The Glass Menagerie Theme Essay

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Tenesse Williams’ “The Glass Menagerie” is a play presenting a story of the Wingfield family and their struggles. Set in St. Louis during the Great Depression, the play revolves around Amanda and her adult children, Tom and Laura, struggling to make ends meet in a St. Louis apartment.

Numerous themes are incorporated in this play, and amongst the more prominent themes are those of individuals trapped by circumstances and struggling between illusions and reality, impossibility of true escape, and loneliness of humans.

These themes are clearly portrayed through the characters of the play, each lonely, struggling to survive, to escape reality through illusions. Perhaps the most dominant theme in “The Glass Menagerie” is that of human failure, the frustration of individuals trapped by circumstances. All the characters in the play are palpably doomed from the very start, unable to ever have a truly happy life in this harsh world.

They all struggle to survive in a world that gives them no reason to exist, and though their attempts will allow them to survive for a time, they will never truly triumph.

Hence Amanda Wingfield clings to her Southern background, a past of servants, jonquils, and gentlemen callers, and in the meantime puts hope into the future of her children, of a steady job for Tom and a husband to support Laura.

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In this attempt to pull her life and family together, she consequently causes the eventual destruction of her family. Tom Wingfield cuts of all ties binding him to his family and leaves to pursue his dreams of adventure and poetry, but at the very end he discovers that the outside world is no more sympathetic.

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The biggest failure of them all is perhaps Laura Wingfield, an extremely introverted world who refuses to come out of her shell of inferiority. Although the newly kindled feelings for the gentleman caller encourages her to temporarily emerge from her shell, the consequent confession of his engagement shatters any remaining hope in her and only serves to push her deeper into her world of introversion. Laura’s situation is undoubtedly a clear epitome of tragedy, an example of an individual trapped in such cruel circumstances. Even Jim, the gentleman caller, is a failure.

He has not achieved much in life despite “shooting with such velocity through his adolescence”, having “ran into more interference since his graduation from Soldan. His speed has definitely slowed”. Jim now struggles to regain his “velocity” by investing his hopes in the future of the “American Dream”, but this, too, is a huge gamble and his efforts could only prove to be in vain. As a result of their struggles and failures, the characters resort to illusions to protect them from the oppressive and destructive reality, hence another important theme in the play.

As previously mentioned, Amanda clings to her past as a Southern Belle, and her illusionary world is the world of her youth when she lived a carefree life as a girl. She attempts to restore her Southern aristocracy by retaining her style of conversations, mannerisms and appearances, also trying to relive it through Laura, by getting her “to stay fresh and pretty- for gentlemen callers” and refusing to admit that Laura’s crippled and weird in the eyes of others, insisting “Don’t say crippled!…

Don’t say weird! “, choosing instead to believe that when te gentleman caller will fall for Laura when he “sees how lovely and sweet and pretty she is”. Meanwhile, Laura retreats to her ‘glass menagerie’, her beautiful yet fragile world of little glass animals. In this world, the special glass unicorn “gets along nicely” with the other normal horses, in contrast to Laura’s social isolation due to her ‘weirdness’.

Tom escapes to his world of movies and the bars to escape from his daily life of a nagging mother and a boring job at a shoe factory, and Jim, the supposed “emissary from a world of reality”, is too, trapped in the memories of his high school glory and the hopes for the ‘American Dream’ of future opportunities, confidently declaring “Knowledge – Zzzzzp! Money – Zzzzzzp! – Power! That’s the cycle democracy is built on! ” Finally, the world outside the Wingfield apartment is no different.

To get away from the hardships of the Great Depression and world conflict, the Americans indulge in “hot swing music and liquor, dance halls, bars, and movies, and sex that hung in the gloom like a chandelier and flooded the world with brief, deceptive rainbows”. Thus, in their exploitation of illusions to cope with reality, the Wingfields become a kind of microcosm for the entire country. “The Glass Menagerie” identifies the conquest of reality by illusion as a huge and growing aspect of the human condition in its time.

The loneliness of human beings is a recurring theme in Williams’ works and is also clearly portrayed through the characters of “The Glass Menagerie”. Since being abandoned by her husband, all Amanda has left is her family. Despite having each other as family, each of them is alone in a sense. Amanda clearly loves her children, but she lacks understanding and is unable to communicate her feelings and thoughts to them, stating to Tom, “there’s so many things in my heart that I can’t describe to you”.

As a result the family ties become strained and gradually the family falls apart, leaving her to be more alone than ever. Vice versa, Tom is also lonely because he is unable to make Amanda understand him, claiming to Amanda’s comment “That’s true of me too. “. Being a poet, he is trapped in his own world and is unable to communicate with even his family, let alone establish any worthwhile relationships with his co-workers.

His loneliness increases when he discovers the world outside is no more understanding towards him than the world within his family. As for Laura, she has never been able to successfully communicate with anyone due to her introverted nature and inferiority complex, admitting “I – never had much luck at – making friends”; hence loneliness is more natural to her. Her thwarted chance at happiness with Jim as well as Tom’s abandonment gives her only deeper loneliness. In a way, Williams is trying to convey that humans are all essentially alone.

Hence, the themes of individuals trapped under circumstances, the use of illusions to combat reality, as well as the inevitable loneliness of humans, are clearly presented in Tenesse Williams’ “The Glass Menagerie”. These themes are prevalent in the plight of the characters, palpable in their tragedies, individual worlds of illusions, and their loneliness due to inability to communicate with each other. Hence the combination of these results in a delicate and meaningful play, an expert yet sympathetic observation of human nature.