Laura Wingfield: a Caged Bird with Clipped Wings

Laura Wingfield: A Caged Bird with Clipped Wings

Playing with her glass menagerie entertains her, listening to her father’s Victrola records calms her, and taking a stroll through the park to the museum, zoo, and movies is what she does on a daily basis to kill time. Laura Wingfield, the protagonist of The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams, lives in the mid 20th century, in urban St. Louis. Laura is different from other people, “A childhood illness has left her crippled, one leg slightly shorter than the other, and held in a brace…Stemming from this, Laura’s separation increases till she is like a piece of her own glass collection, too exquisitely fragile to move from the shelf” (Williams xviii). She is emotionally, as well as physically, fragile and easily breakable. Like a fairy tale, Laura’s character changes from a unicorn to a horse when Jim breaks the horn of her glass unicorn. Laura, once the red-nosed unicorn, becomes less-freakish and more like all of the other horses. Throughout the play, Laura’s fragile, perturbed, and terribly shy self-conscious nature changes her from living in her illusions and separating herself from reality, to mature as a less awkward human being.

Laura is fragile because of her physical condition and weak self-esteem. Her physical fragility comes from not only her crippled leg, but “her frequent faintness, nausea, and colds, together with her bout with pleurosis…an inflammation of the thin membrane covering the lungs that causes difficult, painful breathing” (Cardullo 163). Jim O’Connor, the gentleman caller, and former high school classmate (whom Laura has a crush on), mishears Laura’s disease, earning her the nick-name Blue Roses, from her pleurosis. “Blue Roses” is a metaphorical personification of Laura, because it describes that she is fragile, like the flower: “Jim’s nickname for Laura, ‘Blue Roses,’ signifies her affinity for the natural—flowers—together with the transcendent—blue flowers, which do not occur...