Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams - Research Paper Example

Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams is a memory play whose actions are drawn from the memories of Tom Wingfield, who is the raconteur. Tom is also one of the characters in the play (Oliveira 1).Tom is an aspiring poet who works in a shoe warehouse in order to support his family. Tom’s father, Mr. Wingfield fled some years back and he sent home only one postcard(Oliveira 1). Amanda, Tom’s mother, often narrates to her children her youthful life and how many suitors pursued her. Amanda is sad that her daughter Laura, Tom’s sister is shy and cannot attract suitors (Kolin 27). Laura is enrolled in a business school in order to start establishing her own life, but due to shyness, she drops out of school and secretly spends her time wandering in the city (Oliveira 1).Tom, who dislikes his shoe warehouse jobs, finds solace in alcohol, movies and literature. This surprised his mother (Oliveira 1).Amanda and Tom plot to get Laura a suitor at the warehouse, and Tom chooses Jim O’Connor who is his casual friend. A dinner is organized for Laura to meet Jim (Oliveira 1). Just before the dinner, Laura discovers that Jim, whom she had a crash on while in high school, is the suitor. Laura however refuses to eat dinner with the family and Jim and pretends she is ill (Kolin 66). Amanda, who was dressed in her youthful dress, ends up talking with Jim throughout the meal. Later after the dinner though, Laura opens up and confesses to Jim that she had a crash on him in high school(Oliveira 1).Jim reproaches her for being shy and having low self-esteem but also praises her for being unique. Jim mentions that he has to leave and see his fiancée (Kolin 34). It is therefore discovered that he is engaged. This leaves Amanda and Laura sad, and they blame Tom for not being attentive and for being selfish dreamer, because he is the one who brought Jim (Oliveira 2).Not long after Jim had visited, Tom gets fired from his shoe ware house job and leaves his home. As he travels, years later, he finds it very hard to forget and leave behind guilt memories of Laura (Kolin 23). Tennessee Williams, author of the play struggled with homosexuality which made him feel like an outsider in his society. This and other experiences made him feel empathetic to vulnerable people of the society (Oliveira 2).This play presents similarities between the dysfunctional Williams family and the play’s family, the Wingfield family. There are similarities between the fictional Wingfield family and Tennessee Williams’s own family (Kolin 23). The Glass Menagerie brings out the tension between illusion and the harsh reality. The play also examines how responsibility and guilt play out in family relationships(Oliveira 2).The Glass Menagerie is set during the desolate days of the Great Depression, and it is Williams’s way to show family conflict and sibling bonding. Laura and Tom are in disagreement with Amanda, who refuses to accept them for who they are (Oliveira 2).Tom has a special relationship with Laura but in the end abandons her. The difference between illusion and reality brings out an ironic gap in the play. Characters pretend to be happy and fine, but this contrasts with realities in their lives (Oliveira 2).Illusion is used by characters to conceal from the realities of their everyday existence. Many of the characters in the play live in the dream world of their own.Deliberately; they try to turn their backs on the real happenings of life (Kolin 19). Laura together with her glass figurines world represents the most evident use of illusion. Her glass menagerie world becomes more real than the true world outside, which she isolate herself to the point of being compared to a fragile piece of glass which is lost forever in the illusionary world she creates (Oliveira 2).According to Oliveira, Laura’s separation increases to the point that she is like a piece of her own glass collection, too fragile to move from the shelf (Kolin 25). Nevertheless, Laura also lives in the real world too. She listens to music that is sometimes interrupted by domestic chores (Oliveira 2).Sometimes she also has conversations with her mother and brother. Oliveira observes that Laura has given up trying to be a normal human being. When Jim tells her that he is engaged, Laura offers him a symbol of her own life, which is a piece of the broken unicorn (Oliveira 3).Moreover, she also plays victim when she extinguishes the light at the end of the play. According to Delma E.Predley,the act of extinguishing the light is a miserable affirmation of the truth (Oliveira 3).The truth that she has withdrawn herself into the dark shadows of her own self (Kolin 23). Oliveira further observes that what happened to Laura and to the whole of her family is an ordinary consequence of the fact that an individual is seen as a victim of forces beyond control (Oliveira 3). Laura underwent a gradual isolation process from the real world by quitting Runicam’s Business College. According to Jim, she also developed an inferiority complex which was hard to overcome (Oliveira 2).Jim tries to bring back Laura to the real world in scene seven, by reasonably claiming that being shy and her physical flaw is not a true obstacle to leading an ordinary life. This effort however, failed (Oliveira 12).Bigsby also observes that Laura’s limb was not totally disabling but that it was a sign of more serious handicap. Being crippled generates the illusions that fills Laura’s world, and by this, these illusions set up against reality (qtd in Oliveira). In real life, Laura has failed her mother in academic life and she is crippled. Being shy keeps her from accomplishing anything tangible(Oliveira 3).Laura is physiologically paralyzed by feeling humiliated and inferior. The animals in her glass menagerie are fragile and easily breakable. When Amanda and Laura realize that Jim will not marry Laura, their artificial dreams come tumbling down (Oliveira 2). Turning to Amanda Wingfield, she is mentioned by the writer in his production notes as a woman of great but confused vitality who clings anxiously to another time and place. Whenever reality becomes too manifested in her life, she invokes her past world of gracious living and fearless sentiments she once had in Blue mountain (Oliveira 3).She tries to pretend that things are not as bad as they appear. Amanda speaks as if there are no problems (Oliveira 3).This is shown by her jovial tone. She recalls her suitors, rides she used to have in the country, banquets and balls (Oliveira 3).When Amanda’s truthfulness of her memories is questioned however, it can turn out futile, because her version of the past seems both private and public myth, according to Delma E.Presley (Warren 28). According to Delma, Amanda has lost her memory because her recount of the past is not exactly the way she tells her children. Her past had not exactly been the way she depicts it to her children in their conversations (Oliveira 3).The present is her reality while the past is her illusion. Delma further says that one might think Amanda grew up during the days of plantation slavery (Oliveira 3).Amanda moves back and forth from her illusions and reality in a natural way, according to Oliveira. She does this without her being fully lost in her illusionary world (Oliveira 3).For instance; Amanda pretends to be a servant, for Laura to keep herself looking fresh and pretty for suitors. She tried to influence her children’s mood by telling those stories from her past life (Warren 34). In scene six; Amanda undergoes a profound change in her appearance that readers and audience get the feeling that she is impersonating another character. She turns from the middle-aged woman she is, to a nice-looking and fresh Southern girl (Oliveira 3).At this instance, Amanda is making efforts to trap Jim by performing roles Laura is not able to do. Even though Amanda moves back and forth from reality and fantasies, her actions reveal a rather sensible view of things(Oliveira 34).She is truly worried about her children’s future, but the fruits of this are bitter consequences of dishonesty. She is deceived by her husband who leaves her to take care of two children(Oliveira 3).She is also deceived by Laura. Laura pretends to attend school but actually she is not attending school (Oliveira 36).Tom deceives Amanda by failing to pay the electricity bill and later deserts them. Jim also deceives her by lying that he is engaged, thus avoiding marrying Laura (Oliveira 43).No matter how tough Amanda works to remain in her idealized past, the amount of the problems of the real life pulls her back to the present. When it comes to Tom, he also has his own account of the pressure between reality and fantasy. Reality in his life is that he is unable to help his mother to get Laura married. He does not earn much (Warren 66). Just like his father; he has not brought any meaningful change in his mother’s life. He therefore turns to being drunk and sinks into literature as a way of escaping this harsh reality(Oliveira 4).The cinema represents his way of escaping to the illusionary world. He feels happy when he is in his fantasy world, but the reality hits him once he comes to terms with his current situation (Oliveira 4).Despite Tom being the narrator in the play, to appreciate his function, we must distinguish him from his role as a narrator. Just like other characters, Tom needs illusion to make reality more tolerable (Warren 34). However, Tom is not affected so much by the clash between his reality and illusion because he uses irony and distance to protect himself. Tom presents to the audience the truth pleasantly wrapped in illusions because by recalling his own memories, which could be interpreted as illusions, he brings out a bigger vision of life’s meaning to the audience and readers (Oliveira 4).He brings out the truth. Tom can be viewed as a manipulator of truth and illusions (Oliveira 4).He interchanges them in order to make the audience aware of reality beyond the extent of the characters personal dilemmas. At beginning of scene four, Tom entertains Laura with the magic show, in which the magician escapes from the sealed coffin (Williams 77).Tom can be said to view his life, together with his family and the warehouse job, as a kind of coffin that is confined ,suffocating and dark and to which he is confined. The promise of escape is represented by his missing father and the fire escape outside the apartment building (Oliveira 4).In the end of the play, Tom leaves his family, thus freeing himself from this confinement. This also brings out the aspect of reality and illusion(Oliveira 4). Tom describes Jim as a nice and ordinary man. Jim still believes in his upcoming life and studies at night so as to invest in a good and promising television career. This is evident in scene seven when he was talking to Laura about his career plans (Oliveira 4). He tells Laura that he believes in the future of television. By this Jim shows complete separation from the essence of the reality of his social environment then (Williams 56). Seen through Amanda eyes, Jim is a possible husband for her daughter Laura. Jim is seen to have had a heroic past and someone who believes in his future career (Oliveira 4). He does not drink and he attends school to pursue his dreams in radio engineering and public speaking. However, the reality is that he has been working at a simple warehouse for years, where he holds absolutely unimportant job like his friend Tom (Williams 56).Because he continues to fantasize about his beliefs in the American dream, he can be considered as among many people who refuse to face things as they really are. During the time the play was acted, the American economy was collapsing and the world was bracing itself for a world war (Oliveira 4).In addition, Jim is seen as an emissary of reality compared to the Wingfield family. Jim seems to possess better awareness and ability to deal with life (Oliveira 4).Jim, together with the other Americans then, were trapped by illusions and they needed something to make life bearable (Oliveira 4).When Tom describes Jim as the long delayed someone who always brought something they could live for, it shows that Tom and his family had hopes that Laura could be saved by Jim (Oliveira 4). Reality and illusion is also shown when, even though Jim claims that he is engaged to another girl, it is also likely he may have made-up a lie so he escape the trap set up for him to marry Laura (Wulz 65). So, whether he was saying the truth, which then was the reality, or he was lying, so as to deceive the Wingfields, which then was an illusion, no one will ever know. The Wingfields had to rely on Jims words, even though no one at the warehouse, including Tom had ever seen or heard his fiancée (Williams 56). The play dramatizes the gap between appearance and reality. The characters use fake appearance to hide the reality of their lives (Wulz 54). By escaping to the world of illusion, they are attempting to deny the bitterness of their actual lives. The Glass Menagerie therefore identifies the collapse of reality as a result of illusion, as a huge and emergent aspect of the human circumstance in its time (Oliveira 5).Characters’ illusions seem to be the only option that offers them shelter from the harsh realities that they cannot face. Oliveira observes that Toms father is the only person who managed to escape the frustrations and fragmentations. The characters try to cover up their frustrations in several ways (Wulz 54). Laura covers her frustrations by resorting to her glass animals and music. Amanda on the other hand resorts to remembering the good old days and her idealized past (Oliveira 5).Jim tries to hide his frustrations through memories of his high school days and by believing in a brilliant future career (Oliveira 5). In The Glass Menagerie, characters control their illusions as means of escaping the reality. The characters symbolize the sensitive fragile humans who depend on either stranger’s kindness or on “long delayed but always expected Jim” to lead them out of their illusions (Oliveira 8).According to Oliveira, lack of communication reinforces the isolation the characters face. Williams uses this technique to facilitate detachment from reality (Oliveira 7).In addition, Williams depicts what happens in many people lives. The characters’ lives between illusion and reality stand for a broader social dimension (Wulz 33). The play mirrors the fragmentation of the society in the 1930s and illusions and reality are tools Tennessee Williams used widely in his play(Oliveira 7).The play was written when America and the world was experiencing hard time. Williams tries to figure out answers to some question in his play (Wulz 54). For instance, how could people insert themselves in the then turmoil of harsh reality? Should people face reality or retreat into rather comfortable illusionary world? (Oliveira 8).The play shows how the characters manage to cope with the hard tough situations. The evident intermingling of reality and illusions in the play weaves a network of important messages that the audience and the readers faced, and even face today. The play also points out the deeper meaning of life. Works cited Oliveira, Prof. M. A. Luiz Manoel da Silva. "Reality and illusions leading to deeper meanings of life in Tennessee Williams The Glass." Revista Eletrônica do Instituto de Humanidades (2005): 01-09. Kolin, Philip C. Tennessee Williams: A Guide to Research and Performance. New York: Greenwood Publishing Group, 1998. Warren, Rebecca. The Glass Menagerie, Tennessee Williams: Notes. New York: Pearson Longman York Notes, 2003. Williams, Tennessee. The Glass Menagerie. New York: New Directions Publishing, 2011. Wulz, Felicia. Tennessee Williams The Glass Menagerie:. New York: GRIN Verlag, 2009. Read More