“The Glass Menagerie”
A very significant theme explored in “The Glass Menagerie” is the reality of experience. Tennessee Williams continues to emphasize the importance of the style of the poem. Before the play begins, Williams makes sure that the audience understands that the play is a one based on memory. He justifies its lack of reality:
“Memory takes a lot of poetic license. It omits some details; others are exaggerated, according to the emotional value of the articles it touches, for memory is seated predominantly in the heart” (Williams 143).
However, in all of its fantasized elements, “The Glass Menagerie” is actually an in-depth exploration of reality. Thus, Williams does not fail to explain that it is the use of exaggeration that allows one to understand the difference between reality and fantasy.
The narrator, also a character in the play, is the person who re-tells this tragic story. Tom Wingfield describes himself as “the opposite of a stage musician” who “gives you illusion that has the appearance of truth” (Williams 144). He says, “I give you the truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion” (Williams 144). Again, the reality of the situation is explored. The point that Tom makes connects to a note that Williams makes in the Production Notes. Williams explains that:
“When a play employs unconventional techniques, it is not, or certainly shouldn’t be, trying to escape its responsibility of dealing with reality, or interpreting experience, but is actually attempting to find a closer approach, a more penetrating and vivid expression of things as they are” (Williams 131).
Evidently, reality is presented in the use of “unconventional techniques” like
“poetic imagination” that “can represent or suggest, in essence, only through transformation, through changing into other forms than those which were merely present in appearance” (Williams 131).
Williams is ultimately reiterating the significance of imagination, exaggeration, and illusion in order present truth and reality.
The main characters in “The Glass Menagerie” include two women who are trapped in their own worlds. Amanda Wingfield, the mother, has difficulty in letting go of her past. She lives in the past and constantly tries to re-live her life through her daughter, Laura Wingfield. Williams describes her as:
“A little woman of great but confused vitality clinging frantically to another time and place… Amanda, having failed to establish contact with reality continues to live vitally in her illusions” (Williams 129).
Amanda Wingfield constantly talks about the multiple gentleman callers that she had in her life. Tom and Laura make it obvious that Amanda loves reminisce on these memories and constantly tells her stories:
Amanda: Sometimes they come when they are least expected! Why, I remember one
Sunday afternoon in Blue Mountain–Tom: I know what’s coming!
Laura: yes. But let her tell it.
Tom: Again?
Laura: She loves to tell it. (Williams 147).
Not only that, but when Laura almost meets her first gentleman caller, Amanda dresses up and begins to describe her days with many gentleman callers.
Amanda:…. This is the dress in which I led the cotillion. Won the cakewalk twice at Sunset Hill, wore one Spring to the Governor’s Ball in Jackson! See how I sashayed around the ballroom, Laura?
It is quite evident that Amanda is obsessed with her past. She does not quite grasp reality as it is looming about her. Her own kids even smirk at her vivid memories of a wondrous lifestyle. Not until Tom leaves the family does Amanda realize she needs to step out of her dream-like state and learn how to provide a life for Laura and herself.
Laura, on the other hand, is an even worse situation because she is like a shy 5-year old girl trapped in a 30-year-old woman’s body. Constantly subconscious of her legs, that are uneven in length, she is incapable of going out into the real world and exploring her future. Williams describes Laura:
“Laura’s separation increases until she is like a piece of her own glass collection, too exquisitely fragile to move from the shelf” (Williams 129).
Obsessed with her glass menagerie, Laura constantly polishes and treats these inanimate objects as if they were her best friends. Laura has no intention of developing a future for herself, since she has no confidence in herself.
Amanda: Laura, where have you been going when you’ve gone out pretending that you were going to business college?
Laura: I’ve just been going out walking.
Laura: I went in the art museum and the bird houses at the Zoo. I visited the penguins every day! Sometimes I did without lunch and went to the movies. Lately, I’ve been spending most of my afternoons in the Jewel Box, that big glass house where they raise the tropical flowers.
Evidently, these two women are living in a fantasy world, where only the both of them matter to themselves. Not until Jim O’Connor, a nice, ordinary, young man, arrives does reality start to slap these characters in the face. Tom refers to Jim as “the most realistic character in the play, being an emissary from a world of reality that we were somehow set apart from” (Williams 145).Jim O’Connor helps Laura grasp reality for once when he tells her how beautiful she is. He helps her overcome the flaws that she continuously dreads:
Jim: You know what I judge to be the trouble with you? Inferiority complex! Know what that is? That’s what they call it when someone low-rates himself! (Williams 220)
He continues on:
Jim: Just look about you a little. What do you see? A world full of common people! All of ‘em born and all of ‘em going to die! Which of them has one-tenth of your good points! Or mine! (Williams 221)
Finally, Laura realizes that she must not seclude herself from society. She presents the glass unicorn to Jim and tells him how fond she is of it. He then places the fragile unicorn onto a desk. While Laura and Jim dance around the room, they accidentally hit the desk, causing the unicorn to fall to the floor and break. It is then, that Laura presents her understanding of reality:
Laura: Now it is like all athe other horses.
Jim: It’s lost its–
Laura: Horn! It doesn’t matter. Maybe it’s a blessing in disguise. (Williams 226)
Laura continues on and says:
Laura: Now he will feel more at home with the other horses, the ones that don’t have horns. (Williams 126)
The conclusion that Laura makes also stands as a symbol of Laura’s understanding of the reality she must face. Her transformation from a shy girl, who is not able to face other people for fear of their superiority, to a more confident woman, who now understands that she is like the rest. Recall that Williams explains that he presents reality through transformation. Thus, he ultimately achieves the in-depth exploration of the reality of experience in “The Glass Menagerie” with the transformation of Laura.
Works Cited
Williams, Tennessee. The Theatre of Tennessee Williams: Volume 1. New York: New Directions Books, 1971.
So first I want to say that I’m a fan of two unrelated things.
a. the random quotaiton marks that won’t die
b. the fact that i’m on your blogroll twice
Anyways, about your post…
Not that it’s a bad thing (your post is very in depth) but I must say that when I read your intro about the examples of experience in the play, I really thought you would bring up Tom’s movie tirade, but you didn’t, so I’ll talk about it here because it’s something I thought goes well with your point. Tom exploded about how Hollywood was for only the actors to experience really living and for the common people to only sit and watch them live it in the movies. I just liked that idea that society in general allows themselves to use the media to only hear about and see other people really experiencing life while they just let it pass by. But maybe that’s just me.
Awesome job meme, the quotes brought this blog to life. I especially loved this play because once you got to know the characters you weren’t done. Every character in this play had many sides that were yet reveled.
P.S. – Love the pic of Laura.
yes they were all alone in there worlds I only wich you had included Tom’s world and how he breaks out that would have made an even more supported argument but it is very hard to break this one.