Tennessee Williams

THE GLASS MENAGERIE

Williams is considered one of the most important American playwrights since World War
II. The Glass Menagerie, his first successful Broadway production and the winner of the New
York Drama Critics Circle Award in 1944, established his reputation as an innovative dramatist
whose expressionistic style and complex themes revolutionized the American theater. In this
play, as in such later works as A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and The Night
of the Iguana, Williams combined lyrical, symbolic, and realistic elements to portray sensitive
individuals struggling to survive in a brutal, unsympathetic world. Centering on the vulnerability
and grace of its characters, The Glass Menagerie probes the fragile illusions that both sustain and
entrap them. It is a drama of `memory,' which transforms autobiography into lucid, objective art.
The Glass Menagerie is small, domestic, deeply felt, its lyricism reigned in by perception,
sentimentality tightened by insight, experiment anchored in sure classical techniques.
Williams wrote The Glass Menagerie while working as a screenwriter for Metro
Goldwyn Mayer, a major Hollywood production studio. Based on his short story Portrait of a
Girl in Glass, the play was originally presented to MGM executives as a script outline entitled
The Gentleman Caller. It was rejected, however, as his previous story ideas had been, and
Williams was eventually asked to leave the studio. He spent the remaining three months of his
contract revising the play, which soon attracted the attention of Eddie Dowling, a successful
Broadway actor who agreed to direct and perform in The Glass Menagerie. The production
debuted in Chicago on December 26, 1943, starring Laurette Taylor, whom many critics
regarded at that time as America's greatest stage actress. Laudatory reviews of the play and
Taylor's performance aroused the interest of critics and theatergoers in New York City, where
The Glass Menagerie opened to sold-out audiences the following March. Alan Chesler described
the atmosphere surrounding The Glass Menagerie as the excitement of experiencing the work
of a new talent and very likely a landmark in the history of American drama. Two weeks after
its arrival on Broadway, the play was awarded the New York Drama Critics Circle Award.
Critics generally agree that the revisions of dialogue and characterization contained in this
version improved upon the reading text and should be considered in discussions of the play.
In writing The Glass Menagerie Williams drew extensively upon his own experiences
and those of his family. The play revolves around Amanda Wingfield and her adult children,
Tom and Laura, who live, as Williams's family had, in a dingy tenement in depression-era St.
Louis. Williams's autobiographical protagonist, Tom, both narrates and participates in the action
onstage. He advises the audience in his opening soliloquy that the play is memory and
features characters who are aspects of his own consciousness, tinged by sentimentality. His
retrospective commentary continues throughout the play and provides an ironic counterpoint to
the unfolding events. A poet trapped in a tedious job at a shoe warehouse, Tom dreams of
becoming a writer and escapes nightly to the movies, where he vicariously experiences the
adventure he craves. Tom's sister, Laura, like Williams 's sister who was diagnosed as a
schizophrenic, is debilitated by shyness, forcing her to withdraw from reality and retreat into a
fragile world of old phonograph records and glass animals. The matriarch, Amanda, possesses
many personality traits that have been attributed to Williams's mother, Edwina Dankin Williams.
A fading southern belle abandoned by her husband, a telephone man who fell in love with long
distances, Amanda clings to the past and memories of her genteel girlhood in Blue Mountain.
Yet she also exhibits a fierce determination to overcome her grim circumstances, and often
badgers her children about family responsibilities and planning for the future.
The dramatic action of The Glass Menagerie centers upon Amanda's attempt to obtain a
secure future for her daughter, who Amanda knows cannot survive independently. When Laura's
attempt to attend business school ends disastrously, Amanda acts on her final hope that a
husband can be found who will provide for and protect her daughter. She pesters Tom to choose
a suitable gentleman caller from among his coworkers, and, he eventually agrees to bring his
friend Jim O'Connor to dinner. Delighted, Amanda immerses herself in plans for his visit, the
prospect of a suitor for her daughter stirring memories of her own beaus in Blue Mountain.
Laura, however, is terrified and becomes physically ill when Jim arrives. Described in Tom's
narration as an emissary from a world of reality, Jim is a spirited young man who believes in
the power of self-improvement courses and the future of television. He is also the popular boy
for whom Laura secretly pined in high school. Left alone with Laura after dinner, he gradually
sets her at ease with his personable manner and eventually persuades her to dance. Their
movement is awkward, however, and they bump against the table that supports Laura's glass
unicorn, breaking its horn. The mood of the scene then shifts and what began as Jim's attempt to
build Laura's self-confidence becomes an expression of genuine admiration, ending with a kiss.
Apologizing, Jim explains that he is engaged and cannot call on Laura again. He leaves abruptly,
taking the unicorn that Laura gives him as a souvenir. Following Jim's departure, Amanda
berates Tom for having cruelly betrayed his family. Tom storms out of the apartment, leaving
Amanda alone to comfort Laura. The play concludes with a soliloquy by Tom in which he
reveals that he never returned to the tenement and that he chose, as his father had, to wander the
world. His final words are addressed to his sister and reveal his inability to assuage his guilt for
having abandoned her.
Commentators agree that the primary theme of The Glass Menagerie is the conflict
between illusion and reality. Amanda and Laura, considered among Williams most gentle
creations, are the first of his many vulnerable characters to use fantasy to escape harsh reality,
yet they do not rely on alcohol or sexual promiscuity to sustain their illusions as do such later
Williams protagonists as Blanche Dubois of A Streetcar Named Desire. While Williams
sympathetically portrayed their needs, he also dramatized, in the words of Joseph K. Davis, the
tragedy of indulging in the kinds of behavior and thinking that negate the possibilities of living.
This theme is explored at a more complex level through the character of Tom. As a participant in
the play, he shares in the escapism of his mother and sister. Yet, as its narrator, he communicates
the ambivalent attitude of one who has acted on his dreams. By confessing that he cannot forget
his sister, Tom also admits that he cannot permanently escape from the unreal world in which his
family lives.
As Williams exposed the falseness of the Wingfield's fantasies, he also condemned what
he perceived as the illusions of American society. For example, the South of Amanda's dreams
distinguished by jonquils, gentleman callers, and negro servants is an idealized popular fiction
that thwarts progress in the region just as it prevents Amanda from developing as a person.
Additionally, Jim's optimistic belief in America's capitalist system is subtly undercut by his
lowly position at the warehouse despite his many achievements in high school. Finally, in his
soliloquy on the social background of the play, Tom accuses the American middle class of
matriculating in a school for the blind as social unrest and violence sweep through Europe,
destined to explode as World War II.
Williams presented the themes of The Glass Menagerie through a complex blend of
symbolism, realism, and expressionism. While some critics have objected to the pervasiveness of
the play's symbols, most concur that they significantly enhance the meaning of the characters and
the action. For example, Laura's unique yet fragile personality is symbolized by the delicate glass
unicorn and Jim's high school nickname for her, Blue Roses. Similarly, the photograph of
Amanda's absent husband and the fire escape where the Wingfields find relief from the summer
heat signify liberation from the stifling atmosphere of the apartment and the family. Williams
drew on the realistic tradition in creating the setting and characters of The Glass Menagerie, yet
he also used several experimental production techniques involving screens, lighting, and music
to produce the sense of events recollected in memory. Most important, Williams infused the
dialogue of his characters with a poetic lyricism that universalizes the emotions enacted on the
stage. We noticed that through a profusion of symbolic references and a recurrent pattern of
anticipation, momentary fulfillment, and ultimate despair, the meaning of the play is enlarged. It
is not simply the story of one shy crippled girl, a neurotic mother, and a dreamer of a son, not the
story of just one more broken family, but an analogue of modern man's alienation from God and
isolation from his fellow man.
By writing The Glass Menagerie, Williams hoped to introduce a new, plastic theater
that would take the place of the exhausted theatre of realistic conventions. Along with Eugene
O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night and Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, The Glass
Menagerie is regarded as one of several works to have supplanted European sensibilities in the
American theater, communicating universal themes through a distinctly American voice. The
Glass Menagerie, through its union of transcendent lyricism and realistic family drama, remains
one of his most revered works.