Date 6/4/00 125326 PM Eastern Daylight Time Essay Example For Students

Date: 6/4/00 12:53:26 PM Eastern Daylight Time Essay POeDate:6/4/00 12:53:26 PM Eastern Daylight TimeThe Glass Menagerie: Plight of the WingfieldsIn Tennessee Williams: A Portrait in Laughter and Lamentation, Harry Rasky uses extensive interviews with Williams to explore the playwright’s intent. Through these interviews, Rasky presents a glimpse of the playwright’s life-world and the driving force behind his creations. Rasky reports Williams as saying: â€Å"I have always been more interested in creating a character that contains something crippled. I think nearly all of us have some kind of defect, anyway, and I suppose I have found it easier to identify with the characters who verge on hysteria, who were frightened of life, who were desperate to reach out to another person† (134). This statement supports the idea that Williams incorporates something crippled into all his major characters. In The Glass Menagerie, Tennessee Williams portrays a crippling mother and child relationship comprising fundamental themes of dysfunctionalism. He poignantly illustrates that none of the characters are capable of living in the present. They believe their functionality and life’s happiness lies in their repeated quests for escape from plight. As such, they retreat into their separate worlds to escape life’s brutalities. Their daily tribulations thrive in an overcrowded building’s rear apartment where lower middle-class population is a symptomatic impulse of a large and fundamentally enslaved section in American society. Set in Depression-era St. Louis, the overbearing Southern ex-charmer, Amanda Wingfield is the de facto head of the household. A former Southern belle, Amanda is a single mother who behaves as though she still is the high school beauty queen. Williams’ still-resonant study reveals her desperate struggle with the forces of fate against her dysfunctional relationship that looms and grows among her adult children. (Gist) Laura, Amanda, Tom, and Jim resort to various escape mechanisms to avoid reality. Laura, fearful of being denigrated as inferior by virtue of her innate inability to walk, is shy and detaches herself from the unfeeling modern world. Amanda tries every means to integrate her into society, but to no avail. She sends her to business school and invites a gentle man caller to dinner. She is both unable to cope with the contemporary world’s mechanization represented by the speed test in typing and unable to make new acquaintances or friends due to her immense inhibition with people. Her life is humdrum and uneventful, yet it is full of dreams and inundated with memories. Whenever the outside world threatens Laura, she seeks solace and retreats to her glass animal world and old phonograph records. Amanda, her mother hints at the alternative of matrimony for fiasco in business careers and Laura â€Å"utters a startled, doubtful laugh. She reaches quickly for a piece of glass.† (Williams, ). The glass menagerie becomes her tactile consolation. The little glass ornaments represent Laura’s self and characterize her fragility and delicate beauty. In particular, the glass unicorn greatly symbolizes her. As the unicorn is different from all the other glass horses, it adds a unique quality and virtual â€Å"freakishness† t o her very characteristics (Kapcsos). Laura’s physical handicap differentiates her from others. She is just as easily broken as the glass unicorn is as unique. She instantly regresses, just as it appears that Laura finally overcomes her shyness and hypersensitivity with Jim, the gentleman caller. Jim accidentally bumps into the unicorn, as it falls and breaks. The unicorn no longer retains its unique quality. To comfort Laura, he kisses her and then shatters her hopes and dreams by telling her he is engaged. Both Laura and the glass menagerie break upon exposure to the outside world. Laura offers Jim her broken unicorn, symbolizing her broken heart that Jim will take with him. She is unable to cope with the truth and once again retreats to her fantasy world of glass figurines and Victrola records. Laura can only live a brief moment in reality. Amanda obsesses over her past. The moment Tom or Laura worry her, she uses her Mississippi Delta childhood memories like a cooling balm. She flashes back to her days dancing at the governor’s ball in Jackson, Mississippi and recalls the gentlemen’s â€Å"chivalric nature† during her youth. (Ghiotto) She constantly reminds Tom and Laura about that â€Å"one Sunday afternoon in Blue Mountain† when she receives seventeen gentlemen callers (Williams, 148). The reader is not confident that this actually occurs. However, it is clear that despite its possible falsity, Amanda has come to believe it. She refuses to acknowledge that her daughter is crippled and refers to her handicap as â€Å"a little defecthardly noticeable† (Williams, 157). Only for brief moments does she ever admit that her daughter is â€Å"crippled† and then she resorts back to denial. Moreover, Amanda does not perceive anything realistically. While she has not met him yet, she be lieves that Jim is the man that will rescue Laura. As Laura nervously awaits Jim’s arrival, Amanda tells her, â€Å"You couldn’t be satisfied with just sitting home† (Williams, 192). Yet, Laura prefers that. Amanda cannot distinguish reality from illusion. Amanda dresses in the same girlish frock she wore on the day she met their father. Upon Jim’s arrival, she reverts to her childish, giddy days of entertaining gentlemen callers. Amanda chooses to live in the past. How Moods Are Affected By The Sun EssayAlthough Jim pulls himself into the Wingfield’s illusory world, he sustains his reality senses. This accounts for why Jim is such a â€Å"stumble john† in the Wingfield apartment. He is more realistic than the others and is clumsy in such a delicate world. Likewise, Laura’s fragility and hypersensitivity prevent her from participating in the outside world, a world that is harsh and brutal. Just as Jim is clumsy in Laura’s world, Laura is clumsy in Jim’s world, as she slips and falls on the fire escape and in another instance, throws up on the floor at Business School. Laura’s irrational fear of the outside explains why she cannot successfully enter the outside world. The major characters in this play are so warped and their lives so distorted and perverted by fantasies that each is left with only broken fragments of what might have been. Accordingly, Judith Thompson, in Tennessee Williams: Memory, Myth , and Symbol, believes that memory is the avenue Williams uses to approach the collective unconscious. Through Tom’s recollections, Williams demonstrates how powerful memories revolve around characters whose actions reflect the inner turmoil of the person doing the remembering. Thompson states that Williams’ characters are representatives of a modern suffering humanity, victimized by their own conflicting drives and desires and existentially alienated from a world become a metaphysical ‘heap of broken images’ (11). These representatives form the constituency of Tom’s consciousness; the suffering in each character reflects Tom’s pain. Along with this, Williams reveals that one’s inability to communicate functionally in meaningful ways with other human beings is one of the modern life’s most tragic situations. His interpretation of familial love, shattered hopes, frustration to the point of rage, entrapment, and ultimate guilt throughout The Glass Menagerie depicts each character’s gloom and futile dreams. Tom, Laura, and Amanda seem to believe that escape is possible. Inevitably, no character makes a clean break from the situation at hand. Perhaps Tennessee Williams conveys a message that running away is not a means to solving life’s problems. One’s only escape in life is to solve their problems, not to avoid them. Gist, Richard. The Glass Menagerie 5 April 1997. *http://saber.towson.edu/gist/glass.html*. Ghiotto, Chubby. â€Å"The Glass Menagerie.† Alligator Online 5 March 1998. 15 March 1998 *http://hipp.gator.net/glass_alligator_review.html*. Ng, Ben. â€Å"Dreams and the Notion of Escape in the Glass Menagerie.† Home page. May 1999 *http://web.hku.hk/h9818830/EngLit3.html*. Kapcsos, Kristal. â€Å"The Glass Menagerie.† Online posting. 13 Nov. 1997. The Glass Menagerie 21 Nov. 1997 *http://www.mccnic.mohave.az.us/wcb/schools/NMC/dl/dtimpson/1/forums/forum12/me†¦/26.html*. Rasky, Harry. Tennessee Williams: A Portrait in Laughter and Lamentation. New York: Dodd, Mead Co., 1986. Thompson, Judith J. Tennessee Williams’ Plays: Memory, Myth, and Symbol. New York: Peter Lang, 1989. Williams, Tennessee. â€Å"The Glass Menagerie.† The Theatre of Tennessee Williams. Vol. 1. New York: New Directions, 1990. Bibliography: