The Glass Menagerie

Aisling Loftus

Anthony Sovak

Writing 102

5-6-2014

“The Glass Menagerie” by Tennessee Williams is a play based on the memories of narrator Tom Wingfield. The play is set in 1937, where Tom is an aspiring poet in St. Louis. Tom works in a shoe warehouse to support his mother Amanda and sister Laura. Throughout the play Tom describes the difficulty they all had accepting reality while trying trying to escape from the truth. This is portrayed though literary devices of theme, character, and symbolism.

Throughout “The Glass Menagerie” the most apparent theme of the play is the inability to accept reality. Each character subsides the real world in order to find comfort by creating their own illusions of reality. Of the three family members, Laura, the sister, finds it difficult to socialize and perform day to day tasks. Instead of living normally, she isolates herself with her glass animal figures. The narrator and older brother of Laura, Tom, struggles with motivation to do anything with himself. He finds it easier to escape through fantasies provided by movies he’s watched and through the consumption of alcohol. Every time Tom leaves the house, he tells his mother, “I’m going to the movies!”(Williams 1060) When he returns, it’s blatantly obvious that he has been drinking. For example, during scene IV, “the unsteadiness of his advance make it evident that he has been drinking. (Williams 1061). The mother, Amanda, is unlike her children and a little more complicated. She has real world values and wants to succeed socially and financially, yet embodies herself with her attachments making these wants and needs impossible. She lives in denial that her life is anything other than a prominent southern life she was brought up to have and struggles to come to terms with her new status in society. Amanda has an unusual daughter and a son with a far from promising businessman which she may have some responsibility for. Amanda’s illusion of reality is primarily based on...