The Glass Menagerie

The central question in The Glass Menagerie can be seen as "Why and how do people attempt to escape and avoid reality?" There are many details showing that this fear of reality in every family member of the Wingfields. All of the three Wingfields has something that they do to escape from the reality and truths of the world.
Of the three, Laura seems to be the one who has the weakest grip on reality. She is extremely shy, and when her mother gave her a chance to become a working woman in the business world, she throws that hope away by dropping out after just a few days because she was too nervous being around a bunch of strangers. On top of trying to get away from the real working world, she deceives her mother by going out every day to make her mother think she was in school. By a fluke, her mother discovers Laura's absence in school, and Laura explains how she would take walks in the park or sometimes go to a movie. In these examples, Laura seems to be afraid of the outside world and her personal life and relationship with her mother. She doesn't want anything out of the ordinary to happen, because she does not want to face reality. She is too scared to tell her mother the truth, so she escapes further into her own mind. Since she has no outside life, she uses her glass menagerie to entertain her thoughts during the day. As the story develops she seems to be slipping further out of reality, with no plans for the future, until her "gentleman caller" arrives. Jim O'Connor makes her less uneasy with his warmth and begins talking to her and giving her advice about how to overcome her shyness and her inferiority complex. Until this point, there is no sign of Laura showing that she has a life and that she might go somewhere with it.
Tom's case is almost opposite from Laura's, but with the same effect of avoiding reality, in the fact that not enough is happening in his life. He wants to make something of himself and do something with his life, but he makes no effort, and keeps his boring job. Since he feels that his life is empty, he makes up for it by going to the movies. Amanda worries about him, and the possibility that he is making trouble, but he responds by telling her how he goes to the movies because of the adventure. He doesn't have enough adventure in his own life, so he compensates by seeing others have adventures in movies. He also puts his thoughts into writing and reading, again to escape from putting forth any effort to make something of his life. The most dangerous part of Tom, however, is his escaping reality through being drunk, and the release of all of the reality of the world around him. His father had the same problem, and through the story, there are hints that Tom is becoming more like his father, especially in one final example when he is talking to Jim about his life, and his plans to leave his family because he is the "[...] son of a [...]" and he must leave to find himself; but ends up wondering aimlessly around numerous towns, not finding anything different that what was back at home.
Amanda's personality is the most complex of the three Wingfields. She has a grip on real world values such as longing for her children to be successful people and to make lots of money, and also for herself and her children's social success. This is part of the real world, but she is so obsessed with them, that she cannot accept some of the truths about the reality around her. She still thinks she should be the girl she was in Blue Mountain, with servants and slaves and the like. Whenever Tom talks to her about Laura being crippled or peculiar, she says for him not to say such horrible things. She cannot accept that Laura is both crippled and peculiar and wants the situation to be normal. She doesn't even know what to think of Tom. She accuses him of not going to the movies, but to somewhere else. She says to him that he is too selfish and needs to support the family more, when in reality, it is her constant instruction of how he should eat, how he should act, what he needs to do, that drives him further away from the family and more like his father.
It seems as though all the Wingfields want to do something with their lives, but they don't have the motivation to change anything. Tom complains about the people in the movie substituting finding adventure in their own lives for the adventure on screen, but does the same thing himself and doesn't make a real effort to change. This play seems to be showing the idea that people are afraid to change, even if any change would be for the better. They would rather escape the reality they live in and find ways to avoid becoming part of the real world. At the end of the play, Tom decides to leave, but that doesn't solve his reality problem. Amanda is left with no one in the house to support her and to pay the bills, because she was lost in her idea of what reality should be with her recollection of her spoiled childhood and not what reality actually is. Laura seems like the only one in the family that is actually showing signs of change and the possibility of accepting the outside world and making something of herself, because of Jim's comfort and encouragement.

While some people may enjoy reflective books, The Glass Menagerie was not a book that I would recommend to just anyone. The Glass Menagerie has a deep and thought provoking tone, focusing on one main character inability to shake his feelings of guilt. That character is Tom Wingfield. He is the son of an overbearing mother, Amanda Wingfield. Amanda also has a younger daughter, Laura who is excruciatingly quite, akward, and does not have many suitors calling on her, much to her mother's disappointment. Amanda, in her prime, was a beauty queen, very vivacious, and had many suitors. Amanda fails to understand that her daughters self doubt is much attributed to her crippled leg which needs a brace worn at all times. Amanda will not accept the fact of her daughters' illness. Although Tom works as much and as hard as he can, he realizes that he want to get out of his dead end job and leave his mom and sister behind to get away from Amanda. His father left them when he was a young boy and they haven't seen him since. The only thing that was sent. To get away from mother barking orders, he wrote beautiful poetry, drank alcohol often and planned his perfect escape from reality. The book is based on Tom being upset with his youth as an old man remembering his past and it also symbolizes the broken heartedness of Laura. I would recommend this book to book lovers because there are many underlying messages of confusion and regret. This book is a great read for teens to realize the importance of self-approval and acceptance of unchangeable things. Also to make the best of all situations that a person may come across. After you've read this book, you'll realize how evereyone lives in their own glass menagerie.

I remember watching a film adaptation of this book, and I distinctly remember my impressions of it. The sister did not come across as "lazy" to me, as one reviewer stated Laurence Olivier thought. She seemed depressed, a deep unhappiness, as if something had wounded her at some time. There was more there than met the eye. I found the story depressing overall, a real downer. But most Tennessee Williams stories aren't uppers.

"The Glass Managerie" does for shy young girls what "Death of a Salesman" does for the working man. In this life, all people truly want is to be happy and recognized. Young Laura receives neither. This conflict initiates the story.

Laura's mother Amanda wants Tom to find a proper suiter for his fragile sister. Tom, who also serves as the narrator, is tired of caring for his mother and sister in the absence of his father. Despite his yearning for adventure, he attempts to find a suitor for Laura. While he fails in finding a mate for his sister, he does find a man who shows Laura her qualities and gives her confidence.

In the end, Tom leaves his mother and sister and Laura gains confidence from her experience. Aside from these changes, the characters are still left with the same problems. "The Glass Menagerie" is an enjoyable little read. I, however, found myself waiting for more to happen. I suspect that Tennessee Williams wanted us to be left to think about the consequences of the characters' actions.

There is some controversy surrounding "The Glass Menagerie," folks, if only that certain people who do not understand the theater or literature in general find fault with this play. Don't believe them. This play has stood the test of time for over half a century and has earned a special place in American Literature. "The Glass Menagerie" won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award in 1945 for the best new drama in the country, and launched the brilliant career of Tennessee Williams. Virtually every important drama critic and major playwright in the last 50 years has acknowledged "The Glass Menagerie" as one of the hallmark plays of the 20th Century, including Arthur Miller, David Mamet, George Bernard Shaw, Lanford Wilson, Edward Albee, and dozens of others. Why? Simply, because it's a fantastic play.

"The Glass Menagerie" is a simple story of three people, the Wingfield family, trapped in their own illusions. Set in St. Louis, the story is narrated by Tom (a transparent stand-in for Tennessee Williams, whose given name was Tom), his sister Laura, and their strong-willed mother Amanda. It has been suggested by some the Laura is not an interesting character because she is "shy" and "lazy" and "self-absorbed." However, anyone with half a heart and several ounces of brain matter will see that she is much more than that--a lost soul on the verge of a breakdown, unequipped to handle the vicissitudes of her crumbling reality. In this most autobiographical of Williams' plays, Laura is the mirror image of his sister Rose, who was so severely disturbed as a young woman that she received one of the first lobotomies in America, and spent the rest of her life institutionalized, for which her brother paid and to which he made frequent pilgrimages until his death.

Tennessee Williams has always been one of the great writers of female roles, with Amanda Wingfield and Blanche Dubois leading the pack. As Daniel Mendelsohn wrote in a recent issue of The New York Review of Books: "Williams' women and girls manage to be both memorably, even frighteningly, extreme and sympathetic at the same time. Even when they do repellent things, these characters successfully gain our sympathy by their ability to articulate, or in some way to represent, everything that has been left out of the worldview of the men with whom they come into conflict on stage: delicacy of feeling, spirituality, nostalgia, fantasy, and art." So is it with Laura, and so too, to a greater degree, with Amanda, one of the universally acknowledged great female roles in the American Theater. Is she, to use Mr. Mendelsohn's term, an "extreme" character? Without a doubt.

And yet we must ask ourselves: What is drama other than passion and dramatic outbursts? Get rid of that and you get rid of--in Shakespeare's case alone--Falstaff, Beatrice and Benedict, Hotspur, Laertes, Romeo and Juliet, Richard III, Lady Macbeth, The Three Weird Sisters, Titania, Puck, the Rude Mechanicals, and most of the rest of the canon. Plus, in other plays-Death of a Salesman, Curse of the Starving Class, The Misanthrope, Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolff? and A Zoo Story, A Raisin in the Sun, Medea, Oedipus, The Odd Couple, The Importance of Being Earnest, Dr. Faustus, and Cyrano de Bergerac, to name just a few. Yes, Amanda Wingfield is extreme; and that is exactly what rivets our eyes to her throughout this play.

But isn't extremity what performance is all about? For example, some people like the singing of Celine Dion. I'm serious! Some people put her right up there with Shania Twain. I've always thought her singing had all the subtlety of a freight train, with two volume settings--loud and louder. She's womankind's answer to Michael Bolton. But some people like that kind of singing. Which begs a question. Is Amanda Wingfield any more hysterical than Celine Dion? I think not. At least we don't see the veins popping out on her neck.

Some have mentioned that "The Glass Menagerie" cannot be considered a classic because Williams was a drunk and a drug addict. No, I'm not making this up--even at this late date, in this new millennium, there are poorly-read Neanderthal's unaware of addiction science who equate substance abuse with morality. Some literary critics (the lesser ones) go so far as to read the author's biography first, looking for ways to dismiss the book under consideration before even reading it. Now, I personally don't use drugs, and I am not promoting their use here, but I was taught in college to evaluate the text, not the author. There is no question that Williams had problems with "substances"; he would probably be the first to admit it. And yet, does this negate his genius? If we go that route, we might as well get rid of all of them--Coleridge, Poe, Plath, Faulkner, Sherwood Anderson, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Eugene O'Neill, Steinbeck, John Cheever, Raymond Carver, Robert Lowell, Ginsberg, Chaucer, Cervantes, Marlowe (who was killed in a bar), Blake, Dr. Samuel Johnson, Conrad, Auden, Dylan Thomas, and probably Shakespeare too. In music, let's jettison The Beatles, The Stones, The Who, John Cage, Tom Waits, John Prine, John Hiatt, Jackson Browne, The Eagles, David Bowie, Emmylou Harris, George Jones, Bob Dylan, Merle Haggard, Louie Armstrong, Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker, Eric Clapton, and virtually every way major musical act of the twentieth century. In art, Vincent van Gogh, Jackson Pollock, Rodin, Salvador Dali, Picasso and hundreds of others would go into the trash can. See, it never ends.

You know, when I was in college studying this play, I had an interesting debate with one of my classmates. His name was Baron; he was Hungarian, a good-looking but ignorant man. He was a theater major who worshipped Laurence Olivier, and he pointed out that Olivier hated Tennessee Williams' work, to the point where he insisted his wife, Vivien Leigh, not take the role of Blanche Dubois that was offered to her for the movie version of "A Streetcar Named Desire." Now, this gave me pause, because Sir Lord Olivier was without question one of the greatest actors we have ever known. But does that make him a good judge of writing plays? No. He's an actor. He acts. As with some other supposed "experts"--including Baron--he'd never written a play. Plus, Olivier was British, really British, with an expertise in performing Shakespeare. He understood the milieu Tennessee Williams was working in--the decaying post-Cival War South--about as well as a turtle knows backgammon. More importantly, though, Baron didn't finish his story. He stopped short. So I finished it for him. Yes, Olivier repeatedly dissuaded his wife from doing the film version of "A Streetcar Named Desire" I told him, but Vivien Leigh ignored his advice, took the part, and turned in one of the great performances in the history of American cinema, for which she was awarded the Academy Award for Best Actress. (Incidentally, the original stage production of Streetcar won the 1948 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.) So I said to my theater major friend, "Baron, I believe Shakespeare would call this "hoisted by your own petard."

"The Glass Menagerie" is one of the supreme achievements in world drama. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise. In fact, don't even take my word for it. Purchase a DVD copy of the 1973 PBS production starring Katherine Hepburn as Amanda Wingfield--also available for sale here at Amazon.com--or rent it at Blockbuster, or check it out from your local library, and let the play speak for itself. It's a thrilling, funny, passionate, and deeply moving experience. If scene seven, the final scene where Laura meets Jim, doesn't break your heart, I suggest you call a cardiologist to check your pulse. This is a terrific, world-class play that should be read and/or seen by anyone interested in great theater and the struggles of other human beings trying to find meaning in their lives.

As I said at the beginning, "The Glass Menagerie" has stood the test of time. You won't regret reading it. Unless you'd rather listen to Celine Dion.