The Central Theme of The Glass Megagerie by Tennessee Williams - Assignment Example

The Distraction of Illusions Amanda, Tom and Laura are the principle characters in Tennessee Williams’play “The Glass Menagerie,” comprising a small family deserted and left destitute by a wandering yet charming father. Amanda is the mother, raised in the gentility of the Old South, who finds it difficult to accept her current conditions, both in terms of age and social position. Although Tom is the younger of the two children, he bears most of the responsibility for the family as the play opens with him working at a job he detests while dreaming of traveling and being a writer. His frustration is expressed through his drinking and going to the movies in the evenings and reading and writing poetry on the job. A great deal of the play centers on Laura, though. She is extremely shy, partly because of her crippling disease (pleurosis) which forces her to wear a brace on her leg and walk with a limp, and spends much of her time dreaming about her glass menagerie. Because of Laura’s fragility, Amanda attempts to force Tom to find a suitable husband for his sister regardless of any limitations Tom might have in trying to accomplish this. Despite his best efforts, though, the man Tom brings home is already engaged, leaving Laura with a broken heart at the end of the play, driving Tom to run away and leaving the mother a figure of “dignity and tragic beauty” (VII, 236). One of the concepts that emerges from this story is the idea that the memories of our youth shape our illusions of the present which in turn serve to protect us from the realities of today. That the play is a memory play is explicitly stated in Tom’s first words, also the first words of the play: “The play is a memory” (I, 145). To bring forward that effect, Williams continues to allow Tom to separate himself out from the action from time to time to narrate and point to specific ideas or events, catch the audience up on what has happened in the interim between two scenes or make other comments. In describing how the concept of memory is achieved, Richard Vowles (1958) describes its dreamlike qualities, “One scene dissolves into another. There is, indeed, almost a submarine quality about the play, the kind of poetic slow motion that becomes ballet and a breathless repression of feeling that belongs to everyone but Amanda” (54). By keeping the concept that almost the entire play is a memory belonging to Tom in clear focus through this otherworldly light, Williams is able to illustrate how memory has served to shape Tom’s life, never permitting him the escape he sought through the merchant marine. Despite his attempts to escape his past, Tom tells the audience at the end of the play that he followed “in my father’s footsteps, attempting to find in motion what was lost in space. I traveled around a great deal … I would have stopped, but I was pursued by something” (VII, 237). That something turns out to be the images, smells, sounds and other reminders of the sister he left behind, proving through the very act of telling the play that memories cannot be escaped regardless of how hard or fast you run. While Tom is now a member of the merchant marine and an accomplished traveler, this outward show of personal dream fulfillment is revealed as little more than an illusion of its own. In truth, Tom’s heart remains trapped within the small apartment he shared with his mother and sister. In Tom’s case, rather than helping him hide from reality, his memories serve to force reality upon him at odd moments throughout every day. His memories constrain the illusions he is able to conceive, forcing him to ‘come clean’ and tell what has happened in his life. At the same time, this final production of “truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion” (I, 144) is itself an illusion for Tom, who feels in its telling he will escape the memories that have been haunting him, “Blow out your candles, Laura – and so, goodbye” (VII, 237). However, in the preservation of the story in printed word, the reality is that Tom will never escape these memories, either because he was never going to forget or because the play would always be there to remind him. Laura lives in perhaps the most obvious world of illusion as she drifts through life seemingly in a cloud of disconnection. She associates the classical music of her records with a happier time in her life while she associates her own school days with the ‘thunder’ of her leg brace as she struggled into her music room late day after day. She “takes refuge in her collection of glass animals” (Popkin, 1960: 58) and seems completely trapped “in the jailhouse of her thwarted present – the past dominates as the present or future can never do. The past not only casts its shadow upon the present and the future, but actually determines the course that each of these shall take” (Bluefarb, 1963: 513). Laura’s past has a huge significance to her present state of apathy, she dropped out of high school because she “made bad grades on my final examinations” (VII, 219) just as she couldn’t go back to business school because “I couldn’t go back there. I – threw up – on the floor!” (II, 155). Without any means of meeting new people, she is stuck in a present that remains forever dreamlike, occupying her time with little more than domestic activities, listening to her radio and playing with her glass figures. Like Tom, Laura’s past refuses to let go of her, this time creating a cloak of illusion that time is not passing, that her hopes and dreams of long ago will still be attainable if she can ever move beyond her shyness. Her dreams are echoed in her cherished yearbook in which she still knows how to find the picture of the one boy she liked in high school, Jim O’Connor, because he gave her a pet name that didn’t sound like a slur of some sort. “When I had that attack of pleurosis – he asked me what was the matter when I cam back. I said pleurosis – he thought that I said Blue Roses! So that’s what he always called me after that” (II, 157). She imagines that if she could have gained the attention of Jim O’Connor in high school, her life would be much different. When she has the chance to test this theory, when Jim O’Connor comes walking through her door as the guest of her brother Tom, she learns that yes, her life probably would have been different, but the difference didn’t necessarily depend upon Jim. “You think of yourself as having the only problems, as being the only one who is disappointed. But just look around you and you will see lots of people as disappointed as you are” (VII, 216). Although Laura allows her memories of the past to paint a picture of the present that is more acceptable than reality, her encounter with reality in the form of the living and breathing Jim O’Connor remove the blinds for a moment and allow her to realize that her trap is largely of her own imagination. This is shown in the characterization of the glass unicorn when it breaks its horn, becoming just like all the other horses. “This statement seems to be a hint that Laura is overcoming her shyness and becoming like other girls” (Popkin, 1960: 58). Perhaps the character who lives most through the illusions created by her memory is Amanda, the mother. “Amanda lives in the past and imposes unrealistic rules of conduct upon her children” (Popkin, 1960: 46). Her first words in the play indicate her inability to leave her past in the past as she first instructs Tom in the proper forms of eating and then regales her children with the story of her immense popularity as a Southern belle in the Old South. Her language is also reminiscent of a time long gone, consistently referring to male visitors for Laura as ‘gentlemen callers’. Her clothing is of a genteel nature as she appears in front of her daughter just before Jim’s visit in the dress she was wearing when she met Laura’s father, remembering every instance in which she appeared in it: “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! … I wore it on Sundays for my gentlemen callers!” (VI, 193). Although she takes on odd jobs to try to earn enough money to pay for the little extras around the house, she does not have the skills to take on a regular out-of-the-home job nor, as a proper Southern belle, would she consider it. Her refusal to exist in the present is also demonstrated in her dedication and devotion to the DAR. Her expectations for her children also reflect an inability to exist in the present rather than the past. Touting the fine points of her daughter to Jim, she demonstrates the epitome of Southern values and Southern expectations: “It’s rare for a girl as sweet an’ pretty as Laura to be domestic! But Laura is, thank heavens, not only pretty but also very domestic. I’m not at all. I never was a bit. I never could make a thing but angel-food cake. Well, in the South we had so many servants … I wasn’t prepared for what the future brought me” (VI, 204). Her memories of herself at her daughter’s age have her expecting Laura’s life to begin echoing her own at any minute, expecting plenty of gentlemen callers to appear in the evenings despite Laura’s protestations to the contrary or the obvious differences between mother and daughter’s personalities. Her past has painted the strongest illusion of the three to cover over the realities of the present. Not even the brace on her daughter’s leg or the frank comments of her son can wake her up to the facts. “The memories of the past are beautiful and momentarily comforting, but they have to be beautiful if they are to compensate for the indignities of the present” (Popkin, 1960: 54). However, the shock of Jim’s engagement announcement is seen to have perhaps shaken her out of her imaginary world momentarily at least as expressed in the last image the audience is given of her: “Now that we cannot hear the mother’s speech, her silliness is gone and she has dignity and tragic beauty … Amanda’s gestures are slow and graceful, almost dancelike, as she comforts her daughter” (VII, 236). Thus, all three characters experience at least a temporary lucidity from the illusory worlds they live in as a result of the power of their memories. For Tom, the play itself becomes the release of his memory that allows him to find a sense of temporary closure on his past. For Laura, stuck in a steady haze in the present, the realization of her thwarted hopes and dreams from the past allows her to consider new ideas brought in by the very hero she envisioned, although not in the way she had imagined. For Amanda, the wake-up call doesn’t come until the end of the play, when she finally acknowledges the truths of the present, “Don’t think about us, a mother deserted, an unmarried sister who’s crippled and has no job!” (VII, 236). While the duration of this reality check may not be measured in the play or in real life, the suddenness of it, for all the characters occurring in the final scene of the play, serves as a wake-up call for the audience as well, to start examining the various areas in which their nostalgic dreams of the past are clouding their perception of the present or the future and preventing them from truly and effectively addressing the issues of the day. Works Cited Bluefarb, Sam. “The Glass Menagerie: Three Visions of Time.” College English. Vol. 24, N. 7, (April 1963), pp. 513-518. Popkin, Henry. “The Plays of Tennessee Williams.” The Tulane Drama Review. Vol. 4, N. 3, (March 1960), pp. 45-64. Vowles, Richard B. “Tennessee Williams: The World of His Imagery.” The Tulane Drama Review. Vol. 3, N. 2, (December 1958), pp. 51-56. Williams, Tennessee. “The Glass Menagerie.” The Theatre of Tennessee Williams. Vol. 1. New York: New Directions Books: 1971. Read More