Glass Menagerie Essay Research Paper The Glass

Glass Menagerie Essay, Research Paper

The Glass Menagerie

A Tennessee William’s play based on the depression decades of the thirties. Set in a small cramped apartment of St. Louis. A simple four characters whose lives seem to consist in avoiding reality more than facing it. Where each characters escape clearly defined by the aura of the ‘memory play.’ This is so because every one of them changed their difficult situations into shadows of truth. None of the characters is capable of living entirely in the present. All retreat into their separate worlds to escape the brutality of life.

I believe the playwright has done remarkable use of symbols, tensions, and irony. He uses all of these components to express to what I think is the main theme of the play, of the hopeful desire followed by unavoidable disappointments. All of the characters have dreams, which are destroyed by the harsh realities of the world. As the narrator admits in his opening of the play, “since I have a poet’s weakness for symbols,” symbols merely used to express a particular theme, idea or character. One which is I think is the major symbol is the fire escape, which has a separate function for each characters. This fire escape provides a means of escape for Tom from his cramped apartment and nagging mother. Therefore the fire escape for him represents a path to the outside world where dreams are. For the gentleman caller Jim the fire escape provides the means through which Jim can enter the Wingfield’s apartment an entrance to their lives. For Amanda, Tom’s mom, the fire escape allows Jim to come into the apartment and prevent Laura from becoming a spinster. For Laura, Tom’s sister is that it is her door to the inside world in where she can hide. It is ironic that when Laura does leave the security of her apartment she falls. This symbolizes Laura’s inability to function properly in the outside world.

Another major symbol as the title is the glass menagerie, which represents Laura’s hypersensitive nature and fragility. Laura is just as easily broken as a glass unicorn and just as unique. When Jim accidentally bumps into the unicorn and breaks it, the unicorn is no longer unique. As well like when Jim kisses Laura and then shatters her hopes by telling her that he’s engaged. She becomes broken hearted and also part of that innocent which made Laura so unique is now lost. Both Laura and her glass menagerie breaks when they are exposed to the outside world represented by Jim. When Laura gives Jim her broken unicorn as a souvenir, I think it symbolizes her broken heart that Jim will take with him when he leaves and I think it also provided her with a new confident. Now the unicorn is no longer unique like her but rather as common as a horse like him. Therefore she gives the unicorn to Jim. Just as she gives Jim a little bit of herself to take with him and leaving him behind a little bit of himself with her shattered hopes.

The Glass Menagerie also uses rainbow which I think also symbolize hope and each mention of rainbows in the play it is associated with a hopeful situation. Like when Tom talks about his rainbow colored scarf that he got at the magic show. He talks about how it changed a bowl of goldfish into flying canaries and just like the canaries Tom hopes to fly away too, to escape from his imprisonment of himself and his family. The chandeliers that which create rainbow reflections at the dance hall, foreshadow the dance between Jim and Laura, which also gives hope within her. At the end when Tom looks at pieces of colored glass like bits of a shattered rainbow he remembers his sister and hopes that he can blow ‘her’ candles out. Basically though the rainbows seemed to be positive signs but it all end in disappointment. As shown mostly through the narrator Tom, “maintains distance between himself and the pain of the situation through irony,” and also explains, “For the artist, irony is a device that protects him from the pain of his experience so that he may use it objectively in his art.”

The play itself focuses on the apartment life that Amanda, Laura, and Tom Wingfield share in the city and it is among many dark alleys with fire escapes. Tom and Laura do not like the dark atmosphere of their living conditions even though their mother tries to make it as pleasant as possible. An apartment that had only two small windows in the front and in the rear rooms and a fire escape blocked the smoky light from a back alley. A home that is a lower middle class neighborhood, which seemed disgusted. Amanda a typical Southern belle who fantasizes about her seventeen gentlemen callers back in Blue Mountain. In reality she depends on her son’s income to support Laura and herself and she does regularly attend D.A.R. meetings. Which is an important outlet for her activities. Amanda believes that Laura needs to have some gentlemen callers visiting their apartment because she does not want Laura to be an old unmarried spinster, which is like her. This comes from her selfish concern of Laura but also from her being unattached.

Tom is trying to support his mother, sister and himself with his work at a shoe factory, which he does not want to have a career to where he has to do it all his life. Instead he wants to be a writer and spends most of his time working on poetry. Amanda constantly criticizes Tom’s wishes, and she pressures him to bring home a gentlemen caller from his