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Glass Menagerie Essay

Decent Essays

Tennessee Williams, the author of the historical fiction play The Glass Menagerie, wrote the play in the style of retrospection. As we see the effects from youthful choices and situations on the present, one gets a very intimate relationship with the past. Like a domino effect, each and every action by one person affects another; a kind of holistic act of consequence. For example, Amanda Wingfield’s husband leaves her, throwing her into a state of dishevelment and disenchantment, which affects her son Tom (whose point of view the play is told from), and daughter Laura. Amanda can be perceived as a villain, an harbinger of stress and upset to other characters. She is infatuated with her past as a southern belle, detaching from reality and getting irritable when events don't go exactly as she planned them in her head. She often takes these feelings out on her less than perfect children, Laura, who is cripplingly shy and wears a leg …show more content…

She wants to have her children experience the same life as she did before it fell to pieces, showing the desire to live vicariously through them, although they do not have the same resources she did, making this desire unreasonable. The reader can see this yearning to bring her past to the present when she vigorously tries to get Laura suitors, just like she had as a girl. She enlists Tom to get Laura's high school crush to go on a date with her, which subsequently goes very wrong when in the end, Laura's heart ends up broken. Amanda's flagrant obsession with regaining her high society flair ends up hurting many people in the end, doing exactly the opposite of what her intended purpose was. Although partially an antagonist, she genuinely cares about her family as her intention is to give her children happy lives, even though they might not be the kind of happy her children

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