Dreams, illusions, retreats
·
The
characters are hemmed in by thier illusions.
·
Amanda
and Jim are conventional. They both hope to achieve financial security. For
manada this involves making a suitable match for her daughter, while Jim
hankers after a more prestigious job.
·
Laura
and Tom are less worldly. Laura wants only to be left alone. She has no
ambition except to be allowed to drift. Withdrawal from, rather than engagement
with, reality is what motivates her.
·
Tom
dreams of moving out into the world. But he is not driven by a desire to
connect with others. Like his sister, he values isolation because it means that
he will be able to get on with his creative work as a poet. He claims he wants ‘adventure’, but never
fully explains exactly what he means by this word.
·
All
we know by the end of the plat is that Tom has become an itinerant wanderer. In
hia final narration he makes no mention of his poetry, or of any specific
adventures he has had.
·
Tennessee
Williams, in this play, seems to be presenting a negative portrait of dreaming.
All de=reams seem equally fragile and, perhaps, futile.
·
Laura
focuses on her glass collection,
·
Tome
has his movies, poems and the writings of D.H. Lawrence.
·
Amanda
lingers over her romantic memories
·
Jim
is preoccupied by clichéd dreams about ‘making it big’.
·
The
glass menagerie is a play in which characters are afraid to cross thresholds of
any kind. Bold expressions fo dewsire are simply too risky fpr the timid people
we see here. The playwright a;sp insists repetedly that romance is a deceptive
illusion. Amanda found this out the hard way, so her son and daughter can be
forgiven for not watning to follow in her footsteps.
Influence of/longing for the past.
·
t
he play is described as a ‘memory play’
·
Critics
have suggested that by re-enacting his past, Tom is able to embrace the mother
he scorned, blamed and rejected as a young man. He is also trying to lay to
rest the ghost of his sister, whose memory has haunted him for so long.
·
The
other characters are also unable –and unwilling- to forget the past. Amanda
lives on her memories, fighting to reconstruct them in the present. Laura
clings to objects – her menagerie, the Victoria – which suggest memories are
her only comfort. When her idealised image of Jim is destroyed and she is
brought out of her reverie for a few moments, she disintegrates. O’Conner like
having Tom at the warehouse because his acquaintance from high school is a
reminder of his former glory.
·
York
notes – memory
·
In
The Glass Menagerie, memory plays an important part, both thematically and in
terms of the play’s presentation. Thematically, we see the detrimental effects
of memory in the form of Amanda’s living in the past. As far as the play’s
presentation is concerned, the entire story is told from the memory of Tom, the
narrator. He makes it clear that, because the play is memory, certain
implications are raised as to the nature of each scene. He explains that memory
is selective, that events are remembered with music, with peculiar lighting,
that reality is altered and edited and made presentable in certain ways. This
is how we see the play, directly as a memory.
http://www.shmoop.com/glass-menagerie/memory-the-past-theme.html
·
According
to Tom, The Glass Menagerie is a memory play—both its style and its content are
shaped and inspired by memory. As Tom himself states clearly, the play’s lack
of realism, its high drama, its overblown and too-perfect symbolism, and even
its frequent use of music are all due to its origins in memory. Most fictional
works are products of the imagination that must convince their audience that
they are something else by being realistic. A play drawn from memory, however,
is a product of real experience and hence does not need to drape itself in the
conventions of realism in order to seem real. The creator can cloak his or her
true story in unlimited layers of melodrama and unlikely metaphor while still
remaining confident of its substance and reality. Tom—and Tennessee
Williams—take full advantage of this privilege.
·
The
story that the play tells is told because of the inflexible grip it has on the
narrator’s memory. Thus, the fact that the play exists at all is a testament to
the power that memory can exert on people’s lives and consciousness. Indeed,
Williams writes in the Production Notes that “nostalgia . . . is the first
condition of the play.” The narrator, Tom, is not the only character haunted by
his memories. Amanda too lives in constant pursuit of her bygone youth, and old
records from her childhood are almost as important to Laura as her glass
animals. For these characters, memory is a crippling force that prevents them
from finding happiness in the present or the offerings of the future. But it is
also the vital force for Tom, prompting him to the act of creation that
culminates in the achievement of the play.
·
http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/menagerie/themes.html
- the unrelenting power of memory
Decline, disillusionment, loss
v In The Glass Menagerie, weakness
is linked to fragility, which comes to mean both beauty and breakability. While
Laura’s shyness and fragility keep her in her own little world of equally
fragile glass animals, they also infuse her with a mysterious individuality, something
Jim picks up on with the nickname "Blue Roses" and finds incredibly
attractive. Fragility also means dependence, as Laura needs Tom precisely
because of her shy and delicate demeanor. We also see the relationship between
physical and mental fragility, as it seems that Laura’s shyness arises from a
physical defect: her crippled leg. http://www.shmoop.com/glass-menagerie/weakness-theme.html
v i n The Glass Menagerie, Amanda
retreats from reality by denial and deliberately deluding herself as to the
true nature of things. She refuses to see that her daughter is crippled or her
son a writer who likes to drink, raising the notion that parents often see only
the good qualities in their children. She is also somewhat blind as to her own
status; although she readily admits that she is old, Amanda still thinks of
herself as the pretty Southern Belle, getting all dolled up and playing the
charming hostess. http://www.shmoop.com/glass-menagerie/deception-lies-theme.html
v In The Glass Menagerie, alcoholism
is not major or explicit, yet becomes a symbol for all undesirable activities.
Amanda uses alcohol as an umbrella to cover any un-ambitious activities that
her son takes part in, including writing, reading, and going to the movies.
When she asks if Laura’s gentleman caller is a "boy who drinks," what
she really wants to know is whether he is the kind of boy who drinks, is rowdy,
goes out at night, and doesn’t care too much about his future. Because her
husband drank, Amanda associates alcoholism with him, and therefore with
irresponsibility and abandonment http://www.shmoop.com/glass-menagerie/drugs-alcohol-theme.html
v At the beginning of Scene Four, Tom
regales Laura with an account of a magic show in which the magician managed to
escape from a nailed-up coffin. Clearly, Tom views his life with his family and
at the warehouse as a kind of coffin—cramped, suffocating, and morbid—in which
he is unfairly confined. The promise of escape, represented by Tom’s missing
father, the Merchant Marine Service, and the fire escape outside the apartment,
haunts Tom from the beginning of the play, and in the end, he does choose to
free himself from the confinement of his life. The play takes an ambiguous
attitude toward the moral implications and even the effectiveness of Tom’s
escape. As an able-bodied young man, he is locked into his life not by exterior
factors but by emotional ones—by his loyalty to and possibly even love for
Laura and Amanda. Escape for Tom means the suppression and denial of these
emotions in himself, and it means doing great harm to his mother and sister.
The magician is able to emerge from his coffin without upsetting a single nail,
but the human nails that bind Tom to his home will certainly be upset by his
departure. One cannot say for certain that leaving home even means true escape
for Tom. As far as he might wander from home, something still “pursue[s]” him.
Like a jailbreak, Tom’s escape leads him not to freedom but to the life of a
fugitive. The impossibility of true
escape - http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/menagerie/themes.html
Women in society
·
In The Glass Menagerie, marriage
is used as a tool rather than a celebration of love. Amanda believes that
marriage is a necessary step for her daughter to live comfortably, to be
supported by a man. This play also calls into question the lasting nature of
marriage, as the marriage of the mother figure (Amanda) and her missing husband
has been destroyed by his abandonment of her. http://www.shmoop.com/glass-menagerie/marriage-theme.html
·
In The Glass Menagerie, gender
roles play a large part in dictating the future plans of each character. Laura
must get married because she is a girl; Tom should take business classes
because he is a man. Gender roles seem to arise from tradition, as Amanda
discusses what women should do and what men should do according to her Southern
upbringing. Gender roles also dictate values, or how women and men are judged
differently. Amanda places great importance on Laura’s staying ‘fresh and
pretty,’ while she believes that ‘character’ is the most important thing for a
man. http://www.shmoop.com/glass-menagerie/gender-theme.html
à Amanda’s girlhood in Blue Mountain is
the first portrait the play Wright wrote of the Old South. It is Based on his
memories of growing up in Mississippi, and informed by the recollections of his
mother and maternal grandparents.
à Williams presents Amanda as an
anachronism (something or someone that is not in its correct historical or
chronological time, especially a thing or person that belongs to an earlier
time: The sword is an anachronism in modern warfare) . The codes and
conventions f the Old south failed to prevent the confused woman from making
the terrible mistake of uniting herself in matrimony with Mr Wingfield, who
fooled everybody. The play Wright suggests that southerners are a blind and
misguided as the cooped up residents of St Louis. Williams suggests that the
quest for the gentleman caller is hopeless; importing southern behaviour into
an modern, urban setting end in tragedy.
à York notes- The Old South
õ In The Glass Menagerie Tennessee Williams focuses on the
helplessness of women and their extreme dependence on men. In A Doll’s House Henrik
Ibsen, on the other hand, shows how women can face challenges and take charge of their lives in dire
conditions. Laura Wingfield, the protagonist in The Glass Menagerie, struggles
to cope with her lameness and the constraints it puts on her life. The
treatment of women’s issues is quite different in the two plays, although both
writers acknowledge that the problems are real.
õ In this play the women characters, as
do the others, escape into a fantasy world when faced with the cold facts of
their existence. They dream of what might have been but never really come to
terms with their present situations. Amanda Wingfield, Laura’s mother slips
back into her youth and finds comfort in revelling in her past and re-living
the popularity she enjoyed with young men who found her inordinately
attractive.
õ
Laura’s World of
Illusions
õ Laura escapes into her little make belief
world in the glass menagerie to seek freedom and peace. Unlike her mother she
is neither attractive nor popular with young swains and is painfully aware of
it. She conjures lives for her glass animals and talks about them as if they
were actual beings and she could communicate with them as she did with humans.
For Laura fantasizing was a necessity as that was the only way to get away from
reality and feel free.
õ Personifying the animals gives meaning to
Laura’s existence. She spends most of her time in her world of illusions. When
the horn of the unicorn breaks accidentally, she creates another fantasy out of
it saying now the unicorn would feel more at home and less “freakish” in the
company of other horses. A reflection, perhaps, of her own secret longing to be
more like other people and not be constantly reminded of her disability because
of her leg-brace.
õ Escapism in the Other Characters of The Glass Menagerie
õ This tendency to escape into an
illusionary world is present in Amanda and Tom too. Amanda lapses into her
youth and reminisces how popular she had been with young men. This helps her
forget that in reality she had made a poor marriage and despite her charm her
husband had abandoned her and their children. She overlooks the fact that
unlike her Laura did not attract as much attention from men and that Laura’s
disability could be responsible for it.
õ In The Glass Menagerie, Williams captures the
tendency among humans to escape difficult situations rather than face them.
Laura, perhaps, resorts to the more realistic practice of escapism and living
in a bubble. In comparison Ibsen’s Nora is able to confront her reality and
decides to take control. Depending on the circumstances both these reactions to
life’s realities are justified and one should not be judgmental about the
methods opted by the characters to deal with their situations.
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