- Play title: The Glass Menagerie
- Author: Tennessee Williams
- First performed: 1944
- Page count: 116
Summary
The Glass Menagerie was Tennessee Williams’ first big theatrical success. It is a play about the Wingfield family who live in a small apartment in St. Louis during the 1930s. The family unit consists of an abandoned, middle-aged mother named Amanda and her two adult children: Tom, a budding writer, and Laura, a mildly disabled and ultra-shy girl. Williams gives this play a solid historical context by referencing hardship and poverty in the American lower-middle classes in the 1930s. He also notes specific international events like the bombing of Guernica in Spain. However, this is not a work of realism but is described instead as a “memory play.” Tom is the main narrator, and the events described are his recollections of his family. While Tom is headstrong and independent, Laura is socially awkward and does not thrive. The central story is about how Amanda, an old-fashioned Southerner, becomes increasingly desperate to find a suitable “gentleman caller” for Laura in the hope of an eventual marriage. The glass menagerie of the title is a collection of delicate glass figurines owned by Laura.
Ways to access the text: reading/listening
There are multiple online sources for this text. For example, there is a PDF file of the play text on the educational website http://www.pval.org. Alternatively, you may source the text via the Open Library (registration needed). The Open Library version is more reader-friendly due to the page formatting.
There is a full audiobook version of the play on YouTube. The recording is divided into two files with a total running time of 1hr and 46mins. However, please note that these have been recorded from an original vinyl record and there is, at times, a distinct scratching sound on the 2nd file. The file names are listed below.
“Tennessee Williams – The Glass Menagerie (Act One)”
“Tennessee Williams – The Glass Menagerie (Act Two)”
Why read/listen to The Glass Menagerie?
A Dependent Daughter.
Amanda Wingfield’s daughter Laura is quite a distinctive character but primarily for what may be seen as negative characteristics. She is mildly disabled on account of a permanent limp, but shyness is her overriding disability. Tennessee Williams is said to have based Laura on his own sister Rose, and it may explain why this character holds such a significant role in the play. Williams explores, from a mother’s perspective, the problem of having a reclusive daughter. Although Laura sometimes goes out in public, her social ineptitude means that she is known by very few people. This makes her ever more vulnerable to the influences within her family especially since she is accommodating and generally passive. One of the key dilemmas of the play is Laura’s uncertain future. The socio-economic backdrop of 1930s America serves to exaggerate the pressures on this already struggling family. Williams explores how someone as loved as Laura is by her family, may still be subjected to certain cruelties by her apparent protectors. In the opinion of Mrs Wingfield, a dependent daughter has only two choices: a career or marriage. Laura is pushed towards both solutions respectively.
A Play Made of Memory.
In the opening scene, the play is presented as a memory of Tom. Tom is essentially the narrator of, and a character in, his own story. This frames the play in a most self-conscious manner; it is the theatrical staging of the personal and therefore wholly subjective memory of one single character. This is intriguing for at least three reasons. For instance, Tom secretly functions as a mouthpiece for the playwright who is processing the Williams family history. As a memory, the play’s action is also curiously located in the past even though it happens before our eyes on stage. Finally, the nature of memory calls into question the truth/reliability of the events depicted. Indeed, Williams highlights many of these issues in the play’s introduction.
One witnesses the replaying of an extended personal memory of Tom. One should therefore attune one’s focus to the subtle differences between generic events (mealtimes or habitual arguments) and standout scenes involving life-changing events. The first is the reel tape of home life but the second category involves memories charged with high emotion and thus branded into the mind’s vaults. Is Tom even present in all the scenes he describes? What level of artistic licence is being employed by Tom? Finally, why is the protagonist so obsessed with this memory? The answers to these questions lurk within the text.
Post-reading discussion/interpretation
A Pawn in a Game.
Even though Laura is the chief focus in the play, she is contradictorily just a pawn in a game. The game is a battle for dominance between Amanda and Tom: each in pursuit of quite contrasting individual wishes. In the absence of Mr Wingfield senior, Amanda expects Tom to continue financially supporting the family, and Laura’s dependence makes this arrangement appear unending. Laura’s prospects directly impact the lives of her mother and brother. Tom pessimistically describes Laura as “terribly shy” and a girl who “seem[s] a little peculiar to people,” whereas Amanda optimistically says that her daughter is “lovely and sweet and pretty.” Each stakeholder in Laura’s future expresses a bias based on their own underlying fears. The family is generally protective of Laura, but specific familial actions are not devoid of cruelty. Laura’s shyness and reserve make it difficult for her to express any contradictory views, despite witnessing decisions being made on her behalf. Williams fills the text with subtle hints concerning Laura’s predicament. The sources of hurt in Laura’s life are varied: economically depressed societal conditions, unending mother-daughter comparisons, escalating family resentments, and Laura’s exclusion from decision making. Tom as narrator restricts an audience’s focus to his perspective, but Laura’s story is clearly one of disempowerment. Indeed, the strongest evidence that Laura is wronged is Tom’s unquenchable guilt. The play is a merging of his memories, but he is incapable of abandoning these hurtful episodes to the past.
The Wingfield family is enmeshed in the dire societal conditions of 1930s America. This means impoverishment and the concurrent absence of any prospects. Even though The Glass Menagerie is not a work of realism, Williams makes pointed references to the social and economic conditions of the times for reasons that soon become apparent. He describes the Wingfield family apartment as typical of the “vast hive-like conglomerations of cellular living units” in the “overcrowded urban centres” of America. The inhabitants of such neighbourhoods as “fundamentally enslaved.” Slavery may be understood in two distinct ways in the play. First, there are Amanda’s derogatory references to black servants: a memory from her youth in Mississippi. On one occasion when Laura wishes to serve table in their little apartment, Amanda says, “No, sister, no, sister – you be the lady this time and I’ll be the darkey.” However, the era of slaves is long gone, as is the era of black servants for the Southern belle Amanda who must now contend with her impoverished conditions. Even though Williams refers to Amanda’s current social position in America’s lower middle class as “enslaved,” it is arguably the burden of a disabled, socially awkward child that truly enslaves Amanda and, by extension, Tom too. Enslavement indicates the loss of hope, or at best a false and always unfulfilled hope, and this is also true of the Wingfield family. Amanda lectures Tom, saying “Life’s not easy, it calls for – Spartan endurance!” It is this mindset that fuels a covert resentment towards the fragile Laura who is the only family member who does not strive for independence. For Amanda, hope lives only in her Mississippian past when everything was possible: even marriage to the “Fitzhugh boy” who had the “Midas touch.” For Tom, the future alone offers hope in the charming guises of freedom and success. Laura unknowingly cements both figures in a depressing present tense of hardship that neither of them can escape.
The pressures are not just societal; there are also household frictions that serve to hurt Laura. One of the most evident and indeed harshest examples of Amanda’s cruelty toward Laura is the implicit comparison continually made between mother and daughter. Amanda’s worn-out story of the seventeen gentleman callers in one day back in “Blue Mountain” is certainly evidence that she seeks refuge and solace in her own, once-promising past. However, the story also serves as Amanda’s cue to pose the discomfiting question to Laura regarding “gentleman callers.” An embarrassed Laura dutifully replies on one occasion, “I’m just not popular like you were in Blue Mountain.” Apart from being an ego boost to the ageing beauty Amanda, the interplay is clearly hurtful to Laura. It would be possible to dismiss Amanda’s question as just mild teasing except for her conscious insistence that no one in the house ever refers openly to Laura’s disability, not even to Laura herself. By ignoring her daughter’s obvious disability, Amanda puts significant, additional pressure on Laura to achieve the goals set for her regarding admirers and romance. According to Amanda, a girl’s two chief routes in life are marriage and career. Amanda first encouraged her 23-year-old daughter to enrol at Rubicam’s Business School, so marriage was not considered Laura’s best prospect for independence. Unfortunately, Laura’s debilitating self-consciousness, most evident in pressurized situations, causes her to drop out of education (again). Only then does Amanda decide on marriage as an alternative solution. In fact, when Amanda happens upon the idea, it is like a eureka moment: “sister, that’s what you’ll do!” A prospective marriage becomes a desperate last attempt for the family to unburden itself of a dependent daughter. Amanda’s consciousness of her daughter’s predicament reveals the sharp cruelty of the aforementioned mother and daughter comparisons.
It is relatively easy to identify the sources of Tom and Amanda’s thinly veiled resentments toward Laura. Tom is now the family wage earner in the absence of his father who abandoned them years previously. Amanda unashamedly uses Laura’s situation to force Tom to stay in a work environment that he hates. In consequence, Tom must suspend or even abandon his future dreams. Once Amanda discovers that Tom secretly plans to join the Merchant Marine, she strikes a deal with him so that he can leave home – “but not till there’s somebody to take your place,” which means a gainfully employed husband for Laura. The deal initiates an ongoing family conversation on the topic of securing a “gentleman caller” for Laura: something that becomes “an obsession” for Amanda. It is understandable that Tom, a budding writer who settles for work in a shoe factory, may come to resent the burden of his sister’s ongoing dependency. On Tom’s drunken night out, he sees the “coffin trick” performed by “Malvolio the Magician” and later remarks to Laura, “There is a trick that would come in handy for me – get me out of this 2 by 4 situation.” Tom clearly feels trapped in his current circumstances. Williams enhances the symbolism of the apartment’s fire escape by referring to the “implacable fires of human desperation.” Tom indeed exits by the fire escape in the end. In contrast to Tom, Amanda’s reason to resent Laura is, at least initially, less apparent. However, the answer lies in her envisioned shared future with her daughter. Amanda dismissively speaks of unmarried women as “barely tolerated spinsters” and “little bird-like women without any nest – eating the crust of humility all their life!” Amanda then asks the rhetorical question – “is that the future we’ve mapped out for ourselves?” If Laura is destined for impoverished spinsterhood, then it is a destiny she condemns her mother to as well. The power struggle between Amanda and Tom becomes a high-stakes game as both risk their futures. Laura is the anchor that binds both of them to an unsatisfactory, current living situation.
It is conspicuous that Laura is continually excluded from decision making by her family. Laura was likely cajoled or coerced into joining business school as this would explain her deep shame at having dropped out. If extra schooling had been Laura’s original aim, then surely her failure would not have prompted Amanda’s “awful suffering look … like the picture of Jesus’ mother.” It appears that Laura dashes her mother’s dreams rather than her own, or as Amanda puts it “all of our plans – my hopes and ambition for you – just gone up the spout.” In regard to organizing a gentleman caller, Laura is again infantilized by her mother since she is excluded from Amanda’s “plans and provisions.” In fact, Amanda sends Laura to the shops for butter so that she may discuss Laura’s future and the possibility of a gentleman caller with Tom privately. The mother and son have dissimilar characters, and they also hold opposing views about Laura. Tom loves his sister but recognises her obvious limitations while Amanda persists in ignoring the obvious, thus courting disaster. When Tom finally accedes to his mother’s demands and arranges for Jim O’Connor to visit then the proceedings quickly become a mockery of romance. To begin, Jim does not know the “ulterior motives” for the dinner invitation. In fact, he has no knowledge at all of Laura’s existence. Similarly, Laura does not know the identity of the visitor until just before his arrival, and it is unclear whether she even suspects her mother’s master plan. Amanda is quite insensitive to her daughter’s predictable distress: the gentleman caller is none other than Laura’s high school crush. Laura repeatedly asks to be excused from the evening’s proceedings but is denied her request. Amanda’s plan does not accommodate her daughter’s obvious social limitations, and she dismisses the girl’s growing anxiety by saying “I don’t intend to humour your silliness” and “I’m sick, too – of your nonsense!” Laura is finally excused from the charade but only when she stumbles and almost faints at the dinner table (practically sick with anxiety). Despite this glaring faux pas, Amanda persists. She directs Jim to go and sit with Laura after dinner. Amanda even tries desperately to arrange further dates until the news of Jim’s fiancé, Betty, shatters all prospects. The whole evening is an exposition of Laura’s powerlessness.
The two dominant characters, Amanda and Tom, battle over issues of money, freedom, and the future. Laura morphs into a burden that holds each of them back in separate ways. Laura is not like her mother, “possessed of a pretty face and a graceful figure … a nimble wit and a tongue to meet all occasions.” Instead, she is a young woman who lives in her mother’s shadow because she can never live up to unrealistic expectations. The result of the family machinations is that Laura becomes an obstacle to Tom’s future. He is shackled to the family home until he finds someone to replace him as the wage earner and marry his sister. Laura’s predicament seems impossible to solve to the satisfaction of her mother or brother. Tom’s eventual departure is an expression of his frustration. As Laura was apparently based on Tennessee Williams’ sister Rose, one may assume that the depiction, though laden with symbolism, resonates with the life of a tragic figure. Laura never complains so it is for the reader alone to take her perspective into account when judging each scene.
The closing episode of The Glass Menagerie exposes the pitiful truth of the family situation. In a fit of despair, Amanda chastises Tom, saying, “Don’t think about us, a mother deserted, an unmarried sister who’s crippled and has no job!” This description of Laura is for once unadorned by euphemisms thus revealing the harsh yet always present reality. Amanda’s twin hopes for a marriage or career for Laura are shown to be equally unattainable. Amanda’s description of her daughter as “crippled” reveals the potent anger of someone who cannot fix the situation and who relies on her son to burden a responsibility that is not rightly his. Amanda tells the truth, for once, but only when she feels it will weigh Tom down with enough guilt to make him stay – it does not. The Wingfield daughter, Laura, stands at the centre of this family storm and we are never quite sure how much she understands or how much she hurts. If she is indeed as fragile as her little glass figurines, then the hurt is substantial. The Wingfield daughter is a pawn in a game best described as a power struggle for survival between mother and son against the backdrop of a depressed, hopeless economy. Laura loses the most and she does so silently.
“Shakespeare’s Sister.”
There are several notable references to Shakespeare in The Glass Menagerie. Jim O’Connor who is Tom’s friend and fellow worker at the shoe factory is the man who gives Tom the amusing moniker of “Shakespeare.” The nickname was originally prompted by Tom’s habit of going to the washroom to write poems during slack work periods. To call an aspiring writer who works in a dead-end job by the name of the most famous writer in history can be interpreted in many ways. As a nickname, it is mildly disparaging but also somehow hopeful. In an essay entitled “The Catastrophe of Success,” Williams wrote of his own long struggle before he attained success, namely with The Glass Menagerie. The character of Tom is most representative of Williams as a young, struggling writer and this struggle has artistic dividends in Williams’ view. In this light, Tom’s nickname is a mark of honour because it symbolizes the preparatory work: hard and very valuable work that normally comes before any breakthrough. The references to Shakespeare in the play are, however, more extensive. For example, Laura is referred to as “Shakespeare’s sister” by Jim, and this is clearly an allusion to Virginia Woolf’s extended essay “A Room of One’s Own,” which proposes the hypothetical situation that Shakespeare had a sister. Thus, Tom and Laura respectively become Shakespeare and his unknown sister. Furthermore, Jim refers to the Shakespearean character Romeo when talking about his love life, and Jim quotes a few famous lines of Ophelia’s from Hamlet. Lastly, the memorably named “Malvolio the Magician” whom Tom sees perform, may be a reference to the character Malvolio in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. The task for a reader is to make sense of these various references to Shakespeare within The Glass Menagerie.
To begin, one may take a broad overview when seeking links between The Glass Menagerie and Shakespeare. One quickly finds a clear connection between Williams’ “memory play” and Shakespeare’s most famous play Hamlet where the ghost of old King Hamlet, the ghost of the past, implores his son to, “remember me” (1.5.91). Old King Hamlet wants his son to correct an injustice. Therefore, in each case, the play’s chief protagonist, Tom or Hamlet, is forced to look back at events that evoke a sense of responsibility and ultimately guilt. Another parallel between these two plays is that the characters of Laura and Ophelia are both mentally fragile women who are spurned by the men they love. We may now hop to a separate Shakespearean play, Romeo and Juliet, because Jim aligns very well with the figure of Romeo (with whom he identifies) since he is charismatic and very much idealized in Laura’s eyes. Laura’s heartbreak is sealed by Jim’s kiss because this man she adores then goes on to announce his engagement to Betty and declares it impossible to see Laura again. When Jim leaves the Wingfield household in the climactic scene of the play, he says, “So long, Shakespeare! Thanks again, ladies – Good night.” This quote returns one to Hamlet since it echoes Ophelia’s line, “Good night, ladies, good night. Sweet ladies” (Hamlet 4.5.73). The link between the scenes is that Ophelia has suffered a mental breakdown due to the death of her father Polonius and her earlier cruel rejection by her lover, Hamlet; and now we have Laura who also ‘lost’ her father and has been rejected by the one man she loves, Jim. The parallels between The Glass Menagerie and Hamlet are quite strong. One odd point is that Jim speaks Ophelia’s lines and not Laura. One possible explanation is that Laura is repeatedly depicted as virtually voiceless in the story, so we constantly learn of her predicament through others’ commentaries. The focus is nonetheless clearly on a heartbroken Laura with Tom as the Shakespeare-like figure who constructed the entire play from a painful memory. It is also a painful remembrance that is the thorn at the centre of the play Hamlet, forcing the young Prince into mental anguish and indecision.
The reference to “Shakespeare’s sister” is quite interesting in its own right. In “A Room of One’s Own,” Virginia Woolf’s key point regarding this fictional sister is that “it would have been impossible, completely and entirely, for any woman to have written the plays of Shakespeare in the age of Shakespeare” (58). Woolf then goes on to construct just such a woman, writing, “Imagine, since facts are so hard to come by, what would have happened had Shakespeare had a wonderfully gifted sister, called Judith” (58). The fictional biography of Judith is that she is just as talented as her brother William. However, she is barred from educational opportunities on account of the restrictions of the historical era; she is burdened by the expectations of her sex (marriage and domesticity); she runs away from home and tries to succeed as an actress; and finally, she gets pregnant and then tragically commits suicide! This synopsis does an injustice to Woolf’s story, but it makes explicit the kind of comparison being employed by Williams to illuminate the character of Laura. Even in 1930s America, Laura is restricted to just two life choices, and these are marriage or a gender-appropriate career. Yet, much like a solitary writer/artist who has no adequate outlet for her talents, this girl “lives in a world of her own.” It is not clear if Laura is in fact talented, but she certainly has a well-developed imagination as proven by her obsession with the assorted characters in the glass menagerie. Unfortunately, Laura, like Shakespeare’s sister Judith, is obstructed from expressing herself in any manner that does not conform to societal expectations. Jim’s throwaway joke of calling Laura “Shakespeare’s sister” is Williams’ ingenious way of giving us a glimpse of Laura’s potential. A girl walled in by suffocating expectations who lives in a world that is only a shadow of the life possible for Tom.
Tom is the Shakespeare figure in this play, so one must not forget that he artistically shapes the presentation of his own memories. In that case, is this modern-day poet moulding his memories to ameliorate his guilt? Laura’s story does not end as tragically as Judith’s, but we still sense a bleak, unfulfilling future ahead of her. When reading the play, it is of particular note that Tom is conspicuously absent in the scene between Jim and Laura, so it is most definitely a work of poetic imagination on Tom’s behalf. Is it not strange that a girl as fragile as Laura not only receives a kiss from the boy she loves in a fantasy scene but also forgives him when he breaks her prized glass unicorn? After all, the glass unicorn is symbolic of Laura’s delicate character and breaking it surely means a crushing, psychological blow. When Tom previously breaks one of her other glass figurines, Laura is inconsolable and screeches “My glass! – menagerie.” This is the same girl who cannot join the dinner table group due to overwhelming anxiety when Jim is present. Yet Tom as Shakespeare crafts a scene where she forgives a clumsy young man and even gives him her prized possession as a “souvenir.” Also of note is that Laura has no lines at the play’s ending, in fact, no lines after Jim leaves with her good wishes ringing in his ears. As Williams cautions at the play’s opening, “Memory takes a lot of poetic license.” One may even interpret the reference to Laura as “Shakespeare’s sister” as containing two opposing voices – the sympathetic playwright Williams (on account of his sister Rose) and the bristling, overburdened character Tom. In modern America, a frustrated brother would expect Laura to work just as hard as others to succeed instead of allowing a “little defect” to determine her life. Maybe Tom not only envies “Malvolio the Magician[’s]” escape trick but is also like the Malvolio character in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night: Malvolio was duped to perform a certain role due to his love of a woman, but he eventually realizes that “there was never a man so notoriously abused” (4.2.78). It may seem ironic to debate if Tom seeks to lessen his feelings of guilt in a play defined by guilt. Yet the shaping of memory is complex work. However, in the end, even this modern “Shakespeare” seems unable to quench a memory that haunts him every time he looks in a shop window and sees “pieces of coloured glass.”
Works Cited
Shakespeare, William. Hamlet, edited by T. J. B. Spencer, Penguin Books, 2005.
Shakespeare, William. Romeo and Juliet, edited by Horace Howard Furness, J. B. Lippincott Company, 1913.
Shakespeare, William. Twelfth Night. Hodder and Stoughton, 1908.
Williams, Tennessee. “The Catastrophe of Success.” New York Times, 30 November 1947.
Williams, Tennessee. The Glass Menagerie. Signet, 1987.
Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. Read Books Ltd, 2012.
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