The Role of Mother in the Lives of her Children - Essay Example

?Amanda and Helen: Family Dynamics as Examined through the Mother Figure in The Glass Menagerie and A Taste of Honey Introduction The role of the mother in both The Glass Menagerie (1944) and A Taste of Honey (1958) is an integral part of the development of the conflict. A Taste of Honey represents a realistic type of playwriting which is done with a multitude of social themes which made it into the forefront of a type of play referred to as “kitchen sink” in which all kinds of themes are put together in one work (Nava 2007). The Glass Menagerie also represents a multitude of themes, although it predates the ‘kitchen sink’ concept and does not share the same number of social themes that are represented in A Taste of Honey. In The Glass Menagerie, the mother, Amanda, is developed through the memory of Tom and represents his point of view on her character. He saw his mother as a smothering influence, a woman who allowed self-deceit to rule the decisions that she made about her children. In A Taste of Honey, Helen is a woman who neglects her daughter, her actions ruled by her own desires over the welfare of her child. Both women represent a disconnection from both the world and from their children. Amanda remembers her life in her youth and is disconnected to the realities of the life that she and her children are living, while Helen also seeks her youth but does so at the expense of her child. Both mothers end up losing their children through their inability to connect to their role as mother in regard to nurturing the potential of their children rather than pampering the memories of their own youth. In creating mothers that were disconnected from their children, the dynamic of crossing into independence, for better or worse, and adulthood was explored within each play. The Glass Menagerie The story of The Glass Menagerie (1944), written by Tennessee Williams, is a story that supports a complexity of themes that are supported by the ideas of family. Family is the core of the play, the work discussing the dynamics that both plague and connect individuals. The play has only four characters. Tom is the protagonist with his memory of the events defining the perspective from which they are related. Therefore, it must be remembered that each character is defined by his memory of them, rather than by their own motivations. His mother is characterized in the way in which he perceived her, just as his sister is defined by his memory. Therefore, his mother’s abrasiveness might be relevant to his experience of her rather than encompassing the whole truth of her existence. Just as he remembers her sister as singularly focused on the glass animals, this may have been her experience with his sister, not understanding other aspects of her life. The story revolves around an event where he brings home a man to visit his sister, Laura. The hope of his mother, Amanda, is that the man will be attracted to Laura, thus giving her a future. Laura has a bad foot, which can be seen as a symbol of her vulnerability. The way in which her character is presented suggests a mental vulnerability as well. As the play progresses, it is revealed that Jim, the man Tom has brought home, is actually engaged to another woman and while he is kind to Laura, he is not in a position to engage in a relationship. The argument between Amanda and Tom over the event seems to be the last catalyst to Tom leaving his sister and his mother to their own devices. This is a haunting memory, one that reflects regret, relief, and is laced with a sense of both hope and hopelessness (Williams 1999). A Taste of Honey A Taste of Honey (1958) was written by an eighteen year old girl who was expressing a very sophisticated collection of themes within her work. Shelagh Delaney writes a story of that also reflects the dynamics of family and the central theme of the play revolves around the differences between reality and the dream of reality. Themes of race, gender, sexual orientation, familial devotion, and class are all explored within the framework of the play. The seventeen year old daughter, Jo, engages in a relationship with a black man who is a cook on a ship. When her mother, Helen, leaves her in their home alone for a period of time to pursue her own opportunity of a relationship, Jo begins to see Jimmy. Nava (2007) discusses the play in terms of the representation of an interracial relationship. Delaney creates a stereotypical representation of the sexualizing the black male, citing this interchange as the foundation of the claim. Jo says to Jimmy “Sometimes you look three thousand years old. Did your ancestors come from Africa?” To which he replies “No. Cardiff. Disappointed?”. She then states “There’s still a bit of jungle in you somewhere” (100). This flirtation sets up the idea of Jimmy as the representation of forbidden desires, the exotic translating to erotic appeal as Jo and Jimmy begin to engage in a relationship that will leave her pregnant. Jimmy leaves for the sea, and Jo is left to deal with the consequences of giving into those desires. Helen marries her boyfriend, Peter, leaving Jo to handle her life on her own. In Act II she is working in a shoe shop and in a bar in order to make ends meet, all the while pregnant and alone. She meets Geoff, a gay man who moves in with her because he has lost his own living situation and in order to help Jo. They develop a very close relationship, but her mother soon interferes. Geoff leaves, although her mother does not tell her the truth and Jo, within the play, never knows that Geoff has left. The end of the play happens when Jo begins to experience labour, her mother having left to go to a bar because of the news that her grandchild would be have black, and with Jo not realizing that Geoff will not be back (Delaney 1959). Bad Mothers Amanda Being a mother is a complicated event. Being put into the place of being a mother is easy, but interacting with children, especially as the children have grown up and are confronting adulthood, can be a very complex dynamic of interactions. As seen in the Williams play, the point of view of a son might be to see his mother as being a witch, her actions being in conflict with his best interest. Bloom (2007) suggests that Tom sees Amanda in two dynamic relationships: in tension with Tom and obsessive about finding Laura a man. “The essential actions of the characters are to be repeated throughout the play in a kind of gestural merry-go-round” (29). The dynamic between mother and child as the child reaches adulthood is to live within the merry-go-round, the adult child finally getting off when he or she has had enough. The first act shows the two core dynamic relationships as Amanda nags at Tom and when Laura offers to go to the kitchen, she is told to stay seated and remain pretty for ’gentlemen callers’ (Williams 1999). In watching the interactions, however, it is good to remember that this is the memory of Tom, who may be generalizing about the experience within his home. He is clear about his frustrations with his mother, her smothering ways driving him from his seat at the table. As well, Tom may only remember his mother’s interactions with his sister from the perspective of an older brother, her interactions with the family resulting in her being pampered in a way that is not in line with the truths of her life. Amanda is characterized as being blind to the realities of the lives of her children. Deception is the key word to understanding Amanda. This theme is explored when Amanda discovers that Laura has not been attending business school classes and had deceived her mother about quitting the school. Laura’s fragility is emphasized by having been sick the first week of classes, thus never returning. It is furthered as she reveals that she has been going to the zoo, to the museum, and to a glass greenhouse instead of going to school. Amanda then believes that the only recourse is to find her daughter a husband so she can be safe. However, the way in which Amanda has been deceived is nothing when compared to the way in which Amanda deceives herself. She refuses to see the reality of Laura’s situation, trying endlessly to put Laura’s future into the round hole that she has created, despite Laura’s life more resembling the square peg. Amanda emphasizes her own self-deceit as she discusses the concept of charm. She suggests that it is through charm that unpleasant aspects of life can be side-stepped and handled. However, she also states that Tom and Laura’s father had charm, thus implying her own susceptibility to deceit (Bloom 2007). This self-deceit is what creates for Tom the central problem with his mother. Her expectations are constantly outside the realm of reality, thus she is always picking apart the details searching for something that resembles her hopes and dreams. She criticizes Tom, his reality emphasizing her own disappointments in life. She sees him through his gender, her own experience of men having been the disappointment of having been left to be a single mother. Tom is the representation of reality, an enemy to Amanda as life has not been the dream she had hoped. However, Laura represents the dream world, Amanda’s hopes for a happy and fulfilling marriage now given down to Laura. Amanda is beyond the dream, but her daughter still represents the hope of that dream. Helen While Amanda means well and tries to go towards bettering the lives of her children, Helen abandons her daughter in the hope of once again attaining that dream of life with a man who loves her. Helen is selfish and narcissistic. Helen has no interest in the life of her daughter, showing glimpses of care, but not backing up that care with real action. She is far more interested in her own life than in the security of her daughter’s. While Jo is seventeen when her mother abandons her for Peter, it indicates that Jo has been abandoned and neglected for most of her life. Her mother has left her to raise herself, creating a life in which she must find ways in which to define it on her own. While smothering has forced Tom to define his life by leaving and Laura to leave her world through her attention to her glass menagerie, Jo has reality stuffed down her throat, her boyfriend leaving her pregnant and her mother imposing more and more harsh realities upon her life. Hochman (1984) suggests that Delaney writes a play that does not have a moralistic overtone, making no judgments on the lives of the characters. The realism that is portrayed is honest, suggesting that people just do what they can to survive under a life that is never framed in just the way one expects. Hochman (1984) describes Jo as having “follow(ed) the promiscuous behaviour of her mother, Helen, while retaining the innocence of a sensitive child” (25). Jo has allowed life to come at her, her situations having no anchor from which she was able to formulate the idea of a good or bad decision, let alone the intent to make a decision based upon sound principles. Jo has had to look to Helen to direct her behaviour, although Jo has behaved in such a way as to reflect the still honest nature of her emotional context. Helen, on the other hand, is using everyone in her path to get to a place she desires. She does not intend harm but she has no problem inflicting it when something or someone is in her path on her way to get what she wants. She will pick her own desires and needs over those of everyone else in her sphere. When she comes to visit Jo, offering her money and a place to life with herself and with Peter, she turns and abandons Jo when he Peter takes back the money and objects to the idea of Jo living with them (Delaney 1959). A ’good’ mother would not have turned her back on her child, while a ’bad’ mother takes only her own needs into consideration. Both Amanda and Helen have displayed the affect of their own needs as put above those of their children. Amanda did so by not recognizing her children for who they were and Helen by not caring to look at her child and consider her welfare. Conclusion While both Helen and Amanda represent bad mothers in the plays they are in, they are poor examples of motherhood for two very different reasons. Amanda is smothering, her own desires imposed upon her children and her expectations about life unrealistic. Helen is a realist at the expense of her daughter and neglects her for the purposes of her own happiness. While at opposite ends of the spectrum, smothering and neglect can result in the same disconnect with the children who must navigate these types of characteristics of parenting. Smothering can be a form of neglect as the child who is smothered is not allowed to express their own sense of identity. According to Engel (2007) “A smothering parent assumes that her child’s mistakes will trap him for life, and so she will try to manage her child’s life in such a way that the child will accept his parents’ attitudes about the world” (46). In narrowing the focus into just the point of view of the parent, the child loses all the possibilities outside of that view. The plays The Glass Menagerie (1944) and A Taste of Honey (1958) both represent the meaning of family and the realities of the pain that can accompany family life. The role of mother in the lives of her children is explored in both plays although they represent a diverse section of mother types. Amanda is a smothering mother who tries to impose both her world view and her desires upon her children without recognizing their dreams and aspirations. Helen has no connection to her daughter and has neglected her until Jo has been forced to enter adulthood on her own terms, defined by indiscretions that have imposed a life upon her. The family dynamic has a great influence on the way in which a child will develop his or her world view. Williams created a play in which the children needed to break free from the smothering of their mother, the character not connected to the realities of their needs. Delaney created a woman who was so involved in her own life that she could not see the needs of her child and physically left her to fend for herself. Both authors connected the desires of the mothers to fantasy with the reality of life being founded within the paths that the children were to face. References Bloom, Harold. 2007. Tennessee Williams' The glass menagerie. New York, N.Y.: Chelsea House. Delaney, Shelagh. 1959. A taste of honey; a play. New York: Grove Press. Engel, Beverly. 2007. Healing your emotional self: a powerful program to help you raise your self-esteem, quiet your inner critic, and overcome your shame. Abington: Wiley. Hochman, Stanley. 1984. McGraw-Hill encyclopedia of world drama: an international reference work in 5 vol. 1. A - C. - 1984. New York: McGraw-Hill. Nava, Mica. 2007. Visceral cosmopolitanism: gender, culture and the normalisation of difference. Oxford: Berg. Williams, Tennessee. 1999. The glass menagerie. New York: New Directions. Read More