The Glass Menagerie

The play “The Glass Menagerie,” by Tennessee Williams, explores the story of a dysfunctional 1930’s southern family and their quest for security, stability and happiness. Ever since her husband left her, the mother, Amanda, has been desperately searching for a suitor for her daughter Laura, whose eccentricities and poor physical health have made her so shy and insecure that it’s caused her to drop out of high school. Laura’s older brother, Tom, works in a shoe factory to try and support his mother and sister, while dreaming of a better life and losing himself in literature and drunkenness. After Tom invites a work associate named Jim to dinner, Amanda attempts to set Laura up with him as a potential suitor. Laura and Jim take a liking to one another as Jim correctly guesses at Laura’s inferiority complex, lets her know she should think better of herself and kisses her. Tragically, Jim is already engaged to be married. After he leaves, Amanda lashes out at Tom, assuming he had known of Jim’s engagement the entire time. At the end of the play, it is insinuated that Tom has left his family for good, as he bids farewell to his sister. Throughout the entire production, the audience experiences the family members’ disconnect from the situation they currently inhabit. As such, “The Glass Menagerie” by Tennessee Williams is truly the story of this family’s inability to accept or relate to reality.

The first argument that can be made in support of the idea that “The Glass Menagerie” is actually about the family’s lack of relation or acceptance to their present reality, is Tennessee Williams’ use of abandonment as a theme throughout the play. One of the first pieces of information divulged to the audience with regards to the history of the family is the fact that Amanda’s husband left her long ago. The play begins with a family in disarray as the son has been forced to take full time work to support his mother and mentally and physically ailing sister, after their father has abandoned them. This first abandonment sets the stage for the entirety of the play, as the physical and mental ailments of Amanda and Laura following this event is what eventually causes Tom to leave. The second time the audience is shown abandonment is through Tom’s frequent trips to the landing on the fire escape to smoke and be alone, abandoning his family and their troubles within the house and contemplating his potential, eventual exit from his current situation. Then, the audience is shown the theme of abandonment a third time after Jim leaves without any further possibility of maintaining a relationship with Laura, causing Amanda to lash out at Tom for his supposed knowledge of Jim’s engagement. The final scene where the audience is shown the theme of abandonment is when Tom decides to leave his family for good.

An additional argument to be made in favor of the central theme of “The Glass Menagerie” being that of an inability to accept reality, is the frequent, subtle mentions of the impossibility of true escape. At the onset of the play, Tom regales Laura with the story of a magician who had escaped from a coffin that had had the lid nailed shut. Tom’s fixation on the magician who escaped the coffin can be viewed as Tom’s own promise of escape to himself. His confinement within the house is his coffin, and the nails holding the lid shut and preventing his escape are his mother and Laura. Escape from this confinement, for Tom, means the suppression of the feelings he has for his family, something he doesn’t truly know if he’ll ever be able to do. He is an able bodied young man who is not imprisoned in the physical sense, but feels he has a moral obligation to his sister and his mother whom he loves, to provide for their well-being when they cannot. Tom’s trips to the fire escape also symbolize his realization at the impossibility of being able to truly escape his family and his current situation, specifically because of the temporary nature of his excursions; he only steps outside for a moment, to smoke and contemplate his life, and when he’s finished he steps back inside to be a part of a world in which he does not wish to participate. Tom does eventually escape his confinement, leaving his sister and mother at the end of the play after being chewed out for Amanda’s failure to set Laura up with Jim, due to his previous engagement. Even then, when he has worked up the nerve and successfully left his family, we can glean from his final speech his sadness at having had to do so, emphasizing the fact that while he is no longer physically in a repressive household, he will never be able to emotionally or psychologically escape the guilt he feels for abandoning his mother and sister. Tom himself says this in no uncertain terms near the end of his final speech:

I didn't go to the moon, I went much further - for time is the longest distance between places. Not long after that I was fired for writing a poem on the lid of a shoebox. I left Saint Louis. I descended the step of this fire-escape for a last time and followed, from then on, in my father's footsteps, attempting to find in motion what was lost in space - I travelled around a great deal. The cities swept about me like dead leaves, leaves that were brightly coloured but tom away from the branches. I would have stopped, but I was pursued by something. It always came upon me unawares, taking me altogether by surprise. Perhaps it was a familiar bit of music. Perhaps it was only a piece of transparent glass. Perhaps I am walking along a street at night, in some strange city, before I have found companions. I pass the lighted window of a shop where perfume is sold. The window is filled with pieces of coloured glass, tiny transparent bottles in delicate colours, like bits of a shattered rainbow. Then all at once my sister touches my shoulder. I turn around and look into her eyes ...Oh, Laura, Laura, I tried to leave you behind me, but I am more faithful than I intended to be!

A third argument in support of “The Glass Menagerie” being the story of the family’s ultimate inability to accept to or relate to reality, is the consistent mentions throughout the play of the power of memory. The story told in the play is given to the audience as such because of the immense grip it holds on the narrator’s memory. The play itself states in the opening scene that, “The play is memory. Being a memory play, it is dimly lighted, it is sentimental, it is not realistic” (CITATION). All of the characters in the play are haunted by their own memories, and it negatively affects their abilities to cope with reality: Amanda is haunted by the sense of abandonment felt after her husband left, and as a consequence, is unrealistically locked in her pursuit of her own youth. Laura is haunted by her memories of feeling inferior and insecure in the outside world, and has taken to coping with those feelings through the creation of her own world using her glass figurines. Tom is the only character not haunted by his memories. Instead, he is haunted by the consequences of his mother and sister’s fragile mental states due to their own inabilities to cope with daily life, which manifest themselves in Tom’s responsibility to a job he hates, a home life he despises just as equally and a life he dreams that he can have for himself if only he were able to escape. Ultimately, it is inferred that Tom, too becomes haunted by his memories of his family whom he left behind.

A final argument for the central theme of “The Glass Menagerie” as losing touch with reality, is the choices made with regards to the music in the play. The music is often coming from outside the play, where the audience can hear it yet the characters do not. It is reasonable to assume that the musical score that accompanies the play is music that accompanies the memory of an older, future Tom, upon whose memories the play is based. In the opening verse read by the narrator, he states “In memory everything seems to happen to music. That explains the fiddle in the wings. I am the narrator of the play, and also a character in it” (CITATION). The narrator acknowledges the music while the characters in the play remain unaware of its existence because they are not real people; they are the amalgamation of several facets of older Tom’s memory being presented to the audience as the story as it actually happened.

“The Glass Menagerie” by Tennessee Williams is a play devoted to exploring the social dynamics present inside a dysfunctional family, much like his other notable play, A Streetcar Named Desire. In the course of doing so, the play uses the themes of abandonment, the impossibility of true escape, the power of memories and the musical score to show the audience how the story unfolds through the eyes of the narrator, whose subjective views of his family and himself underscore the inability of any of the characters to accept or relate to reality.

Works Cited

Gross, Robert F. Tennessee Williams: A Casebook. New York: Routledge, 2002. Print.

Williams, Tennessee. The Glass Menagerie. New York: New Directions, 1999. Print.