The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams, Essay Example

“Not one gentleman caller? It can’t be true!” (Williams, Scene I). This exclamation from Amanda Wingfield captures the complex fantasy/reality essence of The Glass Menagerie.  The play tends to reflect a Southern Gothic quality, one in which loss and decay dominate, and fuel fantasy.  This is a critical force within Menagerie, certainly, just as the “memory play” tells three distinct stories.  At the same time, and even as Tom’s discontent and Amanda’s need for illusion ultimately define these characters and are typically featured as driving the play’s momentum, it is the passive character of Laura that is pivotal to both.  Vulnerable, she is bullied by Amanda to be a different type of girl, just as Tom is protective of, and haunted by, her vulnerability.  Moreover, Williams provides a direct symbol of this in the collection of small glass figures prized by Laura, and the symbolism is dual in nature.  As the following explores, the actual menagerie of glass cherished by Laura is a potent and consistent symbol of both her own fragility, and the desperate clinging to illusion by Amanda Wingfield.

One of the most interesting aspect of the glass menagerie or collection itself is how the collection symbolizes several vital aspects of the drama, and highlights Amanda’s dependence on fantasy.  Williams presents a layered family dynamic, and one in which Tom and Amanda dominate.  Tom’s increasing restlessness leads to battles with Amanda, who responds by reciting aphorisms and through a greater insistence on celebrating her girlhood. It seems clear that Amanda greatly exaggerates her girlhood popularity, yet this expression of fantasy or subjective memory nonetheless motivates her to insist on the same, fictive reality for her daughter.  Early in the play, for example, Laura offers to clear the table, but Amanda insists on promoting illusion, and dreams clearly out of place; she commands Laura to prepare herself instead for men most certainly not coming to call: “Stay fresh and pretty! It’s almost time for our gentlemen callers to start arriving” (Williams, Scene I). This blatant denial of reality, so much a trait of Amanda’s character, is then reflected by Laura’s miniature glass collection; it is just as “decorative,” fragile, and ultimately of little to no real value.

At the same time, and even as Amanda consistently makes efforts to ignore or disguise realty, she has moments of pragmatism, and these highlight all the more her failure to understand Laura’s nature.  After making up with her son after a fight, Amanda seeks to enlist his help in securing a romantic partner for her daughter, as she believes that the introduction of such a man will overcome Laura’s nearly pathological shyness:

“We have to be making some plans and provisions for her. She’s older than you, two years, and nothing has happened” (IV).  The ambition is practical, but deeply misguided, and because Amanda fails to comprehend how Laura has invested her emotional being in her glass collection.  The reality is in fact ironic, in that Amanda’s reliance on illusion prevents her from understanding Laura’s similar need. The importance of the menagerie to Laura is never directly expressed, nor are the glass figures referred to a great deal.  Nonetheless, the few references then gain more impact, and the collection’s meaning to her as representing a safe, beautiful fantasy is all the more reinforced. At the close of Scene III, for example, Tom accidentally crashes into the shelf housing Laura’s collection, and the stage direction here speaks volumes: “Laura cries out as if wounded” (III).  In her world of pretending to go to business school and otherwise gently trying to secure peace between her mother and brother, the menagerie represents Laura’s intense fragility, and through emphasizing her emotional need to retreat from life and embrace what is as fragile as herself. None of this, moreover, is understood by Amanda.

Then, the final scene in which Laura and Jim interact reinforces both her distance from the world and her emotional reliance on the collection.  In a further irony, Jim expresses to Laura the kind of platitudes used by Amanda, as when he argues with her admitted shyness: “People arc not so dreadful when you know them. That’s what you have to remember!” (VII).  He is as oblivious as Amanda as to Laura’s true nature, and his ultimate revelation about being engaged triggers in Laura a reaction emphasizing her attachment to the menagerie.  Initially, she minimizes the collection to Jim: “Little articles of it, they’re ornaments mostly…Most of them are little animals made out of glass, the tiniest little animals in the world” (Scene VII). When, however, she learns the truth about Jim’s romantic status and must discard whatever hopes she has developed regarding him, she makes a sacrifice of the unicorn he broke, placing it in his hand.  Jim is touched and confused: “What are you – doing that for? You want me to have him? Laura?” (VII). What he cannot know is that Laura is giving him a piece of herself, to honor what might have been.  The menagerie, then, completely reflects her being, just as it also symbolizes Amanda’s reliance on fantasy.

Symbolism in the theater is inherently a risky strategy, and the risk is amplified when, as in Williams, the work so embodies Southern Gothic elements.  It nonetheless works perfectly in The Glass Menagerie, and chiefly because the symbolic glass collection, like Laura herself, is set out as a passive reality beneath the dominant struggles of Tom and Amanda. Ultimately, the actual menagerie of glass cherished and protected by Laura is a powerful and consistent symbol of both her own fragility, and the desperate clinging to illusion by Amanda Wingfield.

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