In the introduction to the play The Glass Menagerie, which takes place in St. Louis, Missouri in 1937, Tom, the narrator, now a merchant sailor, tells the story of the last few months he spent with his mother and sister before he left them. He transitions from narrator to his role as Tom the Son and enters the apartment from the fire escape when his mother Amanda calls him to dinner. Soon after, Amanda discovers, to her shocked dismay, that her fragile, introverted daughter Laura has dropped out of business school. In the rising action, Amanda worries about her family's future if Laura cannot work and tells Laura they will find her an appropriate husband.
Tom and Amanda get into a heated fight about the ways they treat each other and their expectations. Amanda accuses him of lying about his evening activities, which have been escapist trips to the movies. Tom calls her an ugly, babbling old witch and accidentally shatters some of Laura's glass animals on his way out. The following morning, Tom apologizes to his mother. Amanda admits that her lover for her children has made her anxious.
Amanda asks Tom to find a man for Laura to marry before he leaves, and appalled, Tom storms out. But soon, Tom mentions he invited his coworker to dinner for the next evening. Amanda is ecstatic, but when Laura discovers the guest is Jim O'Connor, the boy she secretly had a crush on in high school, her anxiety escalates until she's physically ill. Under Amanda's orders, Laura answers the door before rushing from the room. The men go to the fire escape to smoke.
Jim details his plans to move up in the world. Tom says he's joined the Merchant Marines and shows Jim the receipt for his union dues paid with money for the family's electric bill. Amanda hosts, wearing her inappropriate and out-of-touch old ball gown.
After dinner, the electricity flickers and goes out. Amanda realizes Tom has not paid the electric bill and scolds him. Jim's gregariousness relaxes Laura and they reminisce about high school.
Jim remembers nicknaming her Blue Roses, but not her leg brace. a result of pleurosis, reassuring her everyone has differences and not to allow her slight disability to destroy her confidence. She shows him her glass menagerie, in particular, the unicorn. When they dance, the unicorn falls off the table and its horn breaks. In the climax of the play, Jim kisses Laura, but then quickly reveals he's engaged and then leaves.
But before he does, in the falling action, Laura gives Jim the broken unicorn. Amanda accuses Tom of tricking and embarrassing her, knowing Jim is a jerk. Jim was engaged. He denies it and then leaves for good to follow his dreams. In the resolution of the play, Tom delivers his final remarks as the narrator.
He never found contentment because he could never ever be free of his emotional ties to his sister, Laura. Laura blows out the candles in the apartment to end the play. The dysfunctional Wingfield family and their friend are the central characters in playwright Tennessee Williams'beautiful tragedy, The Glass Menagerie.
Tom is the narrator and the only wage earner in the family, and he's frustrated by having to work at a job he detests to support his overbearingly critical mother and sensitive, fragile sister. He desires adventure and seeks escape by drinking, writing poetry, and going to the movies. He is desperate to leave home and be on his own, but his mother's tight and relentless control over his life has tested his tolerance, and he knows if he doesn't leave soon, he will bury his dreams and happiness in his present coffin-like existence. Torn between his devotion to Laura, whom he cannot abandon emotionally, and his own needs, he opts to escape by joining the Merchant Marines, yet he cannot be content because of his attachment to his sister. Amanda Wingfield is a middle-aged woman struggling to function in difficult times with little money and even less hope.
She's characterized by her ineffectual attempts to ensure financial stability and her often annoying, unrealistic, and totally off-the-mark attempts at optimism. Yet Tennessee Williams calls her heroic. She's a combination of selflessness and selfishness.
She honestly believes what is good for her children is good for her and vice versa. She tries to control her adult children, both of whom are completely unlike her, much to her confusion, with her exacting demands, though she loves and worries about them, even though she cannot understand why their aspirations are different than hers. Laura Wingfield is a 23-year-old woman with a beauty as delicate as handmade lace and as fragile as her glass menagerie. She contracted the respiratory disease pleurosis as a child and it left her with a slight limp, a leg brace, diminished confidence, and little sense of social interaction. Her mother and brother's attempts to protect her because of her incapacity have caused Laura to feel ashamed, even incapable of living in the real world.
Thus, she lives in an illusionary world of glass animals she endows with thinking and feeling abilities, and comforts herself with records her father left behind when he abandoned their family. Jim O'Connor is the only person who functions well in the world as it is. A clerk in the shoe warehouse, Jim has a conventional ambition about working in the new field of television and is taking courses to prepare for the future, which seems pretty clear to him.
He's a gregarious extrovert who was popular in high school. Laura had a crush on him in those days, drawn to his melodious singing voice, his genuine good nature, and his nickname for her, Blue Roses. A misunderstanding of the name of her condition, the pleurosis.
Glass animals, the unicorn, blue roses, the fire escape, and the gentleman caller are the strange and beautiful symbols that are so much more than meets the eye in the play The Glass Menagerie. The glass animals reveal Laura's multifaceted personality and her fragility. Her leg is physically frail, and so is her self-esteem. It takes very little to break her.
Her mother and brother see her preoccupation with the figurines as a preference for her illusionary world and a way to avoid the real one. She feels safe with her glass animals, which illuminates Laura's fragile and beautiful world. The menagerie also represents the fragile nature of the Wingfield family.
Mr. Wingfield abandoned them. Amanda, Tom, and Laura share the same home, but with different ambitions, tiptoeing around the truth with each other instead of strengthening their relationships with honesty. On one level, the unicorn stands for Laura's uniqueness.
She loves that the unicorn is different, which is how she herself identifies. And Laura uses him as a receptacle for her sadness, transferring to the glass figurine her feelings of inadequacy. And the unicorn, unlike the other animals in her collection, is imaginary.
Unicorns don't live in this world, and really, Neither does Laura, as she too inhabits an unreal, fragile world of illusion. When the horn breaks, it seems that Laura might enter a more realistic world, but disillusionment brings her back to the world of illusion, where she will remain broken but not completely destroyed. Like the unicorn. Blue roses represent Laura's high school crush, Jim O'Connor, who nicknamed Laura Blue Roses when he misheard the cause of her absence from school, pleurosis.
The name Blue Roses reflects Laura's unusual and otherworldly beauty, and she feels pretty and worthy when Jim calls her that. He tells her the color makes her beauty unique. The fire escape signifies the entrance to and exit from the Wingfield's illusionary world to the real one at the bottom of the fire escape stairway. For Laura, it represents a path to the safety of her illusionary world.
Tom, as narrator, speaks reflexively. from it. It connects to his home. Tom sees the fire escape as a way out of the destructive home life, his coffin, and he uses it to escape from Amanda's nagging. Amanda calls it a poor excuse for a porch, yet sits down on it demurely as if she were settling into a swing on a Mississippi veranda.
The comments and actions show her in both worlds, aware of the present but behaving as she did in the past. Gentleman caller Jim O'Connor lives completely in the real world. He embodies the promise of the future. He welcomes the possibilities of achieving his dreams and strives to make them a reality. Abandonment, disillusionment, and living in the past are the heavy themes buoyed by the drama in the play The Glass Menagerie.
None of the family has healed emotionally from Mr. Wingfield's abandonment. Amanda clings to memories of the past as she yearns for safety and security, the beauty she possessed, and the bright future promised to her. Even though she admits her love for her husband to Tom, she also confesses her need for her son to be their economic strength, afraid he will leave them before their future is protected by Laura's marriage, for which Amanda cannot abandon hope. Laura lives in her illusionary world with her glass animals. They don't abandon, criticize, or undermine her worth with words meant to protect her.
They accept her for who she is. In the Glass Menagerie, abandonment is more than individuals leaving others. It is about abandoning reality, the ability to live in the real world, and hopes for the future. Disillusionment applies to Amanda, Laura, and Tom, who are disillusioned with themselves, each other, and their present lives, as they are with their expectations and dreams.
The themes of abandonment and disillusionment are closely intertwined, as disillusionment is the abandonment of hope. Amanda blames her husband for not shouldering his responsibilities and for destroying the future she had expected when they married. Nothing will bring back the glory of her youth, nor will she see any of it reflected in her children, despite brave efforts to deny the reality of it all.
Laura suffers after she learns of Jim O'Connor's engagement. On learning of the impossibility of a relationship with Jim, she loses hope and thus becomes disillusioned and will remain in her world of illusions. Past can ruin opportunities for happiness in the present. Amanda straddles a line between past and present, and despite her forced cheerfulness, her life in the present is a disaster because she's so rooted in the past.
Although Amanda knows she must navigate her way in the present, she's still a little bit of a loser. in the present, she clings to the past as her support, as the reality of life, not the depressed circumstances of the present, wherein she measures her worth in relation to a man. Laura also hovers between past and present, but her past has no glorious moments. and it's not so different from her present.
She clings to her father's music, a significant part of her past. She also clings to a few souvenirs from high school, including the program from a play her high school crush, and supposed gentleman caller in the play, Jim O'Connor was in, which represents her emotional memory of him. Her present is more or less a continuation of the past.
Stage directions and production notes are important parts of the Glass Menagerie. Story structure and language is key to the play, whose scenes cover winter to spring 1937, and are Tom's memories of his last months at home, as his narration takes place years later. Amanda Wingfield tries to infuse the action with nostalgic stories about her life as a young Southern belle to maintain optimism in depressing surroundings. She stokes Tom's annoyance with her constant nitpicking, but his sister Laura displays a benign tolerance for her mother's nostalgia and nagging.
As narrator, Tom speaks reflectively about the events that led to his departure and have held his heart hostage. Tennessee Williams coined the term memory play because the characters and events in his dramatic works are rooted in his own life and are seen through the filter of time. In his production notes preceding the written text of the play, Williams explains that truth, life, or reality is an organic thing which the poetic imagination can represent or suggest.
Another technique Williams uses is the screen device, a way to call the audience's attention to emotional insights and meanings that might be unclear among the conflicting viewpoints of characters who have difficulty connecting with one another. Williams explains that the screen device did not appear in the later acting version of the play because he did not want it to detract from the straightforward performances, and he wanted to minimize staging effects. He thought the technique strengthened the effect of the written illusion and added emotional appeal because of its dreamlike quality and correlation with memories, but he understood that some directors found it intrusive. Lighting creates mood and atmosphere and evokes emotions, and because of the play's illusory aspects of memory, the general stage lighting in the glass menagerie is subdued and shadowy. Lighting is softened for the apartment's interior, showing its furnishings as worn and shabby.
Finally, Williams mentions music as integral to the play. The glass menagerie theme, played where indicated, usually highlighting Laura or the glass menagerie, is a distant sounding, delicate, circus-like melody that creates emotional emphasis. It serves as a thread of connection and illusion between the narrator with his separate point in time and space and the subject of his story.
Other music appears in the play as well. The music from the Paradise Dance Hall reflects the outside world, and the records Laura plays are part of her world of illusion, the signature of her absent father.