Themes And Conflicts In The Glass Menagerie By Tennessee Williams

There is not one comic or movie, where Superman fails to save the day, where in the end he does not win. The Harry always defeats the Voldemort. This is because when a Christ figure is developed, there are certain expectations that go along with that. However, what happens when a Christ figure fails to fulfill their duty? In The Glass Menagerie, a play by Tennessee Williams, Laura’s mother Amanda wants Laura to have a suitor. Finally, Tom —Laura’s sister— invites Jim O’Connor, one of his friends from work over to have a meal. Amanda goes into a frenzy preparing for him, and when he arrives he appears like the perfect suitor. As the night goes on, Jim eventually seduces Laura and then leaves in a rush. In Tennessee Williams’s play, The Glass Menagerie, Williams uses a ironic Christ figure to demonstrate how illusions tear a family apart.

The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams and Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller are two of the twentieth century’s best-known plays. The differences and similarities between both of the plays are hidden in their historical and social contexts. The characters of The Glass Menagerie and the Death of a Salesman are trapped by the constraints of their everyday lives, unable to communicate with their loved ones and being fearful for their future. There are a lot of comparisons that exist, especially between the settings, symbolism and characterization drawn between the two plays. The contrast comes form the ways that the characters choose to deal or not with the harsh circumstances of life.

Amanda comments sarcastically, at the end of the play, that Tom shouldn't think about his poor mother and sister (Williams, T.G.M., 9.114.1-3).  She tries to push her problems off on him rather than deal with them herself.  By laying the blame on Tom, she feels as though she did nothing wrong and that the family’s problems have been caused by others. If the two women had just accepted that they were also to blame, they could have moved on with their lives.

Amanda and Tom share a familial relationship of mother and son. Williams depicts Amanda at first interpretation as overbearing, hypercritical and controlling. However, on further assessment, the audience is able to acknowledge a more admirable facet to her character: her evident persistence in trying to love her children. Through her attempts in perpetuating her youth and past glory, she distorts reality to fit her

Tennessee Williams, born Thomas Lanier Williams, wrote The Glass Menagerie, a play which premiered in Chicago in 1944. This award winning play, autobiographical in nature, represented a time in which Williams felt the obligation of his responsibilities in regards to the care of his family. Robert DiYanni, Adjunct Professor of Humanities at New York University, rated it as, “One of his best-loved plays...a portrayal of loneliness among characters who confuse fantasy and reality” (DiYanni 1156). Alternatively, The Glass Menagerie, a play set in the era of the Great Depression and written from the narrator’s memory, was meant to teach us the how our relationships with one another can alter our futures, for better or worse. Everything about this particular play was a direct and clear symbolization of Williams ' life growing up. Williams uses characterization to depict several people from his real life in this play; his sister, himself, his overbearing mother, absent father, and a childhood best friend. Williams does a splendid job transforming his personal life into a working piece of art. In Tennessee Williams ' play, The Glass Menagerie, his character, Laura, is central to the structure and focus of the story due to her individual ties to all of the supporting characters throughout the seven scene play.

Amanda becomes a woman bent on finding her daughter either a job or a husband and finding out why her son disappears every night. To help her appear strong and willful, Amanda escapes to her own days as a young girl, finding more than seventeen gentlemen callers, and allows herself to believe her life is stable enough that her daughter and her will be financially taken care of. These facades crumble when she realizes her daughter has never been capable enough to find either a job or a husband. While these expectations of Laura hurt her, they allow her mother to escape to her days of being flaunted over and adorned by men. Once she does see her daughter is struggling, Amanda has to face the fact that her daughter will always be dependant upon her mother. These realities continue to affect how her children act and the results of the

   Tennessee Williams' play, The Glass Menagerie, describes three separate characters, their dreams, and the harsh realities they face in a modern world.  The Glass Menagerie exposes the lost dreams of a southern family and their desperate struggle to escape reality. Williams' use of symbols adds depth to the play. The glass menagerie itself is a symbol Williams uses to represent the broken lives of Amanda, Laura and Tom Wingfield and their inability to live in the present.

Amanda is obsessed with her past, and uses it to escape reality, as she constantly reminds Tom and Laura of the time she received seventeen gentlemen callers. The reader cannot even be sure that this actually happened. However, it is clear despite its possible falseness, Amanda has come to believe it. She refuses to acknowledge that her daughter is crippled and refers to her handicap as "a little defect - hardly noticeable" (Williams 1648). Only for brief moments does she ever admit that her daughter is "crippled" and then resorts back to denial. Amanda doesn't perceive anything realistically. She believes that this gentleman caller, Jim is going to be the man to rescue Laura and she hasn't even met him yet. When Jim arrives, Amanda is dressed in a "girlish frock" she wore on the day that she met their father and she regresses to the childish, giddy days of entertaining gentleman callers. Amanda uses her past as a means to escape the reality she does not want to face.

Tennessee Williams is regarded as a pioneering playwright of American theatre. Through his plays, Williams addresses important issues that no other writers of his time were willing to discuss, including addiction, substance abuse, and mental illness. Recurring themes in William’s works include the dysfunctional family, obsessive and absent mothers and fathers, and emotionally damaged women. These characters were inspired by his experiences with his own family. These characters appear repeatedly in his works with their own recurring themes. Through The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire, Tennessee Williams presents the similar thematic elements of illusion, escape, and fragility between the two plays, proving that although similar, the themes within these plays are not simply recycled, as the differences in their respective texts highlight the differences of the human condition.

In The Glass Menagerie, Tennessee Williams beautifully encapsulates man’s desire to escape from uncomfortable emotional and physical situations. Whether he’s showing a young man trapped in a factory job he hates, an aging single mother who mourns for her life as Southern belle, or a young lady who fears that she’ll spend her life alone, he clearly demonstrates these desires and fears for his audience. Williams shows us through the actions of his characters how humans handle a wide variety of uncomfortable situations, and how these situations dramatically influence one’s ability to thrive. The playwright doesn’t seem to believe in the idea of “bloom where you’re planted”, and the desire to escape becomes a major theme of the play, demonstrated across multiple characters in a wide variety of ways. Creative individuals often do not thrive in noncreative, industrial environments. Williams demonstrates this clearly in this “memory play”, which carries many autobiographical element. Tom Wingfield represents his own character, Williams himself, and also serves as a narrator, making him quite the complex character. Williams’s uses Tom to show how an emotionally complex, creative individual can quickly feel trapped and tied down in a factory job, longing to get out, see the world, and pursue a job with more creative elements. Tom’s escapism, drinking, and evening theatrical adventures all reflect the life of the playwright himself, as Williams was known to struggle with alcoholism

The other well-known and beloved play of Tennessee Williams is The Glass of Menagerie. It takes place between World War I and World War II in St. Louis, Missouri. After World War I, the stock market crash of 1929 came which sent the American nation into the Great Depression. Formerly well-to-do families found themselves underprivileged, and the poor seemed to get even lesser. The story of the Wingfield family is a close-up look how people dealt in various ways with their impoverished circumstances. To express his universal truths Williams created a term, which he uses in this play, the plastic theatre, which is distinctive new style of drama. He insisted the setting, properties, music, sound, and visual effects – all the elements on the staging – most combine to reflect and enhance the action, theme, characters, and language. For instance, “a single recurring tune,” The Glass of Menagerie”, is used to give emotional emphasis to suitable

Amanda Wingfield was a complex character that encompassed many facets of her personality. She longed to have the life she had as a girl and young woman with gentleman callers and being the center of attention; her reality though, was a much more dismal existence with a son who worked at a factory making little money at a job he despised and a daughter that was as emotionally and physically

Written in 1944, Tennessee Williams wrote a play during World War II when people were barely making ends meet. Centering on the Wingfield family, the story consisted of five characters: Amanda Wingfield (the mother), Laura Wingfield (the daughter), Tom Wingfield (son, narrator, Laura’s older brother), Jim Connor (Tom and Laura’s old acquaintance from high school) and Mr. Wingfield (father to Tom and Laura, and Amanda’s husband)- who abandoned the family long before the start of the play. The title, “The Glass Menagerie”, represented a collection of glass animals on display in the Wingfields’ home. At one point or another, these animals then represented each character when they couldn’t accept reality. The theme of this play were about the

The loss of her husband causes Amanda to develop a dependence on her children. She wants Tom and Laura to become successful. Amanda complains that Tom does not earn enough money at the shoe factory. She wants him to attend night school so he can attain a better career.

Amanda constantly lives in her past and generates devastating consequences for her children. The fate of Amanda’s children is her fault, crippling them psychologically and emotionally, seriously inhibiting their own quests for maturity and self-realization. Amanda lives in a fantasy world of dreamy recollections, and her children cannot escape from this illusory world either. She suffers from a psychological impulse to withdraw into a fabricated "lost" time.