Tennessee Williams

THE GLASS MENAGERIE

Williams is considered one of the most important American playwrights since World War

II. The Glass Menagerie, his first successful Broadway production and the winner of the New

York Drama Critics Circle Award in 1944, established his reputation as an innovative dramatist

whose expressionistic style and complex themes revolutionized the American theater. In this

play, as in such later works as A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and The Night

of the Iguana, Williams combined lyrical, symbolic, and realistic elements to portray sensitive

individuals struggling to survive in a brutal, unsympathetic world. Centering on the vulnerability

and grace of its characters, The Glass Menagerie probes the fragile illusions that both sustain and

entrap them. It is a drama of `memory,' which transforms autobiography into lucid, objective art.

The Glass Menagerie is small, domestic, deeply felt, its lyricism reigned in by perception,

sentimentality tightened by insight, experiment anchored in sure classical techniques.

Williams wrote The Glass Menagerie while working as a screenwriter for Metro

Goldwyn Mayer, a major Hollywood production studio. Based on his short story Portrait of a

Girl in Glass, the play was originally presented to MGM executives as a script outline entitled

The Gentleman Caller. It was rejected, however, as his previous story ideas had been, and

Williams was eventually asked to leave the studio. He spent the remaining three months of his

contract revising the play, which soon attracted the attention of Eddie Dowling, a successful

Broadway actor who agreed to direct and perform in The Glass Menagerie. The production

debuted in Chicago on December 26, 1943, starring Laurette Taylor, whom many critics

regarded at that time as America's greatest stage actress. Laudatory reviews of the play and

Taylor's performance aroused the interest of critics and theatergoers in New York City, where

The Glass Menagerie opened to sold-out audiences the following March. Alan Chesler described

the atmosphere surrounding The Glass Menagerie as the excitement of experiencing the work of

a new talent and very likely a landmark in the history of American drama. Two weeks after its

arrival on Broadway, the play was awarded the New York Drama Critics Circle Award. Critics

generally agree that the revisions of dialogue and characterization contained in this version

improved upon the reading text and should be considered in discussions of the play.

In writing The Glass Menagerie Williams drew extensively upon his own experiences

and those of his family. The play revolves around Amanda Wingfield and her adult children,

Tom and Laura, who live, as Williams's family had, in a dingy tenement in depression-era St.

Louis. Williams's autobiographical protagonist, Tom, both narrates and participates in the action

onstage. He advises the audience in his opening soliloquy that the play is memory and features

characters who are aspects of his own consciousness, tinged by sentimentality. His retrospective

commentary continues throughout the play and provides an ironic counterpoint to the unfolding

events. A poet trapped in a tedious job at a shoe warehouse, Tom dreams of becoming a writer

and escapes nightly to the movies, where he vicariously experiences the adventure he craves.

Tom's sister, Laura, like Williams 's sister who was diagnosed as a schizophrenic, is debilitated

by shyness, forcing her to withdraw from reality and retreat into a fragile world of old

phonograph records and glass animals. The matriarch, Amanda, possesses many personality

traits that have been attributed to Williams's mother, Edwina Dankin Williams. A fading

southern belle abandoned by her husband, a telephone man who fell in love with long

distances”, Amanda clings to the past and memories of her genteel girlhood in Blue Mountain.

Yet she also exhibits a fierce determination to overcome her grim circumstances, and often

badgers her children about family responsibilities and planning for the future.

The dramatic action of The Glass Menagerie centers upon Amanda's attempt to obtain a

secure future for her daughter, who Amanda knows cannot survive independently. When Laura's

attempt to attend business school ends disastrously, Amanda acts on her final hope that a

husband can be found who will provide for and protect her daughter. She pesters Tom to choose

a suitable gentleman caller from among his coworkers, and, he eventually agrees to bring his

friend Jim O'Connor to dinner. Delighted, Amanda immerses herself in plans for his visit, the

prospect of a suitor for her daughter stirring memories of her own beaus in Blue Mountain.

Laura, however, is terrified and becomes physically ill when Jim arrives. Described in Tom's

narration as an emissary from a world of reality, Jim is a spirited young man who believes in

the power of self-improvement courses and the future of television. He is also the popular boy

for whom Laura secretly pined in high school. Left alone with Laura after dinner, he gradually

sets her at ease with his personable manner and eventually persuades her to dance. Their

movement is awkward, however, and they bump against the table that supports Laura's glass

unicorn, breaking its horn. The mood of the scene then shifts and what began as Jim's attempt to

build Laura's self-confidence becomes an expression of genuine admiration, ending with a kiss.

Apologizing, Jim explains that he is engaged and cannot call on Laura again. He leaves abruptly,

taking the unicorn that Laura gives him as a souvenir. Following Jim's departure, Amanda

berates Tom for having cruelly betrayed his family. Tom storms out of the apartment, leaving

Amanda alone to comfort Laura. The play concludes with a soliloquy by Tom in which he

reveals that he never returned to the tenement and that he chose, as his father had, to wander the

world. His final words are addressed to his sister and reveal his inability to assuage his guilt for

having abandoned her.

Commentators agree that the primary theme of The Glass Menagerie is the conflict

between illusion and reality. Amanda and Laura, considered among Williams most gentle

creations, are the first of his many vulnerable characters to use fantasy to escape harsh reality,

yet they do not rely on alcohol or sexual promiscuity to sustain their illusions as do such later

Williams protagonists as Blanche Dubois of A Streetcar Named Desire. While Williams

sympathetically portrayed their needs, he also dramatized, in the words of Joseph K. Davis, the

tragedy of indulging in the kinds of behavior and thinking that negate the possibilities of living.

This theme is explored at a more complex level through the character of Tom. As a participant in

the play, he shares in the escapism of his mother and sister. Yet, as its narrator, he communicates

the ambivalent attitude of one who has acted on his dreams. By confessing that he cannot forget

his sister, Tom also admits that he cannot permanently escape from the unreal world in which his

family lives.

As Williams exposed the falseness of the Wingfield's fantasies, he also condemned what

he perceived as the illusions of American society. For example, the South of Amanda's dreams

distinguished by jonquils, gentleman callers, and negro servants is an idealized popular fiction

that thwarts progress in the region just as it prevents Amanda from developing as a person.

Additionally, Jim's optimistic belief in America's capitalist system is subtly undercut by his

lowly position at the warehouse despite his many achievements in high school. Finally, in his

soliloquy on the social background of the play, Tom accuses the American middle class of

matriculating in a school for the blind as social unrest and violence sweep through Europe,

destined to explode as World War II.

Williams presented the themes of The Glass Menagerie through a complex blend of

symbolism, realism, and expressionism. While some critics have objected to the pervasiveness of

the play's symbols, most concur that they significantly enhance the meaning of the characters and

the action. For example, Laura's unique yet fragile personality is symbolized by the delicate glass

unicorn and Jim's high school nickname for her, Blue Roses. Similarly, the photograph of

Amanda's absent husband and the fire escape where the Wingfields find relief from the summer

heat signify liberation from the stifling atmosphere of the apartment and the family. Williams

drew on the realistic tradition in creating the setting and characters of The Glass Menagerie, yet

he also used several experimental production techniques involving screens, lighting, and music

to produce the sense of events recollected in memory. Most important, Williams infused the

dialogue of his characters with a poetic lyricism that universalizes the emotions enacted on the

stage. We noticed that through a profusion of symbolic references and a recurrent pattern of

anticipation, momentary fulfillment, and ultimate despair, the meaning of the play is enlarged. It

is not simply the story of one shy crippled girl, a neurotic mother, and a dreamer of a son, not the

story of just one more broken family, but an analogue of modern man's alienation from God and

isolation from his fellow man.

By writing The Glass Menagerie, Williams hoped to introduce a new, plastic theater

that would take the place of the exhausted theatre of realistic conventions. Along with Eugene

O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night and Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, The Glass

Menagerie is regarded as one of several works to have supplanted European sensibilities in the

American theater, communicating universal themes through a distinctly American voice. The

Glass Menagerie, through its union of transcendent lyricism and realistic family drama, remains

one of his most revered works.