed to see or attempted to marginalize the play’s achievement. For some, the lyricism of language and expressiveness of theatrical devices obstructed the action. This response was due to the fact that the critics were married to an American theater tradition that demanded realism, which is precisely what Williams denounced in the production notes for the play. Instead of scientific photographic likeness, Williams attempted and conveyed spiritual and emotional truth.

The acid test of audience reception bears this out. Not tied to ideologies and convictions, audiences understood and responded immediately and favorably to The Glass Menagerie . A generation after its Chicago premiere, critical attitudes and opinions had shifted markedly. Many acknowledge The Glass Menagerie as possibly Williams’s greatest achievement because of the breadth of its cataclysmic vision, a vision “not only of individuals who fail to communicate with one another, nor a society temporarily adrift in a depression, but of man abandoned in the universe” (Stein, 153). This is the explanation for the play’s enduring appeal. As are all great works of art, it is not limited by time and space but manages to transcend both by touching on matters shared and universal. Spoto surmised that nothing Williams wrote after The Glass Menagerie possesses the “wholeness of sentiment,” its “breadth of spirit,” or its “quiet voice about the great reach of small lives” (Spoto, 116).

O’Connor, Jim

Jim is a former hero of the high school Tom and Laura Wingfield attended. He is also a colleague of Tom’s at the International Shoe Company. Tom invites Jim for dinner at the Wingfields’ apartment. Jim does not realize that Tom’s mother, Amanda Wingfield, has the ulterior motive of presenting him as a gentleman caller and prospective suitor for Laura. The plan fails, as Jimis already engaged. The character of Jim is based on an actual Jim O’Connor, who was one of Williams’s fellow students at the University of Missouri at Columbia. On one occasion he was invited to the Williams home with the goal that he would become better acquainted with Williams’s sister, Rose Williams.

Wingfield, Amanda

She is the mother of Tom and Laura Wingfield. Living in a dingy, Saint Louis apartment and struggling to make ends meet by selling magazine subscriptions, Amanda finds solace in the romantic memories of her girlhood. Her concern about her children’s future prompts her to bully them to live her ideal life, that of Southern gentility. Her inappropriate sense of propriety makes Tom and Laura miserable. As does Esmeralda Critchfield in Spring Storm , Amanda places importance on the need to have Laura marry a socially suitable young man. This goal causes an unhappy tension in the household and bitter friction, especially between Amanda and Tom. At her insistence, Tom invites Jim O’Connor, a fellow shoe factory worker, to visit the Wingfield home as a prospective gentleman caller for Laura. Amanda Wingfield is based on Williams’s mother, Edwina Estelle Dakin Williams. Mrs. Williams acknowledged the similarity and recalled that in her youth she was always “the belle of the ball,” who proudly “made [her] debut in Vicksburg twice” (Brown, 119). Mrs. Williams also said that she greatly enjoyed the character of Amanda, especially when she was played by Laurette Taylor, a “real genius,” who adequately captured the “pathos” of the character (Brown, 115–116).

Wingfield, Laura

Laura is the daughter of Amanda Wingfield and older sister of Tom Wingfield. A childhood illness has left her with a shortened leg, for which she has to wear a brace. Laura’s self-consciousness about her disability renders her unable to attend business college, and she seeks refuge in her collection of glass animals, the eponymous glass menagerie. Her encounter with Jim O’Connor, with whom she has been secretly infatuated since high school, proves traumatic when she finds out that he is engaged. Laura Wingfield is based on Williams’s sister, Rose  Isabel Williams.

Wingfield, Tom

Tom is the narrator and simultaneously a character in the play. He has ambitions to be a poet, but he is forced to work at a shoe factory warehouse to support his mother, Amanda Wingfield, and his sister, Laura Wingfield. His home life in their Saint Louis apartment is miserable. His mother repeatedly accuses him of being selfish and regularly looks through his possessions. Dreaming of adventure and escape from his depressing job and home life, Tom spends most of his evenings at movies. He becomes a reluctant accomplice in his mother’s plan to secure a gentleman caller for Laura. He invites his workmate and former high school associate Jim O’Connor to the Wingfield apartment for dinner. The evening is a disaster, and his mother blames the negative turn of events on Tom. As a result, he leaves home, abandoning Amanda and Laura to their own resources. Tom is forever haunted by memories of his sister, and the play is his account of events surrounding his departure. Tom Wingfield is Williams’s most autobiographical character. Tom’s leave-taking mirrors Williams’s own departure from his family’s Saint Louis, MISSOURI, apartment and from his emotionally unstable sister, Rose  Isabel Williams.

FURTHER READING Brown, Dennis. Shoptalk: Conversations about Theatre and Film with Twelve Writers, One Producer—and Tennessee Williams’s Mother. New York: Newmarket Press, 1992). Cassidy, Claudia. “Fragile Drama Holds Theatre in Tight Spell,” Chicago Daily Theater Tribune, December 27, 1944, p. 11. Spoto, Donald. The Kindness of Strangers: The Life of Tennessee Williams. Boston: Little, Brown, 1985. Stein, Roger B. “ The Glass Menagerie Revisited: Catastrophe without Violence,” Western Humanities Review 18, no. 2 (spring 1964): 141–153. Terkel, Studs. The Spectator: Talk about Movies and Plays with the People Who Make Them. New York: New Press, 1999. Tynan, Kenneth. “Valentine to Tennessee Williams,” in Drama and the Modern World: Plays and Essays, edited by Samuel Weiss. Lexington, Mass.: D. C. Heath, 1964, pp. 455–461.

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The Glass Menagerie

Introduction to the glass menagerie.

The Glass Menagerie is a memory play , written by a popular American writer, Tennessee Williams . The play was first staged in 1944 and became an instant hit, bringing fortune and popularity, both for the playwright on account of the autobiographical elements he has inserted in it. The story of the play revolves around a mother, her shy and introverted daughter, Laura , and her artist son, Tom. Originally written as The Gentleman Caller, the play won New York Drama Critic Award for the author in 1945 and became a masterpiece.

Summary of The Glass Menagerie

The play starts with Tom Wingfield, Amanda Wingfield’s son recalling his life. Amanda is a single mother, whose husband had forsaken the family years back in the past before the play begins. The cast shows Laura and Amanda, both daughter and mother, conversing with their only male member in St. Louis in the year 1937.

The play shows Amanda Wingfield living in a middle-class apartment in St. Louis, taking care of her small family. She recalls her glory days when the boys used to chase her due to her beautiful looks and outgoing personality. This future worry and not-so-bright prospectus of her son, who is working in a warehouse, has become another constant worry for her. Despite seemingly being a budding poet, Tom Wingfield does not find enough time due to his constant worry of everyday preoccupations and penchant for movies that he watches all night . Now her main anxiety is her daughter, Laura, who is crippled and naturally shy, does not seem to win any gentleman’s attention. Looking at her daughter’s youth, Amanda becomes obsessed with the idea of finding a gentleman for her. At dinner Amanda tells her daughter, Laura, to stay polite and pretty for her gentlemen callers even though she never had any callers and never expected one.

Amanda then proceeds to tell Laura to practice her shorthand and typing. A few days later when Amanda comes home from Laura’s school after getting to know that Laura had dropped out several months earlier, she is shocked. Amanda wonders what they will do with their lives since Laura never tried to help her and spends all her time playing with her glass menagerie and her old phonograph records. Amanda decides that to have a gentleman caller for Laura, and Laura reveals that she has liked only one boy in her whole life, a high school boy called Jim.

When Tom goes out to the movies that night, Amanda scolds him and asks him to do something useful other than watching movies. The next morning after Tom apologizes to her, Amanda asks him to find a nice gentleman caller for Laura. A few days later, Tom tells her that he has invited his colleague, Jim O’Connor over dinner. When Amanda comes to know about the arrival of Jim, she becomes jubilant, seeing the prospects of meeting with the future of her daughter. When Jim comes, she starts recalling her own budding youthful period and her own looks. However, Laura senses that she must have been attracted to Jim during her school years. First, she excuses herself to join dinner with them due to her supposed illness but later when she comes into the living room, she sees Jim alone waiting for the electricity.

As they start a conversation, Jim encourages her to think about their past and starts dancing quietly when he accidentally knocks down her menagerie, having her glass animals in it, breaking the unicorn. However, he immediately takes the situation in control by kissing her and paying compliments for keeping such a beautiful menagerie. Following this, he explodes the bombshell about his likely marriage soon. Laura, on the other hand, presents the broken unicorn to him as a gift after which he departs. Amanda, upon learning this, lashes out at Tom, who expresses his ignorance about such a thing. The play ends on a sad note of Tom leaving the house, asking his sister to extinguish the candles.

Major Themes in The Glass Menagerie

• Escape from Responsibilities: The play demonstrates the theme of escape from the heavy responsibilities of life as Tom desires to avoid family responsibilities like a magician, who shows the ability to escape the box without removing nails from it. The burden of a shy sister and a pestering mother remains heavy on his mind. He wants to remove this burden from his mind and escape to the world of magical fantasy . However, the memory of the family stays with him, reminding him of having family relations with Laura and his mother. On the other hand, both of them could not escape the financial constraints and social pressure due to the well-knit domestic setup. In the end, Tom realizes that this escape from responsibilities does not come without its cost which is loneliness and mental depression.
• Family : The major theme of family and its responsibility is shown through the Wingfield family, Amanda, the mother , Laura, the daughter, and Tom, who’s Amanda’s son. As the only male member, Tom has to assume the charge of the main breadwinner, though, he shirks taking up the responsibility of the whole family. On the other hand, Amanda constantly feels the stress of finding a suitable match for her daughter, Laura, whose social shyness and isolation are costing the family heavily. In this backdrop, the shadow of the disappearance of Mr. Wingfield is peeping through their mental stress. Tom, therefore, follows suit, but the realization of his being the patriarchal head does not recede.
• Abandonment: The theme of abandonment looms large in the background due to the disappearance of the head, Mr. Wingfield. Amanda has an acute realization of her husband’s abandoned presence and on her daughter who suffers from social abandonment. Her son, Tom, too, tries to take this abandonment on him by deciding to leave the family. He tries to hook Jim, but this, too, proves a futile effort on his part. Therefore, his own predicament shows his fear of being abandoned by his dreams and desires in life.
• Illusions and Reality: The play, The Glass Menagerie, shows the theme of illusion and reality through the characters of Amanda and Tom. Her Southern legacy has caused the illusion to Amanda in that she visualizes patriarchy taking up the household responsibility but her son’s upbringing in the abandoned household is the stark reality staring in her face. It is because he has a constant reminder of the disappearance of his father, the reality which runs contrary to his presence as the responsible head of the family. Similarly, Amanda feels that the illusion of her being an outgoing girl in her past may be reflected through her daughter Laura, who is, in reality, a socially shy girl, having little prospects of finding a gentleman.
• Memory: The play, The Glass Menagerie, shows the theme of memory and its undertones among all the family members of the Wingfield family. Amanda, the mother of the family, is constantly stuck in her memories of her blissful and pretty youth period, while the memory of her escaping husband makes these memories muddied. Similarly, Tom also recalls his sister by the end, the memory of which haunts him, while Jim is lost in his memories of boyhood, a thrilling period of his life.
• Shattering of Dreams: Despite a broken family, every Wingfield individual dreams about having a good life. Amanda, the mother, dreams of having her daughter married to a gentleman and her son, Tom, taking up the family responsibility. On the other hand, Tom dreams of having an independent life free from family preoccupations and burdens.
• Marriage: The play also shows the theme of marriage as an institution whose existence and preservation keep the family united and stable. Amanda wants her daughter to have a good gentleman to marry, but she fails, shattering her dreams. It is because Amanda’s husband married her but left her, leaving the family in the lurch.
• Alcoholism: The play implicitly shows the theme of alcoholism in that if a person drinks, he is irresponsible as Amanda experiences addiction as she recalls her fleeing husband. Keeping this in mind, she also questions Jim whether he drinks or not, having the point of family responsibility in her consciousness.
• Love: The theme of love in the play is quite implicit through the motherly love of Amanda for her daughter to marry a gentleman and for her son to take up the family responsibility.

Major Characters The Glass Menagerie

• Tom Wingfield: Tom Wingfield is the representative of patriarchy in the play and shows the memories presented objectively. His direct address to the audience shows his capability of objective evaluation of his situation. At the same time, his duality confuses the audience in understanding his role within the family. His artistic capabilities stand in contrast to his actual achievement for the family in the real world. Although his concerns about his sister, Laura, and mother, Amanda, shows that he takes care of his family, his frequent demonstration of indifference leads to the impressions of the audience about his cruel behavior. His breaking down of the glass menagerie, in the end, shows this cruel behavior, leading to contradictory arguments about him, having no role model in the family to follow.
• Amanda Wingfield: A remnant of the faded Southern beauty , Amanda represents the role of the fading matriarchy after having suffered an economic and social decline. Following her husband’s escape from the family responsibilities, she has to take up matters into her own hands despite having little experience of raising a family, the reason that the family is undergoing stress and turbulence. As the extrovert character , she tries to lead her son, Tom, to take up the role of the family head. Yet, she herself stays away from Laura instead of guiding her to mix in the society. Some of the flaws in her character lead to the comic and tragic issues arising in the family. Her failures are apparent from her monologue delivered in response to her children’s behavior.
• Laura Wingfield: A very innocent and mentally challenged character, Laura demonstrates compassion when she comes to know the situation of her brother. This behavior stands in stark contrast to the selfish attitude of Amanda, her mother, as well as, her brother, Tom. Her position in the family makes her the center of the play in that her mother and brother, both, are engaged in finding a suitable match for her. Although she is a young girl, her mother’s thoughts of her own glamorous past belittle her prospects when Tom brings Jim. Laura, though, seems an introvert and a shy character, shows her will at several moments which defies her real personality built by her mother and brother.
• Jim O’Connor: The character of Jim within the play is interesting and intriguing. He is a gentleman and Amanda encourages him to woo Laura. An ordinary but nice young man, Jim is a hero in Tom’s sight since his school days when he used to lead sports and theatrical productions. Having no haunting memories and present stigmas, Jim is a true middle-class young man who does not take fantasies at the face value. Sensing his fall in this abyss, he extricates himself and returns to his world on the pretext of his being already hooked.
• Mr. Wingfield: The significance of the character of Mr. Wingfield lies in his portrait hanging on the wall in the family apartment despite his shameful flight from the family responsibilities. A symbol of the deceitful patriarchy, he becomes prominent in the play on account of his absence. Amanda’s memories of his charm also belittle his patriarchal role due to her wrong choice among the responsible and noble gentlemen of her time.

Writing Style of The Glass Menagerie

As poetic, symbolic, and spontaneous, The Glass Menagerie establishes Tennessee Williams at his best. The characters speak in a lyrical style with spontaneity in their dialogues. The conversation is down-to-earth direct and simple, showing the characters in their true colors. As far as the sentence style and diction are concerned, they are informal and simple. Yet Williams relies heavily on metaphors , similes, and symbols to convey the meanings of the frustration the family members are in after the flight of their family head, Mr. Wingfield.

Analysis of the Literary Devices in The Glass Menagerie

• Action: The main action of the play comprises the life of the Wingfield family, the desires of Tom and Laura, and the wish of Amanda to marry her daughter to a gentleman. The rising action occurs when Laura allows her mother to decide that she should marry. The falling action occurs when Jim states that he has a fiancée waiting for him and leaves the house.
• Anaphora : The play shows the use of anaphora as given in the below examples, i. In Spain there was a revolution. Here there was only shouting and confusion. In Spain there was Guernica. Here there were disturbances of labor, sometimes pretty violent, in otherwise peaceful cities such as Chicago , Cleveland, Saint Louis . . . This is the social background of the play. (Scene-I) ii. Honey, don’t push with your fingers. If you have to push with something, the thing to push with is a crust of bread . (Scene-I) Both of these examples show the repetitious use of some phrases such as “In Spain there was…” and “have to push.”
• Allusion : The play shows amazing use of different allusions as given in the examples below, i. You simply couldn’t go out if you hadn’t read it. All everybody talked was Scarlett O’Hara. Well, this is a book that critics already compare to Gone with the Wind. It’s the Gone with the Wind of the post-World-War generation! (Scene-III) ii. I’m going to opium dens! Yes, opium dens, dens of vice and criminals’ hangouts, Mother. I’ve joined the Hogan Gang, I’m a hired assassin, I carry a tommy gun in a violin case! (Act-III) iii. They were waiting around the corner for all these kids. Suspended in the mist over Berchtesgaden, caught in the folds of Chamberlain’s umbrella. In Spain there was Guernica! (Scene-III) The first example shows alluding to an author and her books, the second to a gang, and the third to Spanish locations. There are some other lurking allusions such as Pygmalion , a Greek mythical figure, Midas touch of King Midas, Biblical allusions of the Annunciation, and allusion of the Clark Gable.
• Antagonist : Amanda seems to be the antagonist of the play as she seems to have still the charm of her husband and the glamor of her personality having encircled her mind that she does not think about other family members.
• Antimetabole : Antimetabole is the reuse of words in the first and second halves of a sentence. The play shows the use of antimetabole as given in the below example, i. Their eyes had failed them, or they had failed their eyes, and so they were having their fingers pressed forcibly down on the fiery Braille alphabet of a dissolving economy. (Act-I) The play shows the use of antimetabole as the reversely used phrase “Their eyes” show.
• Conflict : The play shows both external and internal conflicts. The external conflict is going on between Tom and Amanda, while the internal conflict is going on in Tom’s mind as he narrates the events of the play.
• Characters: The play, The Glass Menagerie, shows both static as well as dynamic characters. The young man, Tom, is a dynamic character as he shows a considerable transformation in his behavior and conduct by the end of the play. However, all other characters are static as they do not show or witness any transformation such as Laura and Amanda.
• Climax : The climax in the play occurs when Laura comes to know that Jim is the same, her classmate, and faces freezing feelings that she has to get support to sit on the sofa.
• Foreshadowing : The play shows many examples of foreshadows as given in below, i. Tom’s departure from the scene foreshadows his escape from familial responsibilities ii. Music foreshadows the dance of Jim and Laura iii. Breaking of unicorn foreshadows breaking of Laura’s heart
• Hyperbole : The play shows various examples of hyperboles as given below, i. Like some archetype of the universal unconscious, the image of the gentleman caller haunted our small apartment… (Scene-III) ii. I’m starting to boil inside. I know I seem dreamy, but inside — well, I’m boiling! (Scene-VI) Both these examples exaggerate things such as the first one says that the gentleman has become a ghost and in the second Tom says that he is boiling inside which is not possible.
• Imagery : The Glass Menagerie shows excellent use of imagery as given in the below examples, i. He had tremendous Irish good nature and vitality with the scrubbed and polished look of white chinaware. He seemed to move in a continual spotlight. He was a star in basketball, captain of the debating club, president of the senior class and the glee club and he sang the male lead in the annual light operas. (Scene-VI) ii. I didn’t go to the moon, I went much further — for time is the longest distance between two places. Not long after that I was fired for writing a poem on the lid of a shoe-box. I left Saint Louis. I descended the steps of this fire escape for a last time and followed, from then on, in my father’s footsteps, attempting to find in motion what was lost in space. (Scene-VII) These two examples show images of nature, color, and feelings.
• Metaphor : The Glass Menagerie shows good use of various metaphors as given the examples below, i. The play is memory. (Scene-I) ii. My devotion has made me a witch and so I make myself hateful to my children!. (Scene-IV) These examples show that several things have been compared directly in the play such as the play itself has been compared to things recalled from memory or the mother compared to a witch.
• Mood : The play, The Glass Menagerie , shows various moods; it starts with a reflective mood but turns out highly ironic and melancholy at times.
• Narrator : The play, The Glass Menagerie , has been narrated by the first person, Tom, who happens to be one of its characters, too. In this sense, it seems a meta- fiction , a narrative within the play but still, it has a dialogue form.
• Personification : The play shows examples of personifications as given below, i. A fragile, unearthly prettiness has come out in Laura: she is like a piece of translucent glass touched by light, given a momentary radiance, not actual, not lasting. (Scene-VI) ii. Wind blows the white curtains inward in a slow, graceful motion and with a faint, sorrowful sighing. (Scene-VI) These examples show as if the glass and the wind have life and emotions of their own.
• Protagonist : Laura Wingfield is the protagonist of the play as it is her fate that Amanda and Tom are going to decide or not decide.
• Setting : The setting of the play, The Glass Menagerie , is the middle-class apartment of the Wingfield family located in St. Louis in 1937.
• Simile : The play shows good use of various similes as given in the examples below, i. Mother, when you’re disappointed, you get that awful suffering look on your face, like the picture of Jesus’ mother in the museum! (Scene-I) ii. But here there was only hot swing music and liquor, dance halls, bars, and movies, and sex that hung in the gloom like a chandelier and flooded the world with brief, deceptive rainbows. (Scene-V) iii. Amanda has worked like a Turk in preparation for the gentleman caller. (Scene-VI) iv. A fragile, unearthly prettiness has come out in Laura: she is like a piece of translucent glass touched by light. (Scene-VII) The use of the word “like” shows the comparison between different things in the examples. The first example shows this between the mother and Jesus, the second shows between sex with a chandelier, the third between Amanda and a Turk, and the fourth between Laura and glass menagerie.

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The Glass Menagerie

Tennessee williams, ask litcharts ai: the answer to your questions.

The Glass Menagerie is a memory play, and all the events are drawn from the memories of the play’s narrator, Tom Wingfield , who is also a character in the play. The curtain rises to reveal the dimly lit Wingfield apartment, located in a lower-class tenement building in St. Louis. The apartment is entered by a fire escape . Tom stands on the fire escape and addresses the audience to set the scene. The play takes place in St. Louis in the nineteen-thirties. Tom works in a warehouse to support his mother, Amanda , and his sister, Laura . A gentleman caller, Tom says, will appear in the final scenes of the play. Tom and Laura’s father abandoned the family many years ago, and except for a single postcard reading “Hello––Goodbye!” has not been heard from since.

Tom enters the apartment, and the action of the play begins. Throughout the play, thematic music underscores many of the key moments. The Wingfields are seated at dinner. Amanda nags Tom about his table manners and his smoking. She regales Tom and Laura with memories of her youth as a Southern belle in Blue Mountain, courted by scores of gentleman callers. The stories are threadbare from constant repetition, but Tom and Laura let Amanda tell them again, Tom asking her questions as though reading from a script. Amanda is disappointed when Laura, for what appears to be the umpteenth time, says that she will never receive any gentleman callers.

Amanda has enrolled Laura in business college, but weeks later, Amanda discovers that Laura dropped out after the first few classes because of her debilitating social anxiety. Laura spends her days wandering alone around the park and the zoo. Laura also spends much of her time caring for her glass menagerie , a collection of glass figurines. Amanda is frustrated but quickly changes course, deciding that Laura’s best hope is to find a suitable man to marry. Laura tells Amanda about Jim , a boy that she had a crush on in high school. Amanda begins to raise extra money for the family by selling subscriptions for a women’s glamour magazine.

Tom, who feels stifled in both his job and his family life, writes poetry while at the warehouse. He escapes the apartment night after night through movies , drinking, and literature. Tom and Amanda argue bitterly, he claiming that she does not respect his privacy, she claiming that he must sacrifice for the good of the family. During one particularly heated argument, precipitated by Tom’s manuscripts pouring out of the typewriter , Tom accidentally shatters some of Laura’s precious glass animals.

Tom stumbles back early one morning and tells Laura about a magic trick involving a man who escapes from a nailed-up coffin. Tom sees the trick as symbolic of his life. Due to Laura’s pleading and gentle influence, Tom and Amanda eventually reconcile. They unite in their concern for Laura. Amanda implores Tom not to abandon the family as her husband did. She asks him to find a potential suitor for Laura at the warehouse. After a few months, Tom brings home his colleague Jim O’Connor, whom he knew in high school and who calls Tom “Shakespeare.” Amanda is overjoyed and throws herself into a whirlwind of preparation, fixing up the lighting in the apartment and making a new dress for Laura. When Laura first sees Jim and realizes that he is her high-school love, she is terrified; she answers the door but quickly dashes away. Amanda emerges in a gaudy, frilly, girlish dress from her youth and affects a thick Southern accent, as though she is the one receiving the gentleman caller. Laura is so overcome by the whole scene that she refuses to join the table, instead lying on the sofa in the living room.

After dinner, the lights in the apartment go out because Tom has not paid the electricity bill––instead, as Tom and Jim know but Laura and Amanda don’t, Tom has paid his dues to join the merchant marines. Amanda lights candles, and Jim joins Laura by candlelight in the living room. Laura slowly warms up and relaxes in Jim’s gently encouraging company. Laura reminds Jim that they knew each other in high school and that he had nicknamed her “Blue Roses,” a mispronunciation of her childhood attack of pleurosis. Jim tells Laura that she must overcome her inferiority complex through confidence. Laura shows Jim her glass collection and lets him hold the glass unicorn , her favorite. They begin to dance to the strains of a waltz coming from across the street. As they dance, however, Jim knocks over the unicorn, breaking off its horn.

Jim kisses Laura but immediately draws back, apologizing and explaining that he has a fiancée. Laura is devastated but tries not to show it. She gives him the broken glass unicorn as a souvenir. Amanda re-enters the living room and learns about Jim’s fiancée. After he leaves, she accuses Tom of playing a trick on them. Tom storms out of the house to the movies, and Amanda tells him to go to the moon. Tom explains that he got fired from his job not long after Jim’s visit and that he left his mother and sister. However, no matter how far he goes, he cannot leave his emotional ties behind. The play is his final act of catharsis to purge himself of the memories of his family.

The Glass Menagerie

By tennessee williams, the glass menagerie study guide.

The Glass Menagerie was written in 1944, based on reworked material from one of Williams' short stories, "Portrait of a Girl in Glass," and his screenplay, The Gentleman Caller. In the weeks leading up to opening night (December 26, 1944 in Chicago), Williams had deep doubts about the production - the theater did not expect the play to last more than a few nights, and the producers prepared a closing notice in response to the weak advance sales. But two critics loved the show, and returned almost nightly to monitor the production. Meanwhile, they gave the play enthusiastic reviews and continued to praise it daily in their respective papers. By mid-January, tickets to the show were some of the hottest items in Chicago, nearly impossible to obtain. Later in 1945, the play opened in New York with similar success. On opening night in New York, the cast received an unbelievable twenty-five curtain calls.

Tennessee Williams did not express strong admiration for any early American playwrights; his greatest dramatic influence was the brilliant Russian playwright Anton Chekhov. Chekhov, with his elegant juxtaposition of the humorous and the tragic, his lonely characters, and his dark sensibilities, was a powerful inspiration for Tennessee Williams' work. Additionally, the novelist D.H. Lawrence offered Williams a depiction of sexuality as a potent force of life; Lawrence is referenced in The Glass Menagerie as one of the writers favored by Tom. The American poet Hart Crane was another important influence on Williams; with Crane's dramatic life, open homosexuality, and determination to create poetry that did not mimic European sensibilities, Williams found a great source of inspiration. Williams also belongs to the tradition of great Southern writers who have invigorated literary language with the lyricism of Southern English.

Like Eugene O'Neill, Tennessee Williams wanted to challenge some of the conventions of naturalistic theatre. Summer and Smoke (1948), Camino Real (1953), and The Glass Menagerie (1944), among others, provided some of the early testing ground for Williams' innovations. The Glass Menagerie uses music, screen projections, and lighting effects to create the haunting and dream-like atmosphere appropriate for a "memory play." Like Eugene O'Neill's Emperor Jones and Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman , Williams' play explores ways of using the stage to depict the interior life and memories of a character. Tom, as narrator, moves in and out of the action of the play. There are not realistic rules for the convention: we also see events that Tom did not directly witness. The screen projections seem heavy-handed, but at the time their use would have seemed to be a cutting-edge innovation. The projections use film-like effects and the power of photography (art forms that are much younger than drama) in a theatrical setting. In The Glass Menagerie, Williams' skillful use of the narrator and his creation of a dream-like, illusory atmosphere help to create a powerful representation of family, memory, and loss.

The Glass Menagerie is loosely autobiographical. The characters all have some basis in the real-life family of Tennessee Williams: Edwina is the hopeful and demanding Amanda, Rose is the frail and shy Laura (whose nickname, "Blue Roses," refers directly back to Williams' real-life sister), and distant and cold Cornelius is the faithless and absent father. Tom is Williams' surrogate. Williams actually worked in a shoe warehouse in St. Louis, and there actually was a disastrous evening with the only gentleman caller who ever came for Rose. Thomas was also Tennessee Williams' real name, and the name "Thomas" means twin - making Tom the surrogate not only for Williams but also possibly for the audience. He is our eye into the Wingfields' situation. His dilemma forms a central conflict of the play, as he faces an agonizing choice between responsibility for his family and living his own life.

The play is replete with lyrical symbolism. The glass menagerie, in its fragility and delicate beauty, is a symbol for Laura. She is oddly beautiful and, like her glass pieces, easy to destroy. The fire escape is most closely linked to Tom's character and to the theme of escape. Laura stumbles on the escape, while Tom uses it to get out of the apartment and into the outside world. He goes down the fire escape one last time at the end of the play, and he stands on the landing during his monologues. His position there metaphorically illustrates his position between his family and the outside world, between his responsibility and the need to live his own life.

The play is non-naturalistic, playing with stage conventions and making use of special effects like music and slide projections. By writing a "memory play," Tennessee Williams freed himself from the restraints of naturalistic theatre. The theme of memory is important: for Amanda, memory is a kind of escape. For Tom, the older Tom who narrates the events of the play, memory is the thing that cannot be escaped, for he is still haunted by memories of the sister he abandoned years ago.

The Glass Menagerie Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for The Glass Menagerie is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

What is Jim's nickname for Tom?

Jim nicknamed Tom, Shakespeare.

In Scene 6, how does Amanda embarrass Tom?

Tom is embarrassed by his mother because she acts like a teenager in Jim's presence. She talks incessantly (about herself) and presents herself as if she were a young, southern belle in search of a husband.

What would you judge the Wingfield's social status as being?

In context, the family's social status/ financial status has declined. Amanda is described as once having been a Southern belle. She has been abandoned by her husband and is now supported by her son.

Study Guide for The Glass Menagerie

The Glass Menagerie study guide contains a biography of Tennessee Williams, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

• About The Glass Menagerie
• The Glass Menagerie Summary
• Character List

Essays for The Glass Menagerie

The Glass Menagerie literature essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of The Glass Menagerie.

• Chekhov's Influence on the Work of Tennessee Williams
• Entrapment in The Glass Menagerie
• Odets and Williams's Women of the Depression
• Life's Fire Escape
• Symbolism of The Glass Menagerie

Lesson Plan for The Glass Menagerie

• About the Author
• Study Objectives
• Common Core Standards
• Introduction to The Glass Menagerie
• Relationship to Other Books
• Bringing in Technology
• Notes to the Teacher
• Related Links
• The Glass Menagerie Bibliography

Wikipedia Entries for The Glass Menagerie

• Introduction
• Original Broadway cast
• Autobiographical elements

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The Glass menagerie : a collection of critical essays

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The Glass Menagerie

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A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.

Play Summaries & Analyses

Part 1: Scenes 1-5

Part 2: Scenes 6-7

Character Analysis

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Discussion Questions

Tom describes The Glass Menagerie as a memory play. What elements of memory do you see at work? How does the idea of memory function? What does the theme of memory mean in the play?

In the 2017 Broadway revival of The Glass Menagerie , Madeline Ferris, a performer in a wheelchair due to muscular dystrophy, played Laura. She is believed to be the first disabled performer in a wheelchair to play a leading role on Broadway. How does this choice affect the meaning of the play? How does it color the ways that the characters describe or interact with Laura? Do you agree with this choice? Why or why not?

How does the play formulate disability? What does disability mean to the various characters in the play? What does it mean to Laura? Considering that the play premiered in 1945, how do you think the play’s depiction of disability would play to an audience today?

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102 The Glass Menagerie Essay Topic Ideas & Examples

🏆 best the glass menagerie topic ideas & essay examples, 📌 most interesting the glass menagerie topics to write about, 👍 good research topics about the glass menagerie, ❓ the glass menagerie essay questions.

• Illusion vs. Reality in “The Glass Menagerie” by Tennessee Williams One of the major themes of the play is considered to be the characters’ inability to meet reality, and the meaning of illusion for them.
• The Glass Menagerie To counter her fears, Amanda enrols Laura in a business school hoping that she would be stable; provide for her self and probably for the family. We will write a custom essay specifically for you by our professional experts 808 writers online Learn More
• The Glass Menagerie: How Laura’s Relationship With Jim Changed the Tone of the Play Jim is Tom’s friend and was in the same school as Laura, he is engaged and when he tells this to Laura on their first meeting after school, she is heartbroken because she loved him.
• Gender Roles in “The Glass Menagerie” by Tennessee Williams In the play The Glass Menagerie, Tennessee Williams has written the story of the Wingfield family that lived in St Louis during the 1940s.
• Character Sketch of Laura in “The Glass Menagerie” by Tennessee Williams In the words of her brother: “…in the eyes of others strangers she’s terribly shy and lives in a world of her own and those things make her seem a little peculiar to people outside […]
• The Main Themes in “The Glass Menagerie” by Tennessee Williams The most notable feature of the play is its symbolism, which is demonstrated by the author in a variety of ways. The outside world frightens the girl, and her way of escaping from reality is […]
• How the Glass Menagerie Illustrates the Breakup of Family Structures Debusscher, in this respect states that, the mention of “a double life,” could be the mask that Tom Wingfield wears to meet the world, in particular the “world of his mother and that of the […]
• Tennessee Williams’ “The Glass Menagerie” and Critique It is one of the most poignant scenes of the modern stage, But there is another kind of music in The Glass Menagerie, as there is in most successful drama, and that is the underground […]
• Family Concept in “The Glass Menagerie” by Tennessee Williams The play ‘The Glass Menagerie” by Tennessee Williams focuses on the life of Amanda along with her son Tom, and “weakling” daughter Laura during the year 1937 at St.
• Desperation in ‘The Glass Menagerie’ by T. Williams Williams admits that she regrets her diminished status: the fading of her beauty and the increasing harshness of her tone of voice: “a little woman of great but confused vitality clinging frantically to another time […]
• “Death of a Salesman” by A. Miller and “The Glass Menagerie” by T. Williams: Elements of Drama Action That is why it is interesting to compare the details of the two stories, and the peculiarities of both dramas’ actions.
• The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams and A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry Drama In the play A Raising in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry, each member of the Younger family has his/her own idea on how to spend $10,000 that the family received from the insurance cover of […]
• Analysis of the Characters in Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie Although the characters of Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie are different in their perception of the world and their actions, all of them prefer the world of illusions instead of reality in order to cope […]
• “The Glass Menagerie” by Tennessee Williams Play Critique The production elements were compatible and coordinated, with the lighting and sound design contributing to the overall mood and atmosphere of the play.
• The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams Review These examples indicate that music in the play is one of the foremost instruments that express the idea of escapism and contributes to character development. The theme of hope and hopelessness is effectively conveyed in […]
• Contrast, Conflict and Tension in The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams As soon as it appears clear the fact that the play’s author is engrossed in the action the audience experience the first display of tension.
• Analysis of “The Glass Menagerie” and “The Taming of the Shrew” Concerning the outline of the paper, it consists of two major parts: the first one is devoted to “The Glass Menagerie,” and the second one to “The Taming of the Shrew”.
• The Glass Menagerie: A Play by Tennessee Williams Amanda’s withdraw to the past suggests that she does not want anybody else and especially her children to go through the bad experiences she had in the past.
• The Narrative of “The Glass Menagerie” by Tennessee Williams Too shy to attend the business school her mother enrolled her in and without any friends of her own, Amanda decides marriage is the only answer for Laura and forces Tom to find a beau […]
• Williams’ “The Glass Menagerie”: The Distraction of Illusions She imagines that if she could have gained the attention of Jim O’Connor in high school, her life would be much different.
• The Play “The Glass Menagerie” by Tennessee Williams At the time the play opens, Tom is an adult and travels the world with the Merchant Marines, but remains unhappy because of the way that he left his mother and sister.
• “The Glass Menagerie” the Play by Tennessee Williams Tennessee Williams, a prominent playwright of his own epoch was born on 26 March 1911 in Columbus where he lived with his family consisting of his grandfather who was a religious man in the church, […]
• Tennessee Williams: “Glass Menagerie” and Autor’s Life His sister Rose, the closest person in his life and the prototype of Laura in “The Glass Menagerie”, actually suffered from epilepsy and underwent a prefrontal lobotomy in the mid-1930s, which has a clearly negative […]
• The Glass Menagerie by American Repertory Theater Tiffany’s production of Williams’ play should be discussed as the tribute to the classic The Glass Menagerie because of valuing the traditional approach to interpreting the play; thus, the director’s voice can be discussed as […]
• ‘The Glass Menagerie’ and ‘A Raisin in the Sun’ Drama Analysis The two plays ‘The Glass Menagerie’ and ‘A Raisin in the Sun’ brings out the features of American society. On the other hand, the play ‘The Glass Menagerie’ portrays the American men who ran away […]
• Glass Menagerie by William Tennessee Literature Analysis He partially wants to stay at home and look after his family because he is morally obligated to do so. The advantage of the action is that he supports his mother and sister.
• Tennessee Williams: Characters in “The Glass Menagerie” The first role is that of a character having memoirs that the play writes about. It is these double roles which underpin the tension in the play pulling between dramatic realism shown in the play […]
• The Motif of Alienation in Tennessee Williams’s Play The Glass Menagerie In its turn, this explains why, as opposed to what it happened to be the case with her mother, the Laura’s sense of existential alienation has strongly defined tragic undertones to it.
• “The Glass Menagerie” by Tennessee Williams: Play Analysis Tom’s mother is from a genteel southern ancestry and frequently narrates the stories of her youth to her children and the number of suitors who wanted her.
• The Glass Menagerie: Figurines’ Significance In this paper the focus will lead to a discussion of the significance of the glass figurines and their symbolic value to the whole play as representation of the most central symbol uniting and supporting […]
• Characters in The Glass Menagerie and Death of a Salesman For example, one of the main characters in Death of a Salesman, Willy Loman is identified as a “mentally and emotionally confused” person; the male character of The Glass Menagerie is under a threat of […]
• The Deconstructionist Role of Fathers in “The Glass Menagerie” and “Ghosts”
• Parallel Themes in “The Glass Menagerie” and a Raisin in the Sun
• The Conflicts Experienced by the Characters in “The Glass Menagerie”
• Delayed Goals in “The Glass Menagerie” by Tennessee Williams
• The Character of Jim and Laura in “The Glass Menagerie” by Tennessee Williams
• Unrealistic Dreams in “The Glass Menagerie” by Tennessee Williams
• The Primary Archetype Elements of Tennessee Williams’ “The Glass Menagerie”
• The Difference of Mothers in “The Glass Menagerie” and “A Raisin in the Sun”
• William’s Use of Symbolism in “The Glass Menagerie”
• Tennessee Williams’ Characters in “The Glass Menagerie” and “A Streetcar Named Desire”
• The Psychological Costs of Societal Ideals in “The Glass Menagerie”
• Transcendent Laura Wingfield in “The Glass Menagerie” by Tennessee Williams
• The Biographical Elements of Tennessee Williams’ “The Glass Menagerie”
• Masculinity Portrayed in “The Great Gatsby,” “The Grapes of Wrath,” and “The Glass Menagerie”
• Crossing the Rubicon in Tennessee Williams’ “The Glass Menagerie”
• The Author’s Self Portrayal in “The Glass Menagerie” by Tennessee Williams
• The Embodiment of Escape in “The Glass Menagerie” by Tennessee Williams
• The Symbolism of Jonquils and Unicorn in “The Glass Menagerie” by Tennessee Williams
• The Need for a Husband as Portrayed in “The Glass Menagerie”
• The Irresponsibility of a Mother as Portrayed in Laura’s Case in “The Glass Menagerie”
• The Characters and Themes of Strengths and Weaknesses in “The Glass Menagerie”
• A Representation of a Dysfunctional in “The Glass Menagerie”
• The Father as the Most Important Character in “The Glass Menagerie” by Tennessee Williams
• The Theme of Desperation as Portrayed in “The Glass Menagerie”
• The Escape Mechanisms Used in “The Glass Menagerie”
• Use of Metaphor in Tennessee Williams’ “The Glass Menagerie”
• Fantasy in James Thurber’s “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” and Tennessee Williams’ “The Glass Menagerie”
• The Truth in Perception: An Exploration of “The Glass Menagerie”
• The Theme of Alienation in “The Glass Menagerie,” “Another Country,” and “The Love Song” by J. Alfred Prufrock
• Power of Hope Through “The Glass Menagerie”
• The Use of Symbolism in “Mulatto” and “The Glass Menagerie”
• The Demonstration of Friction Between Parents in “Oedipus Rex,” “Hamlet,” and “The Glass Menagerie”
• Glass Fragility in Tennessee Williams’ “The Glass Menagerie”
• The Influence of Parents in “The Glass Menagerie” by Tennessee Williams
• The Theme of Entrapment in “The Glass Menagerie”
• The Common Things in “The Glass Menagerie,” “Death of a Salesman,” and “Raisin in the Sun”
• The Working in Man in Tennessee Williams’ “The Glass Menagerie”
• The Failure of Amanda in “The Glass Menagerie”
• Wingfield’s Absent Father in “The Glass Menagerie” by Tennessee Williams
• Willy Loman of “A Death of a Salesman” and Amanda Wingfield of “The Glass Menagerie”
• The Meaning of Work in “The Glass Menagerie” by Tennessee Williams
• What Is Peculiar About Laura in “The Glass Menagerie”?
• What Does the Glass Menagerie Symbolize in “The Glass Menagerie”?
• Why Is Laura the Tragic Hero in “The Glass Menagerie”?
• Which Play Best Exemplifies the Contemporary Woman, “The Glass Menagerie” or “Lysistrata”?
• What Is the Conclusion of “The Glass Menagerie”?
• Why Is Tom Unhappy at the End of “The Glass Menagerie”?
• What Makes “The Glass Menagerie” Play So Appealing?
• Why Is Amanda So Upset With Tom at the End of the Play in “The Glass Menagerie”?
• What Do the Movies Symbolize to Tom in “The Glass Menagerie”?
• How Does Williams Explore the Theme of Entrapment in “The Glass Menagerie”?
• What Is Tom’s Illusion in “The Glass Menagerie”?
• How Does Tennessee Williams Present the Character of Amanda in “The Glass Menagerie”?
• What Is the Introductory Incident in “The Glass Menagerie”?
• Who Is Called Blue Roses in “The Glass Menagerie”?
• What Does the Coffin Symbolize in “The Glass Menagerie”?
• Who Is the Hero in “The Glass Menagerie”?
• What Is the Main Idea of “The Glass Menagerie”?
• What Is the Most Significant Play Element in “The Glass Menagerie”?
• How Does Tom Escape Reality in “The Glass Menagerie”?
• What Does the Glass Unicorn Symbolize in “The Glass Menagerie”?
• What Is the Irony in “The Glass Menagerie”?
• What Techniques Does the Author Use to Maintain the Reader’s Interest in “The Glass Menagerie”?
• How Does “The Glass Menagerie” Relate to the Metallica Song “Frantic”?
• What Does the Expression Blue Mountain Signify in “The Glass Menagerie”?
• Who Is the Antagonist in “The Glass Menagerie”?
• What Does the Gentleman Caller Symbolize in “The Glass Menagerie”?
• Why Is “The Glass Menagerie” Called a Memory Play?
• What Does Blowing Out the Candles Symbolize in “The Glass Menagerie”?
• What Does Amanda Make Tom Promise That He Will Never Be in “The Glass Menagerie”?
• How “The Glass Menagerie” Illustrates the Breakup of Family Structures?
• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

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IvyPanda . "102 The Glass Menagerie Essay Topic Ideas & Examples." March 2, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/topic/the-glass-menagerie-essay-examples/.

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