The Glass Menagerie Research Paper

To cultivate acceptance and relate to reality can be a challenge. Because of that, many live in a dream world and resist the truth. The Glass Menagerie is a play by Tennessee Williams that chronicles the memories of the Wingfield family in the 1930’s. Throughout the play, Amanda, Laura and Tom struggles to live in the present. Instead, each draws to their separate world to escape the harsh reality.

Although the past may hurt, Amanda Wingfield chooses to anchor herself to it. She uses it as an escape from her current life. In the opening of the play, Amanda reminisces her youth at Blue Mountains when she received seventeen gentlemen callers. She told her children “One Sunday afternoon in Blue Mountains - your mother received - seventeen! -

In one of the scenes, Laura is described to be “washing and polishing her collection of glass” (11), which emphasizes her fragility and loneliness. Her engagement with the glass figurines demonstrates how painfully frightened she is to interact with others. The qualities of the glass figurines are parallel to Laura’s – delicate, vulnerable and unique. Laura’s self – consciousness makes her believe that everybody notices her limp. Her inability to overcome her childhood illness caused her to exclude herself from the rest. This is apparent when Laura said, “I went in the art museum and the bird houses at the Zoo. I visited the penguins everyday! Sometimes I did without lunch and went to the movies. Lately I’ve been spending most of my afternoon in the Jewel Box, that big glass house where they raise the tropical flowers.”

However, he lacks motivation to pursue his relationships at work and prefers to draw himself to the fantasies through movies and literature. As the play unfolds, Tom attends the movies almost nightly to avoid Amanda’s constant naggings. Later on, he mentioned that “I go to the movies because – I like adventure. Adventure is something I don’t have much of at work, so I go to the movies.” (33). This reveals that the movies were his way of adventure and he uses it to breakaway from his dull life. Throughout the play, Tom Wingfield is portrayed as an individual who wants new experience and greatness. He dreams of adventure in new places, far from St. Louis but his responsibilities for his family has kept him back. In scene 4, Tom’s fascination with the movies and magician exposes his need for fantasy. He stated, “The wonderfullest trick of all was the coffin trick.” (27) Tom sees the coffin as a symbol that represents his current life. The tricks executed on the coffin are what Tom wished he could do – to make an easy escape without destroying the