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An Analysis Of Laura Wingfield In The Glass Menagerie

Decent Essays

Conflicting Emotions:
An Analysis of Laura Wingfield The Glass Menagerie is set in 1937 in St Louis, Missouri where America was in a time of peril when the American economy collapsed and caused a shortage of jobs and money known as the Great Depression (Roberts and Zweig 1379; 3). The play is about a family who lived in an apartment complex in Missouri. The story is about a son named Tom Wingfield, who tells “memories” about a problem about his sister (Williams 1380; 1). Tom works in a shoe warehouse and is miserable of the job and dreams of a career away from his family, his mother and his sister stay in an apartment. Laura the sister who believes that she can’t do anything because of her physical appearance and quits school entirely because of her self-esteem. Her mother requests her son to find a gentleman caller for Laura because the mother believes that she would be taken care of if she finds a suitor to marry the daughter, but it does not go well because the man that tom finds is already engaged and ready to marry another girl. Because Laura Wingfield is exceptionally timid and self-conscious, she is afraid of taking judgmental calls which can alter her limited lifestyle in Tennessee Williams’ classic American drama The Glass Menagerie. Self-consciousness is one of the biggest downfalls of Laura’s character throughout the play. One instance where Laura’s shyness is seen when her mother Amanda finds out she had dropped out of business school because Laura felt that

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