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The Glass Menagerie

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The Glass Menagerie

The Glass Menagerie is a play that is based on Tom Wingfield’s recollections from his

past life. The play was written by Tennessee Williams and was first published in 1945. The play

appreciates the common human conditions because it depicts feelings and human circumstances

that anyone can relate to. Williams presents the story of three characters who desperately want to

escape their supposedly hard realities because of frustrations and lost hopes. Although all the

characters in the play have different life experiences, all of them have a strange preference to an

illusion-based world instead of living off the reality of life. Among the three charactersr, Tom

Wingfield is the most controversial (Mccray, 2019). Tom has a dual reality, and he chooses to

either one of them, when he wants. On one side, he is a timid, unconfident, and petty squalid of

the Amanda household. On the other side, he is a man full of literature, movies, poet writer, and

supposedly intellectual wit. However, while he never settles on either side, Tom is chained to his

past.

Tom’s life is riddled with contradiction. A lover of literature material he is, but we cannot

quite clearly discern his intellectual life. He lives off his past too much and all we know of him is

his thoughts about his family in their St. Louis apartment. They live in the hollows of depression,

and Tom only holds an unpromising job at a shoe warehouse (Williams, 2019). He wants to be a

writer, and he seems not to give up on his dream, despite his current situation. His eldest sister,

Laura, seems to have ditched from the harsh realities of life to live off on her obtrusive world of

past records; she only has glass figurines to play with (Williams, 2019). In the meanwhile,
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Amanda, Tom’s mother, has high hopes on her children in a world that is apparently opposed to

them. In the family’s tiny apartment in St. Louis, tensions grows when Tom is caught between

expressing his emotional feelings towards his sister Laura, and living off his past; he claims that

he wants to escape his former life. Tom is indeed chained to his past.

The Glass Menagerie can be viewed as Tom’s recollection of his past because all events

described in the play are presented from the perspective of Tom’s memory. Tom works hard to

support his family, but he has a strong feeling that his current life is not his desired life (Mccray,

2019). He seems to be in constant suffering from the recollections of his past life, especially

from the tension of his mother. He has strong aspirations to be a poet, but his actions are too

inconsistent (Mccray, 2019). He seems too confused to choose his life path. This is what makes

him strangely cruel to his family, although he has a deep love for his mother and sister. Tom’s

inner contradictions burst out to his life, and this is communicated in his guilt after he abandons

his home, which to him was a house of bondage that curtailed his dreams and hopes (Mccray,

2019).

In Conclusion, Tom is unique from other characters because he acts from the

recollections of his past, and juvenile emotions take part in his scenes. Tom’s duality makes the

play confusing sometimes, and makes it hard to understand Tom’s past. The duality of Tom also

makes it difficult to decide whether Tom can be trusted to make rational decisions; one cannot be

sure whether Tom acts soberly or he is just a manic of emotions. Recollections of the past can be

a big frustration, especially when the past is less virtuous compared to the present life. Tom’s

recollection of this past is reminiscent of Williams (the real author of the play), who, like

fictional Tom, had a jumbled past with a self-dependent mother and sister, and an unstable

father.
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References

Tennessee Williams (2019). The Glass Menagerie: Play Guide. Guthrie Theater.

Mccray, R. (2019, July 3). Analysis of the Characters in Tennessee Williams’s The Glass

Menagerie [Blog post]. Retrieved from https://ivypanda.com/essays/analysis-of-the-

characters-in-tennessee-williamss-the-glass-menagerie