M.

Khan The dramatic technique and structure of The Glass Menagerie

Tennessee Williams contributed towards a new, plastic theatre in place of the exhausted
theatre of realistic conventions and helped the American theatre to resume vitality as a part of
culture. His new conception of the theatre attempts to present the spiritual and emotional
world of his characters.Williams believes in penetrating into the characters’ inner selves
through their dreams, illusions and bizarre reactions normally coated over in sleep or
internalized only. To secure this close approach to the real truth, he often uses expressionistic
and other conventional techniques. The use of lightning effects, music, telephone and
symbols on the stage is a part of his expressionistic technique.
Lightning is used to express the mood of nostalgia, decadence or illusion on the stage. In
The Glass Menagerie the stage is often dim, with shafts of light focused on selected areas or
actors. The light upon Laura was supposed to have a pristine clarity similar to that used in
religious portraits of female saints or Madonna’s. Music too is employed to give emotional
emphasis and to accentuate the dominant theme in various plays. In The Glass Menagerie, a
single recurring tune points up the emotional nostalgia, which is the first condition of the
play, as Williams tells us. This tune dips in and out of the play, coming through most clearly
when the action focuses upon Laura.
A play is a story told through dialogue and action. It attempts to imitate reality. The
dramatist presents his story directly to an audience through a combination of movement,
sound, and mimetic action. All is contrived to make the audience believe in what it sees and
hears. The audience meets the dramatist halfway by pretending that what it sees is, for the
moment, real. The audience wishes to be entertained, engrossed, horrified, or enlightened.
The dramatist does all these things, but in addition he attempts to disturb the minds of the
members of the audience by imitating reality with penetration and insight into human nature.
To achieve any of these effects the dramatist must present his story skillfully. The, dramatic
elements he must manipulate are action, plot, tempo, setting, character, and dialogue.
The Glass Menagerie has an architectural design of seven scenes, each of which has a
"legend" or image to project on the screen, and this turns into a device intended by the
dramatist to 'give accent to certain values in each scene.’ The structure is episodic, but not
loose or irregular, because the apparently changing scenes are held in an organic whole,
primarily, by an unchanging recurrent tune of The Glass Menagerie.
Music is the most significant non-verbal component of the play intoned to draw ideas and
delicate moods or psychological reactions of the characters into meaningful patterns, and also
to unify all verbal and other nonverbal components like light and the magic lantern 'legends'
or images which are projected from behind on a section of the wall between the front room
and the dining room. Again, the device of assigning to Tom the dual roles of the narrator and
a character contributes to the unity of action. Tom, son of Amanda Wingfield, is the narrator
of the play, which begins with Tom speaking the epilogue. But his role as a narrator spreads
over and interweaves the whole plot, as he also intervenes to narrate and direct the action at
various points in between the prologue and the epilogue. Thus, he is assigned the dual roles
of the insider and the outsider, and thus to keep up the tension and balance between active
participation and passive distancing.
The Grass Menagerie, thus, is not a static play. There is much action on the stage. The
outward events are exciting and come rapidly one after the other. From the opening table
scene to the end of the play the characters on stage are busy. They are doing things,
constantly advancing the action, which finally takes up a unified structural wholeness.
The End Multan Khan
M. KHAN The theme of hopelessness, frustration and escape/ illusion and reality / as a
memory play
A fine memory play, The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams dramatizes the theme of
existential pessimism that makes ‘memory and desire’ as one of its solid pillars. It exposes
the effect of illusion upon the individual in hostile conditions by exploring the physical,
mental and spiritual conditions. Memory of the romantic past serves as the only sustenance
for the characters drowned in the pool of present damnation of each kind. Incidentally, the
Wingfield family includes Amanda Wingfield, the mother, Tom, her son and Laura
Wingfield, her daughter. These members are relegated to absolute damnation by extreme
poverty, constant ill-health and the consequent mental distress. The father of the household
has escaped from his responsibility by deserting his wife and children. The harsh and bitter
realities of life dog every member of the family incessantly. Consequently, each of them tries
to escape from the poverty-ridden hellish reality of the present to find a comforting
rendezvous into the world of illusions on the viewless wings of memory. Yet, the light of
reality dawns on them at the end, thereby destroying the mirage of illusion and throwing the
individual into a crisis. So, the characters in The Glass Menagerie habitually look back
through the windows of their memories to the past only to find themselves beset with the air
of frustration, hopelessness and damnation.
One understands that Laura lies at the centre of Wingfield domestic crisis. She is crippled,
for one of her legs is shorter than the other. Therefore, she cannot face the external world and
has to escape into her own psychic zone. She has created a small artificial world which her
mother calls-the glass menagerie, a collection of small glass animals. She herself has almost
become one of those animals living in this beautiful fragile world. The glass animals
symbolize Laura’s make-belief world, the congenial world where he wishes to stay, for she is
unable to face the cruel reality. Even Tom is unable and unwilling to take the burden of the
family on his shoulder. Instead, he begins to hate the apartment and seems to be trading the
old path of his father. He has found out a way of desperate escapism from his monotonous
job in the shoe-warehouse because of its barren claustrophobic atmosphere. His frequenting
the filmshow points to his escapist attitude.
The true condition of Amanda as the mother of two children, who are social failures, brings
her face to face with reality. She has sent Laura to a college and it was a dismal failure. So
she was again taken to young people’s League at the church which proved to be yet another
fiasco. Amanda’s predicament is that of a woman living in the past. This accounts for why
she strives to escape into a world of illusion. Memory of the past, as she was young and
beautiful like a rose with a crowd of bumble bee-like lovers all around her, offers the proper
channel to her escape. The blue mountain in this regard becomes the powerful symbol of her
dream-world. A woman already belonging to the world of illusory past, Amanda is creating
an artificial almost Thespian world of her own only to relinquish the sordid reality.
The preparation for the gentlemen reaches its zenith when Amanda has succeeded in making
her daughter look like a young lady. She has made use of the so-called ‘gay deceivers.’ Jim,
the practical man and the emissary from a world of reality, takes time to understand the trap
prepared for him. He must have found the ulterior motives behind calling him to dinner. So
Jim sets for himself the task of clearing Laura slowly from her illusion. He makes advances
to her and drives off her shyness. It is at this context that Laura shows him the glass
menagerie and her favourite creature the unicorn, an extinct and mythological animal
symbolizing her world of illusion. When Jim and Laura started dancing together, Jim,
accidentally, knocks at the little unicorn. Laura, who usually worships her glass collection
more than anything else, relied to his excuse, “He’s lost his horn. It does not matter. May it
be a blessing in disguise.” This statement gives an impression that Laura is finally escaping
her illusive world. After Jim tells her the news of his engagement to Betty, Laura gives him
the unicorn as a souvenir and retreats into her land of the Glass Menagerie never to come out
again. Though Laura has come face to face with the grim truth about herself, she prefers to
live among her illusion. Thematically, the play dramatizes the futility of human endeavour to
escape from the labyrinthine reality of life. Being unable to do it they at least take shelter in
their respective utopias, which, on the real ground, proves to be as feasible as the glass
animals.
The End Multan Khan
M.Khan The Character of Amanda in The Glass Menagerie
Tennessee Williams creates extraordinarily vital errors and presents, with equal sharpness, human
perversity, on the one hand, and man’s impassioned vitality, on the other. Many of his characters,
specially the women, are desperate or depressed. His characters are generally categorized as fugitive
and depressed. Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire is an impressive figure. In the words of Harold
Cluan, “She is a poet, even if we are dubious about her understanding of the writers she names.” In
The Glass Menagerie, Tom is trying to be a poet Alexandra in Sweet Bird of Youth is an actress: Chris
Flanders in The Milk Train Does Not Slap Here Anymore is a poet, and some other characters are
artists. Hence the artist is a typical character that occurs again an again in the plays of Williams. The
Glass Menagerie, Williams’ magnum opus, represents a group of realistic characters. Of them the
character of Amanda is par excellence.
The members of the Winfield family presented in the play are Amanda Winfield the mother, Tom
her son, and Laura Wingfield-her daughter. These members are hell-ridden creatures conditioned by
extreme poverty, constant ill-health, and the consequent mental distress. The father of the household
has escaped from his responsibilities by deserting his wife and children. The true condition of Amanda
as the mother of two children who are social failures stares her in the face all the time. She had sent
Laura to a college, and it was a dismal failure. So she was again taken to the Young People's League at
the Church, which proved to be yet another fiasco. Amanda is much worried for "all she (Laura) does
is fool with those pieces of glass and play those worn out records. She has thought about the marriage
of her daughter. But the latter is unfit even for that. She herself "accepts in a tone of frightened
apology: But mother…….. I am crippled.”
Amanda’s predicament is that of a woman living in the past: ‘A little woman of great but confused
vitality clinging frantically to another time and place’, but potently irked by the adverse present. Hence
she persistently strives to escape into a world of illusion. In her illusion she underrates her daughter's
drawbacks. She likes no one to say that her daughter is crippled. led: You know that I never allow that
word to be used. If at all there is any difference between Laura and the other girls Amanda would say.
I think the difference is all to her advantage. She is thus trying to 'kill the truth by saving lie.' A woman
already belonging to the world of the illusory past, Amanda is creating an artificial almost Thespian
world of her own, to tide over her desperate condition. She assumes that 'the slight disadvantages' in
Laura could be counterbalanced and could even be overcome, if she can develop charm and vivacity.
To use Amanda's own words: When people have some slight disadvantage like that, they cultivate
other things to make up for it develop charm and vivacity. She thinks it is possible for her to transform
her 'crippled' daughter into an irresistible beauty by artificial means. So she tries to give her illusions
actual shape in a clean house and a beautiful daughter. We see that Amanda works like a Turk in the
preparation to receive the gentleman caller. The whole apartment is given a glittering new appearance.
Laura herself is transformed into a "piece of translucent glass touched by light, given a momentary
radiance, not actual, not lasting." Thus is her attempt to save Laura from those pieces of glass animals,
she uses her daughter as little artifact of her own will and in the process renders her into a piece of
glass. The preparation for the gentleman caller reaches its zenith when Amanda has succeeded in
making he daughter look like a young lady. She has made use of the so-called 'gay deceivers' because
as Amana says: to be painfully honest your (Laura's) chest is flat.
As a dramatist Tennessee Williams makes use of expressionistic techniques to depict inner reality.
Expressionism is a dramatic technique, which enables a dramatist to depict 'inner reality', the soul or
psyche of his personages. The emphasis shifts from the external to the inner reality. The action moves
backward and forward freely in space and time in harmony with the thought processes of the character
concerned. There is a deeper and deeper probing of the subconscious, action is increasingly in
eternalized, and what goes on within the soul becomes more important than the external action.
"Instead of a dramatic sequence of events, there is a concentration on the stream in a dream to suggest
the inner reality which lies beneath the surface. Not concerned with externals. The expressionists
explore the idea, the source of conduct, until reality becomes subconscious and character mere
abstraction. Scenes are often brief; they sometimes succeed one another without time-sequence, they
have neither order nor unity and they suggest, as they alternate between reality and fantasy, between
objective action and analysis, the disorderly, disconnected features of psycho-analysis.
The End Multan Khan