Tennessee Williams A Glass Menagerie - Essay Example

Tom's 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 (pleurodesis) 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.

In Scene 2 of the play, the characters Amanda and Laura become involved in a memory of the past as a means of escaping the reality of the present, in which Laura has stopped attending business school, and the utter terror of the future as it becomes clear that she will be unable to support herself. Amanda asks Laura if there has ever been a boy she was interested in and Laura shyly admits that there has been. From here, she launches into a fantasy about her high school years and what she felt and dreamed about back then. She opens her high school yearbook to find the picture of him in the senior class musical performance of Pirates of Penzance, a play about romance and pirates and being swept away to daring new adventures.

As she talks about his many achievements and qualities, he won the silver cup in the debating club, and an engaging grin, and even had a pet name reserved just for her. “He used to call me – Blue Roses.” For a moment, she allows herself to become lost in the special feeling she used to get whenever he saw her and hollered “Hello Blue Roses” in the halls because that’s what he thought she’d said one time when she told him why she’d been absent. Her bubble breaks, though, when she remembers that he used to go with another girl, who she never felt was all that sincere, but who appeared with him in the personal section in an engagement announcement. “That’s – six years ago! They must be married by now.”

Rather than being concerned about the present or the future, Laura allows herself to get lost in the beautiful memories of the past to a time when a boy she liked paid her some attention. The entire scene is focused on this idealized past and the same sort of wistful nostalgia that infects Amanda regarding her youth in the South. There is no talk of what must be done now to protect Laura or what might happen in the future as a result of her dropping out of business school, only a concentration on what might have been had she been a little less self-conscious or he’d been a little more interested or the insincere girl he used to go with was a little more insincere. That the scene is all about the past is made clear when Laura seems to wake herself up back to the present with the realization that the announcement she saw regarding his engagement was six years ago, meaning they must be married now and perhaps have even started a family of their own. This leaves no room for further discussion of the future as this little love story that never happened is closed before it was even fully opened. Read More