The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams - Literature review Example

The Glass Menagerie: a synopsis and its contribution to psychoanalytical and recuperative development in individuals. The Glass Menagerie (Williams, 1945), a play by the American, Tennessee Williams (hereafter referred to as “Williams”), is set in St. Louis in the State of Missouri in the late 1930’s and concerns the relationships of the Wingfield family. It is Williams most autobiographical work – the setting and plot loosely reflecting his status quo in Saint Louis, Missouri. At the time of writing the play, Williams had returned to a home where his parents often argued, his brother, in the army may was to be sent into combat, Grandmother Rose was slowly dying upstairs, and his beloved sister was in the State Asylum where she was clearly delusional, (Jacobs, 2002, p. 1260). The characters are Amanda, the mother, who Williams describes as “a little woman of great but confused vitality clinging frantically to another time and place” (Williams, 1945, page 18), Laura, the sister who is handicapped by an illness she suffered in childhood which left “one leg slightly shorter than the other, and held in a brace” (Ibid.) and Tom, the protagonist, who Williams describes as “a poet with a job in a warehouse”. It is because of Laura’s disability that it may be safely concluded that she is as fragile as the glass animals she collects (Pilkington, Fredrickson, Whetsell, 2006, p. 190) – literally, the glass menagerie! The plot surrounds Tom’s recollection of the last days he spent with his family, before he leaves them for good. The play opens with William’s taking the audience to the past “to that quaint period, the thirties, when the huge middle class of America” was obligated to survive in “a dissolving economy” (Williams, 1945, p.5). The play is about dreams, hopes and memories, arousing sympathy in the audience. (Macaulay, 2007, p.10). Tennessee understood the psyche of the dream world that Tom is so immersed in and how it conflicts with familial responsibility: Tom’s obligations towards his mother and sister, and in the larger context, poetic metaphor. (Ibid.) The play does not just encapsulate the fantasy world that Laura occupies with her animals, but, on a greater scale, Williams explores the world of psychological escape, that he has instilled in many of his characters. (Ibid.) Williams has attempted to exorcise his youth and the ghosts that haunt him from then – a mother who is cavalier, a father who is missing from the scene and a sister with a mental condition and most of all, frustrated ambitions. (Thorncroft, 1998, p.20) He has created a stifling world where the only future for Tom is to abandon his family, and for his mother, to find a gentleman caller who will care for Laura (Ibid.). Amanda worries that Tom shall grow up to replicate his father, in his drinking habits and his frequent going out while Tom, in return takes exception to his mother’s tendency to wallow in the past – the good old days of “gentleman callers” (Williams, 1945, p.8) during her youth in the American South (Pilkington, Fredrickson, Whetsell, 2006, p. 191). Mother and son fight, Tom calling Amanda an “ugly witch” (Williams, 1945, p.24) which upsets Laura, urging Tom to offer his apologies to Amanda, who subsequently asks Tom to have Laura “get acquainted” with “a nice young man” (Williams, 1945, p.36). Jim, Tom’s co-worker at the factory that they are employed in, enters the scene on Tom’s invitation. Laura, at first terrified (she falls ill at the prospect of meeting him), is coaxed by Jim to relax and communicate, which she does by breaking into conversation about her glass menagerie. They dance, and in a moment of affection, Jim kisses Laura, and then almost immediately apologizing, explains that he is engaged. Amanda remarks that “Things have a way of turning out so badly” (Williams, 1945, p.96) and chastises Tom for not mentioning Jim’s engagement. Tom leaves in a spate of anger, and Amanda’s last words to him are “Go then! Go to the moon – you selfish dreamer” (Williams, 1945, p.96) This paper focuses now on how The Glass Menagerie is so much more than just a play affecting human conditions and the economic depression of America. It has attracted commentary on psychoanalysis and nursing theories apart from other issues pertaining to the human psyche. One aspect of this that is evident, more than any other, is William’s extensive use of “declarative memory”. The playwright has coined The Glass Menagerie as his “memory play” – it is Tom’s memory of the time spent with the Wingfield family that Williams uses to evoke wish fulfillment, conflict resolution and resilience, (Jacobs 2002, p. 1259). Declarative memory is the system that allows a person to recollect past events, moments and facts – however it is not simply a directory in the mind – it is a “creative construction” of those events, moments and facts that are remembered with the “fears, wishes and conflicts” of the person who is remembering, (Jacobs, 2002, p. 1261). The way a person remembers is hinged on the aims and passions of that person at the time he/she attempts to recollect, (Schacter, 1995, p. 23). William’s understood all of this when he penned “memory takes a lot of license, it omits some details, others are exaggerated to the emotional value of the article it touches, for memory is seated predominantly in the heart”, (Williams, 1945, p. 21). It is also evident at the end of the play, when Tom says that when he thinks of Laura he tries doing “anything that can blow her candles out”, (Williams, 1945, p.96), and in the actual stage direction “Laura blows out the candles, ending the play”, (Williams, 1945, p.97) – the playwright successfully connects bitter memory to solid character – ending Laura’s presence in Tom’s mind, and for the audience. Declarative memory can also be discerned in Amanda – the way she brings to life the victorious past, (Jacobs, 2002, p.1262). She is akin to a patient who was a master at recollection of a better youth even though the “tensions of the present” are threatening, (Kris, 1956, p. 305). Laura, who is crippled, attempts to compete with her mother’s remembrance of her childhood home being replete with jonquils, when she remarks that Jim presents her with a single bouquet of flowers, the “blue roses”, a nickname contrived out of Jim’s misunderstanding of the sickness, “pleurosis”, which had kept Laura out of school, (Jacobs, 2002, p.1262). The presence of memory implies that something has been lost, (Jacobs, 2002, p. 1264). Although it is true that, in contrasting the past and present, the knowledge that what has passed will never come again, leads to depression and anxiety. (Schneiderman, 1986, p. 97 - 110). Another aspect of the play and a given in psychoanalysis is the way it explores how individuals need to adapt to their realities in order to carve out a meaningful, possible, existence. The individual is an adaptive creature, dealing with stimulations internally and externally, (Roy and Andrews, 1999). These authors discusses the goal of healthy adaptation to one’s surroundings as the process and outcome of becoming integrated and whole – whereas in The Glass Menagerie the way the characters cope with reality is to withdraw into an artificial and make belief world, (Pilkington, Fredrickson, Whetsell, 2006, p. 192). Laura suffers from a fragile self – she is unable to realize that she needs an education to be employed or social skills to meet a suitor and, handicapped, chooses to escape into her collection of glass animals, (Ibid.). Tom does not have the self-integrity to manifest his poetic aspirations and would rather escape into movies and alcohol, while Amanda, though having highest capacity to embrace reality (her recollection is clearly an illusion, even to her), she cannot accept that Tom would probably never be successful in business (Ibid.). Thus, according to Roy and Andrews, who advocate the adaptation model to survive in this world, the Wingfield family’s coping mechanisms have prevented them from experiencing a full life as they have escaped reality but not the confines of their imaginations - it has kept them in a constant state of unhappiness. (Ibid.) It may be queried whether this family could be considered to have adapted effectively if they had found happiness in their fantasies – or is it that the mere presence of continuing fantasy is in itself ineffective adaption? (Roy, 2005). The Glass Menagerie has also contributed to research being conducted on nursing – the parallel between theatre and nursing is drawn on the basis that both are performing arts. (Parse, 1992). R.R. Parse advocated the Human Becoming Theory (“HBT”), whereby the concepts of human subjectivity, co-existence and situation freedom are present side to side. This is evident in the play as the family members are shaped by the conditions of Saint Louis of the 1930’s (the situation), and yet they are free to choose the meaning of the situation (reflectively and pre-reflectively), thus being shaped by each other. Parse defines the family as “the others with whom one is closely connected”, (Parse, 1981, p.81). Each individual has his/ her own perspective of who is family and “the family participates in co-creating each individual”, (Cody, 2000, p.282). A second principle of the HBT is to track family patterns i.e. paradoxical unity e.g. revealing-concealing or connecting-separating. So the Wingfield family is apart from Mr. Wingfield (the father who abandoned) and yet with him in the way he holds a meaning for each one, (Parse, 1998, p.42). A third principle of HBT is co-transcendence: unique ways of originating in the process of transforming a person, (Parse, 1998, p. 46). Powered by these, the HBT nurse would have a true presence in the Wingfield family – illuminating meaning, synchronizing rhythms and mobilizing transcendence. (Parse, 1998). It is only befitting to say here that Williams has created a glass animal in writing this play – as it betrays the loneliness and guilt he felt over his sister (in real life), Rose’s fate, (Jacobs, 2002, p.1264). Davis J. has pointed out that recollection can make a person strong “through soothing affects that are evoked in recalling a declarative memory of a loving relationship with a parent or other important person”, (Davis, 2001, p. 459). Williams has reflected his current sufferings and, concurrently, makes it easier for himself to cope with his past. (Jacobs, 2002, p. 1265). ________________________________________________________________________ Bibliography 1. Williams T. (1945) The Glass Menagerie, New York: New Direc-tions, 1975. 2. Daniel Jacobs: Tennessee Williams: The uses of Declarative Memory in the Glass Menagerie; Journal of the American Psychoanalytical Association, 2002, 50, p. 1259. 3. F. Beryl Pilkington, Keville Frederickson and Martha Velsasco-Whetsell: The Glass Menagerie as Heuristic for Explicating Nursing Theory; Nursing Science Quarterly, 2006, 19, p. 190. 4. Alastair Macaulay: Apollo Theatre; Financial Times, London (UK), February 15, 2007, pg. 10. 5. Tony Thorncroft: The Glass Menagerie; Financial Times, London (UK), October 5, 1998. pg. 20. 6. Schacter, D.: In Search of Memory; Cambridge: Harvard University Press, (1995). 7. Kris, E (1956): The recovery of childhood memories in psychoanalysis. In The Selected Papers of Ernst Kris. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975, pp. 301 - 340. 8. Schneiderman, L.: Tennessee Williams: The incest motif and fictional love relationships; Psychoanalytic Review, 1986 73 p. 97 - 110. 9. Roy, C. & Andrews, H.: The Roy adaptation model (2nd ed.); Stamford, CT: Appleton & Lange (1999). 10. Roy, C.: A community of scholars; Nursing Science Quarterly, 2005 18, p. 121-122. 11. Parse, R. R.: Man-living-health: A theory of nursing; New York: John Wiley, 1981. 12. Parse, R. R.: The performing art of nursing; Nursing Science Quarterly, 5, p. 147., 1992 13. Parse, R. R.: The human becoming school of thought: A perspective for nurses and other health professionals; Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage., 1998. 14. Cody, W. K.: Parse’s human becoming school of thought and families; Nursing Science Quarterly, 13, p. 281-284, 2000. 15. Davis, J.: Gone but not forgotten: Declarative and non-declarative memory processes and their contribution to resilience; Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic 65: p. 451–470, 2001. Read More