The Glass Menagerie - Research Paper Example

She is drawn carefully as an idol of beauty, delicacy and purity as her glass toys. Her acute self –coconsciousness and as a result great shyness prevents her from coming out of her comfort zone. One of her legs is crippled and this has led to her feeling of inferiority and withdrawal from the outside world. Levy says“She avoids the outside world, and as a result …has no life outside preoccupation with her own vulnerability “But more than this her emotional fragility can said as her main flaw.

Amanda tells “She notices things and I think she broods about them. A Few days ago I came in and she was crying “. According to Smith Laura can be considered as a tragic fellow and her fragility is her flaw. The extreme nervousness of Laura is the reason for her seclusion and thus by the drop from the school and college. When Jim was talking to her she herself somehow came out of her shyness. She is confined herself in the security of her house and rarely come out of that. According to Cardullo, Laura is a romantic symbol familiar to the landscape of nineteenth-century American society “the fragile almost unearthly ego brutalized by life in the industrialized depersonalized cities of the Western world “ Just as Laura find place among her glass menagerie, all the characters especially Amanda and Tom have their own dwelling places.

The main misfortune of the characters is only due to their remaining in the comfort zone. This drawback in the character leads to a kind of seclusion and loneliness. Amanda never comes out of her reminiscence of the past. She relates all the present events with that of the past ones occurred in her own life. The main flaw of the character Amanda is her inability to understand her son Tom. She tries to guide him but every word he considers as interference in his personal freedom. Tom wants to be adventurous, but she seems to be ignorant of it.

The continual friction between Tom and his mother shows lack of understanding. Almost every encounter leads to quarrel. She frightens Tom by imposing on him the heavy responsibility of family support. Her vehement condemnation of Tom as a dreamer and manufacturer of illusions gets on his nerves and drives him away from home. “Amanda is almost alienated from her children and she also suffers from loneliness. When she is disturbed she finds happiness by balancing herself between her past and present.

Her cloths her speech and her ideals for her children make her appear to be a middle aged southern belly, garrulous and sill by narrow and spinsterish in her attitude towards life. At times she appears foolish and ignorant and her approach to life seems unrealistic “. But Dr. Pearl Mchaney in a lecture points out that Amanda is trying to love her children. “There are so many things in my heart that I cannot describe you! I’ve never told you but I-loved your father…” Another character who shares the equal responsibility of the tragic ending of the family is Tom Winfield.

Tom is condemned by most people as an irresponsible runaway. Tom can be said as a person ‘meditating between in present and past’. Neither his job at the warehouse nor his life and home satisfies hunger for adventure . He demands