The Glass Menegerie
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- Category: English: Plays
- Date Submitted: 11/02/2011 09:22 AM
- Pages: 7
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Thesis Statement: The absence of individual independence in each of the characters in “The
Glass Menagerie” causes them to want to escape into their own world of fantasy.
I. Amanda’s personal escape is within the memory of her youth.
A. Tennessee Williams describes Amanda as trying to live in the past.
1. Domina writes, “Yet although she has kept her husband's photograph on her wall, Amanda sometimes seems to forget that she chose to marry a less-than-ideal man. She speaks frequently, almost obsessively, of the Sunday afternoon when she received “seventeen!—gentlemen callers!” (Domina).
2. Amanda talks of her past in the sense that she was better than females today. “Girls in those days knew how to talk, I can tell you” (1.25).
II. Laura’s escape is within her love for unreal objects and fantasies.
A. Lauras love for her glass animals and material objects is a way of her not to face people but to escape to her own little world. “Lately I’ve been spending most of my afternoons in the Jewl Box, that big glass house where they raise the tropical flowers” (2.29).
B. Cardullo says, “Like a romantic, then, Laura has a love for Nature in addition to Art – a nature that is artfully memorialized in her collection of little animals made out of glass” (Cardullo).
III. Tom’s escape is clearly the movies and his imagination. He says he goes to the movies but it is not a proven fact. He longs for a day to be his own man.
A. Tom says “That’s a secret” when his mother asks him what he wished for (5.18).
B. Presley says, “His escape from responsibility is but another in a long series which began, of course, with the father’s desertion (Presley).
A Character Analysis of “The Glass Menagerie” by Tennessee Williams.
In “The Glass Menagerie”, Williams shows how the Amanda, the mother, Laura, the
daughter, and Tom, the son all have insecurities which they handle in separate ways. The...
Glass Menagerie” causes them to want to escape into their own world of fantasy.
I. Amanda’s personal escape is within the memory of her youth.
A. Tennessee Williams describes Amanda as trying to live in the past.
1. Domina writes, “Yet although she has kept her husband's photograph on her wall, Amanda sometimes seems to forget that she chose to marry a less-than-ideal man. She speaks frequently, almost obsessively, of the Sunday afternoon when she received “seventeen!—gentlemen callers!” (Domina).
2. Amanda talks of her past in the sense that she was better than females today. “Girls in those days knew how to talk, I can tell you” (1.25).
II. Laura’s escape is within her love for unreal objects and fantasies.
A. Lauras love for her glass animals and material objects is a way of her not to face people but to escape to her own little world. “Lately I’ve been spending most of my afternoons in the Jewl Box, that big glass house where they raise the tropical flowers” (2.29).
B. Cardullo says, “Like a romantic, then, Laura has a love for Nature in addition to Art – a nature that is artfully memorialized in her collection of little animals made out of glass” (Cardullo).
III. Tom’s escape is clearly the movies and his imagination. He says he goes to the movies but it is not a proven fact. He longs for a day to be his own man.
A. Tom says “That’s a secret” when his mother asks him what he wished for (5.18).
B. Presley says, “His escape from responsibility is but another in a long series which began, of course, with the father’s desertion (Presley).
A Character Analysis of “The Glass Menagerie” by Tennessee Williams.
In “The Glass Menagerie”, Williams shows how the Amanda, the mother, Laura, the
daughter, and Tom, the son all have insecurities which they handle in separate ways. The...