The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams: Escapism and Character Analysis - Research Paper Example

The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams: Escapism and Character Analysis The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams is a beautiful and lyrical play in which the concepts of delusion, fantasy, and family dynamic come together to form the magic of a memory in which the perceptions of a man are played out through the interactions and sorrows of his family life. The three main characters, Tom, Amanda (his mother) and Laura (his sister) are trapped in a world in which they imagine a future that is not manifesting for them. Although the play takes place in a memory, the perceived remembrance of Tom, the escapism that all three characters use in order to navigate their life during the time of his memories provide a type of context for ways in which to identify how Tom saw his mother and sister, and perhaps how they realistically existed. Escapism is defined by the Oxford Dictionary as “an activity, a form of entertainment that helps you avoid or forget unpleasant or boring things” (Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary). In this case, the characters indulge in escapist thoughts in order to avoid the truths about their lives. Through an examination of the ways in which the escapist natures of Tom, Laura and Amanda present within the play, an understanding of the family dynamic emerges that provides the audience with a sense of the balance between delusion and hope. Of the three characters, it is Amanda who exists most definitively in the space of escapism. She has defined her world through memories of the past that defined who she was in a parallel that defines who she wants to be through the success of her daughter. She states “All of my gentleman callers were sons of planters and so of course I assumed that I would be married to one and raise my family on a large piece of land with plenty of servants. But man proposes--and woman accepts the proposal" (Williams 64,Scene 6). Amanda has positioned herself in the center of the future of her daughter, desiring for her want she could not attain for herself. She is presented as obnoxious about her hopes for Laura, deluding herself into believing that Laura can become the type of wife and mother that Amanda had hoped to be herself, had tragedy not taken that from her within her own life. She says “Girls that aren't cut out for business careers usually wind up married to some nice man. [Gets up with a spark of revival] Sister, that's what you'll do!” (Williams 17, Scene 2). Her hopes are somewhat stale, the way in which she presents them leaving Tom with a bitter taste, his only real memory of her being that she existed in her delusions, although one must always remember that in the shape of memory, subtleties of character can be stripped away, leaving only what was most relevant and dear. Amanda presents as a woman who is lost in a hope for the future that is defined exclusively by an outline that she has designed for her daughter. She escapes into this future in order to create the dream space in which her hopes are mirrored in the success that Laura achieves. This success is through marriage, her dream to see her daughter married to a certain type of man who has brought to the family a settled and secure position. This dream is rooted in the imaginings of Amanda’s past from a Southern upbringing. Her charms are thick and sometimes brutal as they lace through the play creating a contrast of humiliation and pain for Tom who sees her delusions for their dishonesty and fragility. What she remembers of life is the future she seeks, but in the fusion of memory and futurism, she is bound in hopes that can never be fulfilled. Amanda suffers from a space in which she holds onto the past and expects the future to be a reflection of that past. Myers calls this a future as fetish in which the past is locked into the imaginings of the future in such a way that it becomes a point of ridicule. She uses the example of the ideas of the 1950s in regard to nuclear fallout, people surrounded by ping pong tables, barbecue equipment, and all the trappings of bourgeois suburban life held encapsulated in a fallout shelter in a future that has been doomed. The idea is that the moment of time is burdened by the conflict of an expected future, the past and future colliding in an absurdity (Myers 72). This is the life that Amanda lives in, her past and believed future converging on her present as she uses both to escape the boundaries of a life that is unsatisfactory to her. Laura’s escapism is more blatant as she fascinates herself with the magic that she sees within her collection of glass animals. She finds a fascination in looking at the representations for which she can spend her time letting her mind drift over the beautiful pieces as if she were within their world. Skloot says of Williams’ writing that “the work he urges us to make our objective, is the creation of humane treatment out of the ashes of experience” (199). Laura lives a life that has a burden in it, her foot crippled, providing an exterior element to the emotional context of her fragile experience. Laura states her condition specifically when she says “I'm - crippled!” (Williams 17, Scene 2). Laura can be seen in elements of fragility which starts at the core of her emotional existence, extending to the exterior element of her foot, which then extends to the fragility of her glass collection. To appease his mother, Tom brings home a friend from work, a man that Amanda believes can be a potential suitor for Laura. Laura recognizes Tom as a boy she had a crush on in school, and as they dance a unicorn is knocked off of the shelf, breaking its horn. In this instance, Laura’s exterior collection and fragmented emotional center are brought into focus, her nature revealed. The unicorn as it breaks, at first seems to symbolize a broken spell, her life freed from the trap in which she has been held for most of her life. In a few seconds, as Jim kisses her, she is at first freed, then made mundane as he reveals that he is engaged, thus not the freedom of normalcy in which she thought she had been embraced. Jim is thoughtless, and in his thoughtless actions he experiences his moment of escapism, slipping away, for a moment, from his commitment to another woman. As he leaves he is, “oblivious to the damage he has left behind, the world of broken unicorns and Laura’s shattered dream of companionship” (Williams xv). Laura is a complex character, her world overlapping that of her mothers, her mother intruding into her dreams in such a way that little of Laura is truly evident. Bluefarb states that “Amanda’s obsession, of course translated into the practical every day world, is to impose her past on daughter Laura’s future” (514). Amanda’s bubble in which she constructs her world is imposed on Laura’s, bursting her delusions as the ’dream’ of Jim as a suitor damages Laura’s contained space of contentment. What she believes in for her life is simple, her limitations built upon the fragility of her character, more so than the visible burden of her foot. She believes that in getting lost in her menagerie, she is leaving the disappointments that have framed her life and tinge the expectations of her mother to a place in which she is within the magic of her fascination. Within the Williams play, there are universes within universes as the characters develop their own state of existence that is independent of the other. For Laura, she has a fictionalized, unframed world in which she seeks to find escape from her truths. Bosworth states of literature “That different views of reality exist at all, of course, reveals in itself something basic about the human condition and about an art that tries to re-create that condition” (5). Laura exemplifies this state and provides worlds of her own in which to find comfort from the despair of her lonely life. It is through fragmentation that Williams best explores his characters, their contrasts of reality against beautiful dreams of the past that influence their hopes for the future. The creatures in his plays, especially the women, are hopelessly caught in fragmentation, shards of sparkling memories that infuse their lives with expectations that arre held together with the glue of belief. Skloot quotes Esther Jackson who wrote that “For Williams, reality itself lies shattered. In the fragmentary world of his theater, new images are pieced together from partialities: they are composed of splinters of broken truths” (199). While Laura and Amanda live in their own worlds, escaping from their reality and coping with their lives through escaping into their dreams and hopes, it is Tom who lives in a landscape of broken truths. Tom is remembering his mother and his sister, his perception of them quite possibility fragmented by what he believes of them rather than a view of their true characters. According to Shaland, “From the very start he appeared to be on the way out” (121). Tom dreams of a future that he will never fully attain as he is trapped. Shaland further states “at the end of the play, it was clear that there was no escape - for the character of the drama or the narrator or the playwright (121). Tom’s memory is fractured with guilt and pity as he places them at the center of a drama in which he eventually reacts to aspects of them that push him to escape from their worlds, but through tormented memory never really does. Tom says “Listen! You think I'm crazy about the warehouse? [He bends fiercely toward her slight figure.] You think I'm in love with the Continental Shoemakers?” (Williams 23, Scene 3) …“But I get up. I go! For sixty-five dollars a month I give up all that I dream of doing and being ever!” (Williams 23, Scene 3). In his memory he feels the powerful oppression of his stalled career, thus shadowing the whole memory with his pain. Tom literally escapes as he moves on from his mother and sister, particularly pained that he left Laura and regret tinges the memories that he holds of her. Despite the fact that he abandoned them, he does seem to feel regret for the state in which they lived, their despair a deep hole that perpetually dragged him under. The nature of his guilt is cold, however, as he did leave his mother and sister whose dependence on him was specific. He fails them, despite the world that he creates for himself, and he realizes it. His escape is the one that frames the escapism of the others, his flight from his world into one in which he could create his own world the deepest escape of all. Tom leaves the ‘real world’ of his family behind to seek what adventure he can through. He even escapes some of his guilt by creating his memory of them in such a way as to cast blame on them for his departure. Within his memory, it is as if he asks the audience ’Would you have stayed?’. It is his escape that does the real harm to the family. The play is about escape. Even Jim escapes for a moment in his shared kiss with Laura, his own commitment to anther set aside for a moment as he indulges in the romance of a moment. The damage of escape is exampled in his actions, the culmination of all the more subtle moments brought to a head in this moment as he uses Laura, her emotions strung along until her reveals that his hope filled actions are in vain. He is promised to another and Laura has no hope of living the dream he has presented. The harm that comes from dallying with the fragility of emotions is shattered across the stage as he breaks the little, tiny glimmer of hope that Laura has held close. Williams creates worlds in which the fragility of women is broken on the callous and unfeeling hearts of men. His women are undone, their delicate nature raw ad vulnerable to the worlds around them. Laura and Amanda are merely fragments of the memory of Tom, his point of view and memories filled with the accusations of misery that he lays upon them. If there is a truth within the story, the perceptions of Tom are mere fragments of the memory that he is living out for the audience. Laura and Amanda reflect the escape that he made, his desires to escape their life transferred to them and reflected through his belief on how the story unfolded. Works Cited Bluefarb, Sam. The Glass Menagerie: Three Visions of Time. College English. 24.7 (April 1963): 513-518. Print. Bosworth, David. The Literature of Awe. The Antioch Review. 37.1 (Winter 1979): 4-26. Print. Myers, Julian. The Future as Fetish. The Independent Group. 94 (Autumn 2000): 62-88. Print. Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary. Escapism. Oxford University Press. 2011. Web. 7 June 2011. Shaland, Irene. Review [Untitled]. Theater Journal. 42.1 (March 1990): 121-123. Print. Skloot, Robert. The Artist's Quest in Tennessee Williams, 1935-1954. Educational Theatre Journal. 24.2 (May 1973): 199-206. Print. Williams, Tennessee. The Glass Menagerie. New York: New Directions, 1999. Print. Read More