THE GLASS MENAGERIE

By Tennessee Williams

OVERVIEW
Author - Tennessee Williams
Type – Memory play
About the poem – The T. Williams picked up certain autobiographical elements
from his life and it is also considered as the first memory play in English
literature
Written in – 1944
Narrator – Tom Wingfield

ABOUT THE CHARETERS

TOM WINGFIELD
Amanda’s son and Laura’s brother, Tom plays a dual role in the play as both the
narrator and protagonist. The play is from the perspective of Tom’s memories.

AMANDA WINGFIELD
Tom and Laura’s mother. Amanda was a Southern belle in her youth, and she
clings to this romantic vision of her past rather than accepting her current
circumstances of poverty and abandonment.

LAURA WINGFIELD
Tom’s sister and Amanda’s daughter. Laura is deeply fragile, both emotionally
and physically: she is painfully shy, and a childhood illness has left one leg
slightly shorter than the other.
JIM O’CONNOR
The Gentleman Caller whose arrival in scene six spurs the play’s climax.
Tennessee Williams’s stage directions describe Jim as “a nice, ordinary, young
man.” Jim works with Tom at the warehouse.

MR. WINGFIELD
The absent father of Tom and Laura and husband of Amanda. He never appears
on stage, but his portrait dominates the living room, and his presence looms
throughout the play.

PLOT SUMMARY
The Glass Menagerie is a memory play, and all the events are drawn from the
memories of the play’s narrator, Tom Wingfield, who is also a character in the
play. The curtain rises to reveal the dimly lit Wingfield apartment, located in a
lower-class tenement building in St. Louis. The apartment is entered by a fire
escape. Tom stands on the fire escape and addresses the audience to set the
scene. The play takes place in St. Louis in the nineteen-thirties. Tom works in a
warehouse to support his mother, Amanda, and his sister, Laura. A gentleman
caller, Tom says, will appear in the final scenes of the play. Tom and Laura’s
father abandoned the family many years ago, and except for a single postcard
reading “Hello––Goodbye!” has not been heard from since.
Tom enters the apartment, and the action of the play begins. Throughout the
play, thematic music underscores many of the key moments. The Wingfield’s
are seated at dinner. Amanda nags Tom about his table manners and his
smoking. She regales Tom and Laura with memories of her youth as a Southern
belle in Blue Mountain, courted by scores of gentleman callers. The stories are
threadbare from constant repetition, but Tom and Laura let Amanda tell them
again, Tom asking her questions as though reading from a script. Amanda is
disappointed when Laura, for what appears to be the umpteenth time, says that
she will never receive any gentleman callers.
Amanda has enrolled Laura in business college, but weeks later, Amanda
discovers that Laura dropped out after the first few classes because of her
debilitating social anxiety. Laura spends her days wandering alone around the
park and the zoo. Laura also spends much of her time caring for her glass
menagerie, a collection of glass figurines. Amanda is frustrated but quickly
changes course, deciding that Laura’s best hope is to find a suitable man to
marry. Laura tells Amanda about Jim, a boy that she had a crush on in high
school. Amanda begins to raise extra money for the family by selling
subscriptions for a women’s glamour magazine.
Tom, who feels stifled in both his job and his family life, writes poetry while at
the warehouse. He escapes the apartment night after night through movies,
drinking, and literature. Tom and Amanda argue bitterly, he claiming that she
does not respect his privacy, she claiming that he must sacrifice for the good of
the family. During one particularly heated argument, precipitated by Tom’s
manuscripts pouring out of the typewriter, Tom accidentally shatters some of
Laura’s precious glass animals.
Tom stumbles back early one morning and tells Laura about a magic trick
involving a man who escapes from a nailed-up coffin. Tom sees the trick as
symbolic of his life. Due to Laura’s pleading and gentle influence, Tom and
Amanda eventually reconcile. They unite in their concern for Laura. Amanda
implores Tom not to abandon the family as her husband did. She asks him to
find a potential suitor for Laura at the warehouse. After a few months, Tom
brings home his colleague Jim O’Connor, whom he knew in high school and
who calls Tom “Shakespeare.” Amanda is overjoyed and throws herself into a
whirlwind of preparation, fixing up the lighting in the apartment and making a
new dress for Laura. When Laura first sees Jim and realizes that he is her high-
school love, she is terrified; she answers the door but quickly dashes away.
Amanda emerges in a gaudy, frilly, girlish dress from her youth and affects a
thick Southern accent, as though she is the one receiving the gentleman caller.
Laura is so overcome by the whole scene that she refuses to join the table,
instead lying on the sofa in the living room.
After dinner, the lights in the apartment go out because Tom has not paid the
electricity bill––instead, as Tom and Jim know but Laura and Amanda don’t,
Tom has paid his dues to join the merchant marines. Amanda lights candles, and
Jim joins Laura by candlelight in the living room. Laura slowly warms up and
relaxes in Jim’s gently encouraging company. Laura reminds Jim that they knew
each other in high school and that he had nicknamed her “Blue Roses,” a
mispronunciation of her childhood attack of pleurosis. Jim tells Laura that she
must overcome her inferiority complex through confidence. Laura shows Jim
her glass collection and lets him hold the glass unicorn, her favorite. They begin
to dance to the strains of a waltz coming from across the street. As they dance,
however, Jim knocks over the unicorn, breaking off its horn.
Jim kisses Laura but immediately draws back, apologizing and explaining that
he has a fiancée. Laura is devastated but tries not to show it. She gives him the
broken glass unicorn as a souvenir. Amanda re-enters the living room and learns
about Jim’s fiancée. After he leaves, she accuses Tom of playing a trick on
them. Tom storms out of the house to the movies, and Amanda tells him to go to
the moon. Tom explains that he got fired from his job not long after Jim’s visit
and that he left his mother and sister. However, no matter how far he goes, he
cannot leave his emotional ties behind. The play is his final act of catharsis to
purge himself of the memories of his family.

THEMES
MEMORY
In his monologue that opens the play, Tom announces, “The play is memory.”
The play is Tom's memory of the past, and all of the action takes place in his
head. That action is therefore dramatic, sentimental, and emotional, not realistic.
As is fitting in a play that is itself a memory of the past, in The Glass
Menagerie the past haunts all the characters.
Tom the character (the Tom who Tom is remembering as he "creates" the play)
feels trapped by memory. He sees the past as a physical and emotional restraint
that prevents him from living his life. And yet there is something in it that holds
him, too—he is compelled to return to memory over and over again. His
repetitive actions, such as smoking and going to the movies, demonstrate both
his desire to escape and the relentless cycle of the past. And the fact that the
play itself is a memory he feels the need to transform into a play suggests that
Tom has still not escaped that past. Amanda uses her memories like a veil to
shield her from reality. She clings to the Southern belle version of herself who
received seventeen gentleman callers in a weekend.
As the play progresses, and things do not work out as Amanda hopes they will,
she clutches the past more desperately. When the gentleman caller arrives, she
wears a ridiculously frilled dress and slips into a Southern accent, becoming her
former self rather than accepting the reality of her present
situation. Laura retreats to the past as a safe haven, a perfect world removed
from time. Her delicate memories, such as being called “Blue Roses,” are much
like her fragile glass menagerie in their perfection and fragility. Unlike the other
characters, Jim is not haunted by his past: he remembers his youth but does not
feel the need to re-live it. Nonetheless, when the Wingfield's treat him as the
high-school hero he used to be, and with the help of the candlelight and the
music, he seems to slip into this memory. But when the glass unicorn breaks and
the spell is broken, he returns to his own life, outside the Wingfield’s’
memories.
ABANDONMENT
The male characters in the play all abandon Amanda and Laura. The father,
whom we never see, has abandoned the family: he worked for the telephone
company and “fell in love with long distances.” The traumatic effect of this
abandonment on Amanda, and Amanda's resulting fear about her own
helplessness, is clear in her relentless quest for Laura to gain business skills and
then to marry. Jim’s abandonment of Laura forms the play’s dramatic climax:
the Wingfield's (not to mention the audience) hope against hope that somehow,
he will stay, though there is always the sense that he cannot, even before the
glass unicorn shatters. Tom, meanwhile, spends the entire play in tension
between his love for his mother and sister and his desire to pursue his own
future, thus abandoning his family. Yet, at the same time, Tom has in some
sense already abandoned Amanda and Laura before the play has even begun,
since the entire play is his memory of the past.
But does Tom really abandon his family? Even though he leaves them
physically, the fact that he remembers them through the act of creating the play
indicates that he has never entirely left, that in leaving them he paradoxically
became closer to them, more deeply connected to them. He left them, but in the
play, he also immortalizes them, transforms Amanda and Laura into a kind of
glass menagerie of his own. “Oh Laura, Laura,” he says at the play’s end, “I
tried to leave you behind, but I am more faithful than I intended to be!”

ILLUSION AND DREAMS

Tom explains that in creating the play from his memory that he is giving “truth
in the pleasant disguise of illusion,” and the stage directions of the play are
designed to create a nostalgic, sentimental, non-realistic atmosphere to create
the unreal yet heightened effects of a dream. The lighting in each scene adds
emphasis and shadows: for example, the electric light that goes out, the
candelabra, moonlight, the paper lantern that hides the broken lightbulb, Tom’s
lit cigarette, all draw attention to the artistic, emotional, and artificial nature of
the play. The stage illusions in the gentleman caller scene—the switch from
electricity to candlelight, the music on the Victrola—further this sense of an
unreal, dreamlike realm. Though the scene begins as comedy, the lighting and
music tenderly develop it into romance, which then shatters into tragedy as the
glass unicorn breaks and the dream shifts suddenly back to reality.
The characters in the play are also full of dreams, though these dreams operate
in different ways. Tom dreams about escape from his present life. He writes
poetry in the warehouse, discusses joining the merchant marines, and escapes
into action-adventure movies. He comments to Jim, at one point, that all of the
people at the movies are there to escape into illusion and avoid real
life. Amanda's dreams are desperate attempts to escape the sadness of her
present, and as such they become self-delusions, blinding her to reality and to
the desires of her children. She insists that Tom will fulfill her vision of him as
the successful businessman. And when the dream of Laura in business school
falls apart, rather than see reality Amanda constructs a new fantasy life for her
daughter in the realm of gentleman callers and marriage prospects.
For Laura, dreams do not take the form of ambitions, but instead offer her a
refuge from the pain of reality. Unlike Amanda, Laura does not delude herself
by pretending that her physical disabilities do not exist. Instead, she retreats
from the world by surrounding herself with perfect, immortal objects, like her
glass menagerie and the “Jewel Box” she visits instead of going to business
school classes. Tom suggests that Jim might have once had high hopes for
himself but has since slipped into mediocrity, which might show Tom projecting
onto Jim and not necessarily how Jim sees himself. Unlike the Wingfield’s, Jim
neither lives in a dream world of the past nor in a secret future dream-life, but in
the present. And yet Jim is himself hoping for a career in radio and television—
an industry that might be described as in the business of creating dreams or
believable illusions—and in this way the play suggests that the Wingfield's are
not alone in their susceptibility to dreams.

ESCAPE
Escape in the play operate in two directions: from the real world into the world
of memory and dreams, as Amanda and Laura demonstrate; or from the world
of memory and dreams into the real world, as Tom desires. Amanda and Laura
escape reality by retreating into dream worlds. Amanda refuses to see things as
they are, insisting on seeing what she wants to see. Amanda still lives as a past
version of herself, even as she projects ambitions onto Laura. Rather than
accepting Laura’s peculiarities or Tom’s unhappiness, she escapes into her
fantasy version of the world as she thinks it should be.
Laura escapes from the imposing structures of reality into worlds she can
control and keep perfect: her memories, the glass menagerie, the freedom of
walking through the park. When Amanda confronts Laura, she tries to escape by
playing music loudly enough to block out the argument. However, both Amanda
and Laura can see their present situations, and they do try to make their realities
better. Amanda raises subscriptions for magazines to earn money. Instead of
escaping the fighting, Laura serves as peacemaker between Amanda and Tom.
Tom does not want to escape into dreams or other fantasy worlds—he wants to
physically escape, to leave. And even when he cannot bring himself to actually
leave, he is constantly escaping from something: he escapes from the apartment
onto the fire escape; he escapes from the coffin in the magic show; and he
sneaks away at the warehouse to write poetry, a mental and physical escape
from a menial job. He fantasizes about joining the merchant marines and
escaping from not only his claustrophobic life but also the landlocked Midwest.
Tom goes to the movies every night to watch an escapist fantasy on the screen.
He also uses alcohol to escape reality: we see bottles in his pockets, and “going
to the movies” is a euphemism for getting drunk. Yet all of Tom’s escape
mechanisms are cyclical: while they offer the promise of freedom, they also trap
him. “I’m leading a double life,” Tom shouts at Amanda at the end of Scene
Three. He intends to hurt her so that he might break free of her power over him,
but ultimately, he cannot escape his love for his family.