Leadership

4 February 2010

Realistic or Exaggeration

The play ventures into many different aspects of the human emotional rainbow. The emotions discussed in “The Glass Menagerie” are love, pity, regret, cruelty, and self loathing. At the end of play in the text making literature matter (392) we are asked, “Is this realistic portrait of family life, or is it an exaggeration”? When reading the play, the reader needs to understand that the play is set at the end of the depression in the late thirties. So according to the time period this can be a realistic portrait of family life.

The play opens up with the back drop of a dark alley with Tom standing on the fire escape. To me this symbolizes the darkness of the period and the characters, especially Tom who feels that he is trapped in life the he doesn’t want and that the fire escape is his way out. “I descended the steps of this fire-escape for the last time and followed, from then on, in my father’s footsteps” (392). Throughout the play weather beginning or ending of a scene they would use the fire escape as a symbol to leave their unhappy lives behind, basically the fire escape was a literal symbol to escape.

The emotion of regret and pity is prevalent throughout the play by all the characters. We see this emotion with Tom more than Amanda and Laura. This also can be seen in the beginning of the play with the sentimental music and soft lighting as Tom remembers what happened in that depressing time in his life. “The scene is memory and is therefore nonrealistic.” “The interior is therefore dim and poetic”. (345). This can be seen as Tom coming back to the same fire escape from which he abandoned his mother and sister. Not to mention the way it is set up with the music and the dimming of the lights and the low key voice of the narrator symbolizes the regret and pity that tom feels for leaving.

The cruelty is most contributed to by Amanda as she berates her children Tom and Laura. She is continuously nagging both...