The Glass Menagerie (1944). Content and Description

The Glass Menagerie was Tennessee Williams’s first great success, thrusting him from obscurity into the limelight, where, for two decades, he shared with Arthur Miller distinction as America’s most important playwright. Opening in December 1944 in Chicago, Menagerie moved to New York’s Playhouse Theatre on March 31 of the following year. Quickly racking up several prestigious theater prizes including the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award, the play’s Broadway run lasted 561 performances. Even though Williams went on to write several other critically acclaimed works, many literary scholars consider Menagerie his best work.

During the course of seven scenes the play records the Wingfield family’s struggle to survive in St. Louis during the Great Depression. Living at home with his domineering mother, Amanda, and his psychologically troubled sister, Laura, Tom, a young poet, yearns to escape both the cramped apartment and the stifling responsibilities of home life. When Amanda discovers that Laura has dropped out of business school, she becomes obsessed with finding a suitor and financial supporter for her daughter. After initially balking at his mother’s suggestion to join in the husband search, Tom invites his friend, Jim, to dinner.

When Jim arrives, Laura is shocked to discover that he is the same man she had secretly loved in high school. Although Laura’s anxiety gets the better of her and she passes the meal resting on the sofa, she eventually responds to Jim’s extroverted personality. They dance together and share a kiss, but the romantic interlude is cut short when Jim breaks one of Laura’s beloved glass figurines. The amorous spell broken, Jim tells Laura that he is engaged to another woman and that he can never see her again. After Jim leaves, Amanda blames Tom, accusing him of sabotaging the evening. In response, Tom storms out of the apartment. A few days later he leaves home for good.

Williams’s most autobiographical play, The Glass Menagerie was written to work through his painful early adult years. Williams crafted Tom in his own image and even named the character after himself— only in his late 20s did Williams change his name from Thomas to Tennessee. As does Tom Wingfield, Williams spent his later youth, adolescence, and early adulthood in St. Louis; attended Soldan High School; and wrote poetry while working at a shoe company. More important, as does Tom, Williams felt trapped between his individual goals and his familial obligations.

According to Lyle Leverich, Williams’s most thorough biographer, the playwright maintained two prevailing commitments: his writing career and his sister, Rose. Throughout Williams’s life, especially his early adult years, his obligations to each conflicted. In 1937, just when Rose was losing her grip on reality, Williams left St. Louis to study English at the University of Iowa. While Rose received questionable treatments in a psychiatric ward, Williams found therapy in his writing. Rose had no artistic outlet, no coping mechanism for the social and familial pressure to conform. Nor does Laura Wingfield, whose crippled leg is an outward sign of her psychological weaknesses.

The autobiographical correlations extend to Williams’s parents. Years after seeing Laurette Taylor’s legendary performance as Amanda Wingfield, Edwina Williams privately joked that “Mrs. Winfield” was her alias. As does Edwina, Amanda never adjusts to midwestern urban life, which she finds unaccommodating to southern values. Like Edwina, Amanda is a southern matriarch with a dominating personality, especially when dealing with her children. Yet, like Edwina, Amanda is no villain. Rather, her character is complex and often sympathetic. During the course of the play, she is callous and tender, selfish and generous, arrogant and vulnerable. Although Tom delivers the play’s most poignant lines, most critics consider Amanda the most rounded character.

In contrast to his mother’s dynamic onstage presence, Tom’s father, “a telephone man who fell in love with long distances,” is only a memory, symbolized by an oversized photograph hanging on the living room wall. Williams’s father, C. C. Williams, did not “skip the light fantastic out of town” and abandon his family. Nevertheless, his job, his disputes with Edwina, and his poor parenting skills estranged him from the rest of his family. Whereas the elder Wingfield physically deserts his wife and children, the elder Williams abandoned them emotionally and psychologically.

Although the biographical correspondences help explain Williams’s motivation for writing it, the play’s critical success and lasting appeal stem from its use of unconventional techniques to explore enduring human concerns. All the play’s major themes—the quest for individual freedom, the conflict between desire and duty, the young man’s need to forge his own identity—have been written about for centuries. However, Williams dealt with these themes in innovative ways. As he explains in the production notes, he hoped Menagerie would usher in an era of “plastic theater,” which would employ nonrealistic dramatic conventions in order to get underneath surface appearances and more closely approximate the “truth.” Williams opposes realism, which aims to reproduce human experience exactly as it seems to most people.

Several aspects of Menagerie are nonrealistic. Tom is both a character who interacts with other characters and the narrator who talks to the audience. In the latter capacity he sets up and comments on the action. The approach allows Williams to control the audience’s interpretation of the play, preventing viewers from overlooking or misunderstanding key elements. For instance, Tom clarifies his own character as a symbol “for the long delayed but always expected something that we live for,” he justifies the significance of several stage devices, and he explains the aims of the theater, which should convey truth “in the pleasant disguise of illusion.” By directly addressing the audience using poetic language instead of everyday speech, Tom draws attention to the artifice of theater.

He also does this, albeit more subtly, when speaking to other characters: In Scene 5, for example, he tells Amanda that “Mr. O’Connor has not yet appeared on the scene.” The term scene simultaneously means “in our apartment” and “at this point in the script.” In addition to the narration and dialogue, the set design and stage directions are nonrealistic. The production notes call for a large screen onto which thematic legends and images are projected. Aiming to evoke memory’s dreamlike quality, the script advises dim lighting and quaint music.

The unconventional staging and narration reflect the characters’ inability to untangle reality from appearance, perception, and imagination. The play challenges the distinction between memory and present experience and between the inner and outer self. Amanda’s identity is inseparable from southern codes of courtship and propriety. She measures a woman’s success by the number of “gentlemen callers” she attracts. She revels in her adolescence, proudly announcing she once attracted 17 suitors in a single day.

She fancies herself a paragon of social decorum, proper dress, and conversational ability. Yet, Amanda’s actions fall short of her self-perception. The gentleman caller she married as a teenager has since abandoned her. Even though she understands “the art of conversation,” she can neither sell magazine subscriptions nor talk to her son without prompting an argument; she is unable to teach her daughter how to emulate her self-declared social graces. Once she is stripped of the qualities on which she bases her identity, little of that identity remains.

While Amanda cannot separate reality from appearances, Tom and Laura cannot separate reality from imagination. Tom resembles the title character in William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, a play that explores the gray area between the inner, imaginative self and what Hamlet calls “that within which passeth show.” As Hamlet does, Tom lives within his mind, brooding about his place in the world and his family obligations. Both men long to escape prescribed social roles passed on by absent fathers. Yet, both men struggle to act. Their stories are marked by indecision and idleness.

When each finally acts, tragic consequences ensue. In Hamlet, these consequences are overt and tangible; the entire royal family, including Hamlet, dies. In The Glass Menagerie, the consequences are understated and symbolic. By pursuing his artistic ambitions, he revokes his familial responsibility, severing his connection to Laura and burdening Amanda with Laura’s care. The first step Tom takes toward independence—using the electric bill money to join a seaman’s union—leads to the termination of light in the apartment, signaling the symbolic death of a fraternal bond. He returns to the darkness/ death motif in his closing monologue, uttering the now-famous lines “for nowadays the world is lit by lightening.” Whereas Amanda escapes reality by harking back to a mythic southern past, Tom flees by immersing himself in an imaginary future.

Laura also surrenders to imagination, but unlike Tom, she cannot interact with the outside world. Laura resembles Shakespeare’s Ophelia, whom Hamlet forsakes in his quest to uncover his father’s killer. Both women display psychological abnormalities, yet male protagonists sacrifice both women: Ophelia is sacrificed by her former lover, Laura by her brother. Social realities prove too much for their psyches to bear. Ophelia commits suicide; Laura flees into a world of old music and glass figurines.

One of these figurines, Laura’s cherished unicorn, is the play’s most telling symbol. The unicorn’s beauty lies in its difference from other “plain” horses; the statuette shines more prominently than the other ornaments. Jim similarly assesses Laura. Reminded of his high school nickname for her, Jim tells Laura that, as with “Blue Roses,” her beauty lies in her departure from the norm. Unfortunately, when Jim breaks the unicorn’s horn, the link between beauty and difference breaks permanently. Laura tries to absolve Jim’s guilt, calling the broken horn “an operation” that makes the unicorn/horse “feel less freakish” and more “at home.”

The unicorn symbolizes a common character type in Williams’s dramas. Gerald Weales, one of the first scholars to write a comprehensive overview of Williams’s works, labeled this character type the “fugitive kind,” a term he borrowed from an early Williams play of the same name. The fugitive kind is an outcast, a person whose artistic temperament, sexual habits, mental instability, or physical deformity provokes the “insider’s” contempt. Usually, fugitive kinds are outcasts consigned to society’s fringe.

In one way or another, Laura, Tom, and Amanda fit the fugitive mold. At 24, unable to cope with the social and familial pressure to conform, Laura hangs on to the last shreds of sanity by avoiding all social interaction. Amanda fits the type for opposite reasons. Gregarious, pushy, and unabashedly southern, her values and personality strike a dissonant cord with midwestern city dwellers. Remarkably, Williams captures Amanda’s unfavorable St. Louis reception without casting a foil to accentuate her inability to assimilate. Instead, he emphasizes her fugitive standing through a series of failed telephone sales pitches Amanda delivers, hoping to sell magazine subscriptions to fellow Daughters of the American Revolution members.

With access only to Amanda’s side of these conversations, the audience witnesses her growing desperation not only to earn a meager supplemental income but also to communicate with her peers. Of all the Wingfield characters, however, Tom most clearly fits the fugitive mold. As he narrates the play from afar, Tom’s artistic ambitions isolate him from friends and family alike. As Amanda does, Tom moves further away from communal integration with every action he takes. In his closing monologue he summarizes his loneliness as an attempt “to find in motion what was lost in space.”

With his portrayal of the Wingfield family, Williams created a masterful psychological profile of the archetypal outcast. Known for his richly rendered character studies, Williams was also deeply concerned with sociopolitical problems, particularly with the way they shape an individual’s self-perception and limit his or her freedom of expression. Jim expands the fugitive kind model, situating it within a social arena outside the Wingfield apartment. At first, Jim seems to be the quintessential “insider.” A sort of antiTom, Jim is down to earth, personable, and, as his habit of calling Tom “Shakespeare” indicates, suspicious of intellectualism. A high school hero turned corporate lackey, Jim is “an emissary from a world of reality that [the Wingfields] were set apart from.” Yet as Tom, Laura, and Amanda do, Jim feels alienated and dissatisfied.

What separates Jim from the other characters is not that he is an insider, but, rather, that he has been seduced by the artificial comforts of conforming. Tom and Jim are foils for each other, each highlighting the other’s isolation. On the one hand, Jim accentuates Tom’s inability to fit in at work, where conformism is a way of life. On the other hand, Tom highlights Jim’s inability to chase his dreams. Whereas Tom’s desires estrange him from others, Jim compensates by seeking others’ affirmation.

The audience glimpses a genuine longing in the normally articulate Jim when he finds himself at a loss for words to describe his attraction to Laura. Another tragic figure, Jim turns his back on selffulfillment, living a socially approved but unromantic life with his fiancee. His tragedy is as great as Laura’s, Tom’s, or Amanda’s. To the extent that so many Americans can identify with Jim—his lack of fulfillment, his resignation to a bland existence—his tragedy may be the greatest of all.

For Discussion or Writing:
1. Would you consider yourself a “fugitive kind”? Why or why not? In your experience, is being an outsider a blessing or a curse?

2. The plot of The Glass Menagerie depends on a familiar literary convention: the introduction of a visitor who disrupts the lifestyle of the story’s main characters. Another famous southern writer working at the time, Flannery O’Connor uses this conceit in many of her stories. Read O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” and/or “Good Country People.” Compare and contrast Jim in Menagerie with the Misfit and/ or Manley Pointer in the O’Connor stories. In relation to each story’s plot and theme, what role do these characters play?

3. Although The Glass Menagerie received positive reviews, many critics faulted Williams for using heavy-handed stage devices, such as the legend and the flashing images. Discuss the play’s unconventional set. Do you think it adds to or detracts from the story?

4. Read a Streetcar Named Desire and compare Blanche DuBois with Amanda Wingfield. Both characters are aging southern belles who struggle to cope with a rapidly modernizing world. What are the similarities and differences between their respective environments? How do they react to those environments?