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Tom goes to the movies to experience the “adventures” that his life at home and the warehouse lacks.
Tennessee Williams wrote the play, the glass menagerie in 1944. In ' the glass menagerie ' by
Tennessee Williams, Tom Wingfield initiates the play by introducing the principal characters who
happen to be his family. The plot and many of its details had been anticipated by situations and
references throughout his previous work: The figures of the crippled, delicate young girl (Laura); of
the virile young man (Jim), whom she desires but cannot cope with; of the sensitive artist-brother
(Tom), who looks on, sympathetic but helpless; of the illusion-ridden aristocratic mother (Amanda);
and of the father who has deserted his family (the elder Wingfield). Alternatively, Williams
implements an on-stage screen device, or legend, which projects images or titles. Let us write or edit
the research paper on your topic. Laura says that you hate the apartment and that you go out nights
to get away from it. This fall symbolizes her inability to fend for herself in the outside world, and the
ultimate hopelessness of her situation. He goes to night school, believes in self-improvement, and has
great ambitions. Hers is a mythology not of this world, but a mythology that only works on the
fictional Tara. The connection draws the audience closer to Tom and where he is coming from, thus
providing a more advanced understanding. Although her physical handicapped appears to be slight,
she has grown accustomed to her abnormality since childhood. Indeed, she was too shy to bring the
program to him back in high school, but she has kept it all these years. Secondly, she helps
compound the theme of the difficulty in accepting reality the most. Like her first story about the 17
gentlemen callers, this story also ends when Amanda meets her husband, making her marriage the
symbolic end of her life. There are various types of glass of whose qualities will be closely examined
further on. But here there was only hot swing music and liquor, dance halls, bars, and movies, and
sex that hung in the gloom like a chandelier and flooded the world with brief, deceptive rainbows”.
Jim warns Tom that the boss is not pleased with Tom and he may soon be out of a job. Stars such as
Greta Garbo and Mickey Mouse (Scene 4, p. 154) presented people with an escape from their dreary
day-to-day lives. Amanda is not cowed, saying that she will not allow any books by “Mr. Lawrence”
in her home. She understands her plight but at the same time wants her to correct herself and
improve herself; her brother continues to be haunted by her memory even after deserting her. Cadullo
feels that it is a non-realistic interpretation for even if it is a memory; it is but a fabricated one. On a
personal level, Paradise Dance Hall might symbolize more specific loss that Tom has experienced.
Fedder suggests that the authors shared early bad experiences with their fathers and play this fact
out in their works. Essay on The Glass Menagerie Research Paper on Symbolism in the. To achieve
this, Williams applies a variety of images and text (which are sometimes repeated) relating to the
particular scene at the time. Why is this topic important, and why is your particular position on the
topic noteworthy. Don’t worry, we have a full kit of tools to help you. The aspect of Laura being a
key figure in the play is underscored by the fact that it is her glass figurines that give the play its
name and theme. In these two plays, even expressing differently, mothers all show love to their
children; they all want their children.
Laura lives within the world of her records and among the figures in her glass menagerie. Inform
Williams’ contrast “an essentially melodramatic vocabulary of the lost past.” (Aronson) With a
revolutionary idea of the introduction of memory and the fluidity of its transition. A semi-structured
indepth interview was used to collect information from 35 participants who included teachers,
principals, and developers of the SHM Program in Iran. In most cases, the narrator is an outsider
providing an unbiased perspective. Both tales revolve around The American Dream and its
challenging nature to attain. The scene closes with Laura remarking wistfully to Tom that their
mother is afraid that Laura will be an old maid. Some theatre critics also maintain that, because
William’s material for his play is real and based on his childhood memories, he does not have to
drape his plays in realistic conventions for fear of lack of credibility. When the father was absent, as
in the case of the Wingfields, the eldest son was to fulfil that responsibility. As their conversation
continues, however, the old rifts seem inescapable. Williams’s essay paper subject and browse essay
prompt: you will find many people. B. Compare contrast between amanda and reality and writing
service a gentleman caller. While his later discussion of his frustration with movies suggests that he
goes to the movies at least part of the time, some critics have argued that Tom might be spending his
nights exploring the city’s hidden gay world. Tom is the one responsible, and the pain of his position
is made clear. Louis forever. As he gives this final speech, Amanda and Laura are visible through a
transparent fourth wall that drops down into place in front of them. Tom can’t openly write when his
mother is there just as Laura’s glass polishing is interrupted by the appearance of Amanda. Three
characters in three books: Oedipus in Oedipus Rex, Tom Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie, and
Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman In each story, the hero misunderstands himself as much as his
own family disdains him. She names them, tells what they went on to do with their lives, and
reminds her children miserably that she, who had her pick, chose their father. He enjoys her company
because, like Tom, Laura remembers his glory days. The descending fourth wall puts a powerful but
permeable barrier between Tom and his family. Tom insists that he has been at the movies all night.
Thus Williams makes it clear that Amanda’s memories are an inextricable mixture of fact and rose
tinted fiction. The sufferings and setbacks that Laura has encountered culminate into her making a
collection of glass figurines, as a way of creating a world of her own (Williams, Scene 1). When
Laura expresses doubt that her brother could really have been at the movies all this time, Tom tells
her about the length of the program and the magician that he went to see. Williams uses his own past
as the basis for his characters and most of the plot. Both find it difficult to adjust to normal social
relationships. The rainbow-colored lights and the lively music point to a world of leisure, ease, and
good times. Working backwards, it is easy to associate Tom’s wistfulness towards the colored lights
of Paradise Dance Hall with his sublimated homosexuality. Therefore much of the material Williams
used in the Menagerie and his other play is, or rather was reality. Laura is completely isolated from
the external world which seems to her as hostile and cruel world for a frail girl like Laura. In reality
of course, there are never such fitting musical soundtracks, but “.in memory, everything seems to
happen to music.” (Scene 1, p. 235) Though not realistic, music, from dance hall jazz to a “lone
fiddle in the wings” or the scratchy victrola, all play an important part in creating the atmosphere of
the Glass Menagerie. He can afford to use such non-realistic staging techniques and such extensive
symbolism because he does not have to prove that his plays are real.
Props, setting, and location lend to a fine tuning of the environment in which the history and daily
activities of the people becomes illuminated and shaped. Laura, clearly shaken and guilt-stricken,
admits that she has spent all of these days walking in the park or going to museums, keeping up the
deception because she could not bear Amanda’s disappointment. What is the symbolic significance
of The Glass Menagerie. Theatre had maintained till then a much closer relation to a realistic
dimension for it explored human emotions and interactions essentially communicated through its
protagonist. This scene, with Amanda and Tom sitting on the fire escape, wishing on the moon and
surrounded by the music and lights of the nearby dance hall, is lyrical and beautiful. While
traditional theatre makes the spectators aware about the difference between showing and seeing, the
desired viewpoint in The Glass Menagerie differs in this aspect for the viewer has to identify his
viewpoint as the seeing eye of Tom, the narrator. These papers were written primarily by students
and provide critical analysis of The Glass Menagerie. His works won four Drama Critics’ awards
and were widely translated and performed around the world. The themes in The Glass Menagerie
include the struggle to find one's place in the world, the importance of illusion and escape, and the
destructive power of memory. But here there was only hot swing music and liquor, dance halls, bars,
and movies, and sex that hung in the gloom like a chandelier and flooded the world with brief,
deceptive rainbows”. For Tom, the older Tom who narrates the events of the play, memory is the
thing that cannot be escaped, for he is still haunted by memories of the sister he abandoned years
ago. Williams uses the rose as a motif for Laura to emphasize her delicateness and her beauty, as well
as her worth. During the Renaissance, Shakespearean plays also toyed with the theme of memory as
in Hamlet for example the protagonist asks himself “Must I remember?” The Glass Menagerie
reshapes the tradition by shifting attention from the simple recollection of memories to a
reconstruction of them. They were capable, and it was acceptable for them to support themselves
financially. Many of these symbols possess similar meanings, resulting in comparable themes in both
stories. Tom, the narrator looks back with fond nostalgia and also with haunted guilt. A fire escape
blocked the smoky light that might have come in from the window facing the back alley 1. That
evening I went to the airstrip with Kasokola, my most trusted assistant. This is the evident reason of
conflict between them both suggesting everlasting peace is unattainable. Amanda has worked hard to
make the apartment ready for the gentleman caller. Plastic theatre is a type of theatre that uses plastic
props and scenery. Amanda is haunted by the memory of her husband, a man who abandoned her
and their children years ago, and she spends her days reliving the glory of her youth through the
stories she tells to her children. This is also what makes the play sentimental and moving for
desperate for the desperate irony of the situation is that the individual seeking so often at cross
purposes lead them inexorably to create their own individual tragedy. Ultimately, Amanda sinks
under the weight of her own self-image. She fears that his nights out jeopardize his day job, and that
if he loses his job their security will be threatened. Angered by her accusations and not willing to put
up with her foolishness, Tom tells her that he is going to the movies. Amanda seems somewhat
shaken by Tom’s misgivings, but she regains her optimism and calls Laura to come out to the fire
escape. They had to cook, clean, iron and generally look after the family. After receiving her first
dance and kiss, perhaps Laura is freed from her constructed fantasy world and blossoms into a real
woman. Laura lives within the world of her records and among the figures in her glass menagerie.
For a brief moment, the Wingfield apartment was a place of dreams. Amanda experienced a return to
her girlhood, Laura showed her long lost love her precious glass menagerie, and the place was full of
the music from Paradise Dance Hall. What is the symbolic significance of The Glass Menagerie.
Amanda is conscious of their financial dependence. The descending fourth wall puts a powerful but
permeable barrier between Tom and his family. Nevertheless post-world war II stagecraft perceived
realistic drama becoming “feeble and impotent” (Aronson) As literature became increasingly
concerned about exploring the darker dimen sions of the human psyche and strove to examine
through Freud’s perception of psychoanalysis. This emphasizes the distance between Amanda and
her children. The play is set in this half-light, with the lighting changing to reflect the mood of the
action on stage. Tom responds that he likes lots of adventure, and that his job at the warehouse does
not provide any. Her most interesting point is stating that The Glass Menagerie is “made of diverse
perspectives,” for even though it seems to be one intrinsic conscience; it is more than it appears for
much like a dream or a memory for Jackson believes the play to be a summary of a “poetic journey”
or a journey to the truth. This repetition reminds the audience of the nostalgic, yet depressing mood
of the play, which further assists Williams in communicating the immersed meaning. The screen
projections seem heavy-handed, but at the time their use would have seemed to be a cutting-edge
innovation. Her pure and inalterable attachment to her glass menagerie can be associated with for
example say a wineglass’s pure and clear structure. Visible is a large collection of transparent glass
animals, this being the first direct reference to glass. The music is meant to be the “lightest, most
delicate music in the world,” and even the saddest. Methods This is a qualitative study using
conventional content analysis method. The sudden uprooting of the family from the Deep South to
the urban environment of St. Some theatre critics also maintain that, because William’s material for
his play is real and based on his childhood memories, he does not have to drape his plays in realistic
conventions for fear of lack of credibility. She is obsessive and controlling to her children, because
she wants them to live the life she wanted to live. Tennessee Williams incorporates a song titled “The
Glass Menagerie”. The influence of his sister however, can be felt dramatically in all of his plays. See
other similar resources ?1.50 (no rating) 0 reviews BUY NOW Save for later Not quite what you
were looking for. The themes in The Glass Menagerie include the struggle to find one's place in the
world, the importance of illusion and escape, and the destructive power of memory. The Glass
Menagerie shines a light on being an outsider and being restless through the perspectives of three
different individuals. Laura is her own self with Jim and as he enters her world of glass, she journeys
into his. We see that it is the job of the male to bring home money, and the daughter to look pretty
and get married. A bout of childhood sickness strikes her, but because of the family's inability to
afford timely quality medical services, she is left with a limp that eats into her personality and self-
esteem. Laura reacts doubtfully and with great sadness, responding that she is crippled and therefore
cannot find a husband. The contrast between the vivacious and talkative Amanda and her timid, soft-
spoken daughter could not be starker: Tom has a tender relationship with Laura; when Tom expresses
frustration at the start of Amanda’s story about her gentlemen callers, it is Laura who persuades Tom
to humor their mother. This is 100% legal. You may not submit downloaded papers as your own, that
is cheating. Also you. The narrator breaks the conceptual “fourth wall” of naturalistic drama by
addressing the audience directly.
Another character who features prominently in the play is Amanda Wingfield, the mother to Tom
and Laura. A fragile unearthly prettiness has come out in Laura; she is like a piece of translucent
glass touched by light, given a momentary radiance, not actual, not lasting” ( glass 62). In Tom’s
speech from the fire escape, the symbolic name of Paradise Dance Hall can be read in a number of
ways. “Paradise” is an allusion to the lost Garden of Eden, and here the allusion paints the American
thirties as a period of innocence before the turmoil of World War II. It is striking how Tom's speeches
are always from the fire escape. Because of their subjectivity, Williams was granted this freedom,
which he used to manipulate conventional techniques. The antimicrobial activity of the agents was
neutralized and the bacterial cells were harvested from the discs by vortexing, serially diluted in
reduced transport fluid, plated on fastidious anaerobe agar containing 5% horse blood, incubated
anaerobically and colony?forming units calculated.ResultsIodine and NaOCl were more effective
than chlorhexidine except against P. Amanda discovered that Laura has not been going to class
everyday, but instead dropped out of the school after only a few days of attendance. The sudden
uprooting of the family from the Deep South to the urban environment of St. How does the fact that
Tom is the narrator affect the style and content of the play. The conclusion of The Glass Menagerie is
that Tom leaves the apartment and his family to pursue his dreams. Laura is left behind to deal with
her father and her own fragile mental state. But since I have poet’s weakness for symbols, I am using
this character also as a symbol; he is the long delayed but always expected something that we live
for”. Indeed, she wants to relive her past through Laura, transplanting the quaint life she had in Blue
Mountain to the urban setting of St. Louis. Clearly, Amanda seems oblivious to Tom’s unhappiness
and Laura’s painful shyness. This resource hasn't been reviewed yet To ensure quality for our
reviews, only customers who have purchased this resource can review it Report this resource to let
us know if it violates our terms and conditions. The results showed the effectiveness of the SMH
program. Amanda Wingfield corresponds with Gertrude Morel as. It is quite apt to think about the
inner state of the characters by psychoanalytical approach. Even the gentleman caller, when he
finally comes, will be careless with Laura. Williams’s essay paper subject and browse essay prompt:
you will find many people. B. Compare contrast between amanda and reality and writing service a
gentleman caller. Amanda tells the woman that she needs to renew her subscription, trying to
convince her with the prospect of a new serial novel that has just begun. In this scene, he seems to
be struggling to tolerate her, and while Amanda is loving, she is also demanding beyond reason. This
essay explores the credibility of the glass menagerie as a believable, realistic play; given that its
narrator says that the play is based on memories and memories can be distorted at will. Laura tries to
clear the table, but Amanda tells her to sit and be the lady while she does the work. From the very
job Tennessee held early in his life to the apartment he and his family lived in. To counter her fears,
Amanda enrols Laura in a business school hoping that she would be stable; provide for her self and
probably for the family. It becomes a reference point of nostalgia, but also provides a connection of
allusion to the narrator. A thrust stage is a theater stage that extends out into the audience's The
realistic drama in Tennessee Williams' play, the glass menagerie. Amanda’s life story, as she tells it,
includes both kinds of Paradise: she longs for the idyllic world of her youth and her seventeen
gentleman callers, and she longs for a future fairy-tale ending for her daughter. Work or housewife,
those were the only two options open for women at that time. It helps to paint a vivid picture of how
Williams wants the audience to feel about Laura. The lighting follows the trajectory of memory by
laying emphasis upon certain objects or actors to focus shafts of light on while keeping others dim to
single out and focus on whatever it permits to completely show the “pristine clarity” (Williams) that
was used in “early religious saints or Madonnas” (Williams) The dim lighting was a product of Tom’s
mind and how dreamy it truly was.
He gives a speech about being tired of the movies: movies tranquilize people, making them content
to watch other people’s adventures without having any of their own. The fire escape, where Tom
spends much of his time on in the play, is very symbolic of his desire to escape the informal
boundaries he is trapped in. “ In Spain there was Guernica. The glass menagerie research paper -
Colorado State University. Theatre had maintained till then a much closer relation to a realistic
dimension for it explored human emotions and interactions essentially communicated through its
protagonist. As if reaching out to stop the glass from falling off the unsteady table, Tom and
Amanda anxiously rush towards her. For example, while Amanda is speaking, the script says that a
projected image of Amanda as a young girl appears. By employing memory play and new plastic
theater, Williams frees himself from the confines of conventional theater in order to emphasize the
underlying reality. For this to exist, she greatly depends on her mother and brother. The glass
menagerie is the most important symbol for Laura and her fragility. The legend also emphasizes the
characters’ mood and feelings. Tom uses the plasticity of the memory to his advantage by creating a
fictional space to store the bitter reality without forgetting them. However I shall begin my essay by
asserting that the characters, themes, scene, stage setting, situation and relationships in this play, are
closely associated with the qualities of glass. The themes in The Glass Menagerie include the
struggle to find one's place in the world, the importance of illusion and escape, and the destructive
power of memory. Her intimacy with the glass objects is the psychological process of mind.
Conversely, in the book The Dramatic World of Tennessee Williams, Francis Donahue states that
Williams “meant more accurately “reverie,’ which implies that small events of small importance in
themselves, are recalled, relived, and treasured because they serve to symbolize and heighten basic
experiences” Benjamin Nelson, in his short essay The Play is Memory in the book titled Twentieth
Century Interpretations of The Glass Menagerie, signifies an even deeper fragility of memory.
Summer and Smoke (1948), Camino Real (1953), and The Glass Menagerie (1944), among others,
provided some of the early testing ground for Williams’ innovations. By writing a “memory play,”
Tennessee Williams freed himself from the restraints of naturalistic theatre. Eventually Jim pursues
her enough for a dance, only to end up bumping the table and breaking the glass Unicorn’s horn.
Williams has set the play in a large squalid apartment block, “.one of those vast hive-like
conglomerations of cellular living-units.” (Stage directions, p. 233) in which most of the American
lower and upper middleclass lived during the Depression. Her true crippling ailment is not her leg
but her shyness, and this anxiety becomes manifest as physical illness. She proposes a swap; Tom’s
freedom in exchange for a husband for Laura. In the seventh scene, Williams has the legend project,
“SOUVENIR”, foreshadowing Jim O’Conner never coming back, as he is engaged to Betty
(Williams 781). Despite his attempts to escape his past, Tom tells the audience at the end Escapism
Doesn't Work In Tennessee Williams' play “ The Glass Menagerie,” the story is told of a small family.
“ The Glass Menagerie. However, we can safely say that there are both large elements of memory
and of reality present in the play, and that while memory dominates the performance and creates a
lasting impression on its readers and viewers, reality supports and shapes this memory. The
connection draws the audience closer to Tom and where he is coming from, thus providing a more
advanced understanding. As Tom goes out to smoke a cigarette, Amanda tells a story she has often
told before, about one day in her youth when she received seventeen gentleman callers in a single
afternoon. And yet, Tom cannot seem to shake the memory of them, and they are clearly visible to
the audience. Essays within the era the glass menagerie and also the glass menagerie papers and
reference. The lighting follows the trajectory of memory by laying emphasis upon certain objects or
actors to focus shafts of light on while keeping others dim to single out and focus on whatever it
permits to completely show the “pristine clarity” (Williams) that was used in “early religious saints or
Madonnas” (Williams) The dim lighting was a product of Tom’s mind and how dreamy it truly was.
Those dancers, says Tom, could not have known that change would be coming for them, too.