THE GLASS MENAGERIE By Tennessee Williams

THE GLASS MENAGERIE By Tennessee Williams
First Staged 1944 New York Critics Prize Winner

Learning intentions We will examine dramatic aspects in the work of Tennessee Williams, including: Guilt Betrayal Change Exiles Morality Fugitives American Tragedy Southern Gothic Symbolism. We will explore links in two plays and analyse the impact and effectiveness of his literary canon on society.

Interrelated themes 1. Guilt: In what way do the characters show guilt in the three plays? 2. Change: How do the characters deal with change in the three plays? 3. Morality: What is Williams saying about morality in the three plays? 4. American Tragedy: What elements make these three plays tragic in a classical sense? 5. Exiles/Fugitives Why are Williams’s characters fleeing and what is he saying about the American Dream? ALL CONSIDER SYMBOLISM. ALSO!!!!!

General Learning Intentions 2016
I will develop a knowledge and understanding of the complexities of dramatic and poetic language. I will convey information using detailed specialist terminology, analysis and evaluation of multiple texts. I will persuade, argue and evaluate using supporting evidence from the text and secondary sources. I will structure a convincing analytical examination of key areas of the texts and contribute in written and spoken forms. I will make relevant detailed notes and organise them in a coherent way to create new texts I will consult primary and secondary sources to expand my understanding of texts. I will present my ideas in a fluent way that is appropriate to my audience. I will examine the interpretation of written/spoken/ performed texts and evaluate effectiveness.

Collaborative Learning
All must take notes. All must present findings to whole class. All must contribute to discussions and presentations Groups will study: Characters, Themes, Language, (monologue/soliloquy), Key Scenes, Symbols, Motifs, Conflict, Denouement, Dialogue, Structure.

Dramatic devices in advanced higher
Hamartia = the decision or tragic flaw that leads to the downfall of a character. Peripeteia= a sudden reversal of fortune that leads to success or tragic failure. Tragic irony, or dramatic irony= a device authors use to draw their reader into the story. Tragic irony occurs when there is a greater meaning in a character's words or actions, understood by the audience only. Catharsis The purging of the feelings of pity and fear that, according to Aristotle, occur in the audience of tragic drama. The audience experiences catharsis at the end of the play, following the catastrophe. Chorus A group of characters in Greek tragedy (and in later forms of drama), who comment on the action of a play without participation in it. Their leader is the choragos. Sophocles' Antigone and Oedipus the King both contain an explicit chorus with a choragos. Tennessee Williams's Glass Menagerie contains a character who functions like a chorus.

COLLABORATIVE LEARNING:
Group work. All contribute to discussions, presentations and gathering evidence. GIVE YOUR GROUP A NAME!!! Think of 5 key elements from the play you would like to examine. (You may also look at Streetcar in comparison). Use laptop to organise notes, quotes and ideas and we will put these into the presentation. Send .

Essay questions Drama Show how any dramatist successfully exploits naturalistic and fantasy elements to convey changing constructs of time and place in two plays ‘Time and memory are manipulated to add fantasy elements to naturalistic plays by many dramatists.’ How true do you find this statement ? You should respond by analysing two plays. ‘Modern drama is driven by characters usually in a naturalistic and linear way to allow the audience insights into their personalities. Sometimes, however, the playwright may manipulate time to examine how past, present and future can merge to form the character’s personalities…’ By examining two plays by the same writer explain how true you find this statement

POSSIBLE KEY POINTS IN THE PLAY
i. Conflict Emerging: Amanda and Tom’s power struggle is introduced and her background of callers sets up the main conflict of the play. ii. Laura’s Life: Since Laura dropped out of business school, Amanda becomes adamant that Laura needs a husband or she’ll be nothing the rest of her life. iii. Wanting Escape: Tom finally vents to Amanda about how he wants to leave and how if he were serving himself he wouldn’t work in the factory. iv. Restlessness: Tom gets home right before Amanda wakes as he can’t stand to be there, then Amanda confronts him about his wanting to leave and her wish for Laura to have a husband. v. Making a Fuss: Amanda fusses over Tom’s smoking habit, then over the preparations for Jim’s visit. vi. Psychological Trap: Jim comes over and Laura is very uncomfortable about it. Amanda is also playing matchmaker with both Jim and Laura. vii. The Exchange: Jim tells Laura he thinks she has an inferiority complex and how to try getting over it, and Laura gifts the horn-less unicorn to Jim.

Essay questions 2016 “Conflict and the balance of power are central to the effectiveness of modern theatre. Power struggles drive the action and confront the audience’s moral position with many questions.” Examine how power struggles are conveyed in two plays “Many plays are based on deteriorating gender relations, simmering emotions and the potentiality for violent confrontation.” Examine how any playwright conveys these aspects of human life effectively ”Morality is a socially constructed façade that playwrights must get behind to expose the multiple hypocrisies of our world.” Discuss this statement by analysing the moral strands in two plays..

Expressing the inexpressible…
Williams liked experimenting with the inexpressible as a result of which we see him using: silences, pauses, gaps and an indistinct dialogue style using short and concise sentences and sometimes incomplete sentences to imply the unexpressed. Stage directions and production notes were very detailed and offered physical interpretations, responses and actions for directors and actors. These are unseen by audiences and allow the unexpressed to be implicit in actions and reactions. He also used techniques from absurd theatre to represent fantasy/realistic views in his plays.

STart Stylish link to texts and topic to allow smooth flow into introduction Title of text Author Response to question/topic. Techniques and aspects of THEME you will examine Attempt to be stylish and intelligent – but above all else keep your writing clear and intelligible.

Title of the plays Originally called ‘The Gentleman Caller’ Based on “Portrait of a Girl in Glass.” and “If You Breathe, It Breaks” earlier short works. ‘The Glass Menagerie’ is symbolic. Original/working title of other plays: The Poker Night (A Streetcar Named Desire) The Enemy Time ( Sweet Bird of Youth)

Structuring a multiple text essay
Linear approach. 1. Take text one. Link it to topic, examine relevant points using SMMME structure. 2. Take text two and do as above. 3. Take text three and do as above. Effective way of logically showing connections in each text. Favoured by Universities/colleges when studying big issues and big texts. Block approach. Analyse a section from text one and compare it to relevant sections from texts two and three. (SSS) 2. Take another section from text one and do the same as above (MMM) 3. Repeat until satisfied that your analysis of each block is thorough and relevant to topic. (EEE) Effective way of showing connections in a micro-analytical way. Can seem a bit fragmented at times but if done properly can work well.

star STAR is an effective and helpful way of showing the assessor that you are using the texts, literary terminology and analytical skills effectively to respond to the given topic. ADVANCED HIGHER VERSION IS: STATEMENT (stylish and relevant) TEXTUAL REFERENCE (full context) ANALYSIS (detailed and using terminology) RESPONSE TO TOPIC (varied and when required) This is a useful structure even in university courses.

smmmmmmme The magical theory of gaining meaning by reading and thinking in a straight lines. Even when dropped into the middle of a conversation, when time is being manipulated to add contextual relevance, when characters appear to be deceptive… We can gather meaning and analyse a text by reading it from the START, through the complications of the MIDDLE(S), to the final satisfaction or disappointment of the END. (SMMMMMME)

link Hepburn Shepherd Woodward Malkovich Wyman Douglas

Drawing on past experience to create drama in the present and effect the future
Tennessee Williams’ play is very autobiographical; what do you think he wanted to achieve, through writing about aspects of his own life and family? Identify aspect of this in three the plays.

The Memory Play “Memory takes a lot of poetic license. It omits some details; others are exaggerated for memory is seated predominantly in the heart” (Stage Directions, Scene One, The Glass Menagerie)

The memory play. “Memory becomes myth, a story to be endlessly repeated as a protection against present declines.… The South does no less and Williams …, like William Faulkner, acknowledges the seductive yet destructive power of a past reconstituted as myth” Discuss. “Jim’s vision of himself as a man of the promising future is as deceptive as Amanda’s vision of herself as a woman from the gallant past” Contrast their self-perceptions

Compare the Symbols in the plays
A Streetcar Named Desire The Glass Menagerie Blanche Stanley Music Light Outcasts Ghosts Tragedy Climax Amanda Tom The Unicorn Freedom Light Music Ghosts Tragedy Anti-climax?

Common themes and elements in the plays.
Three plays Sweet Bird Of Youth Common themes and elements in the plays. Chance Princess Music Light Outcasts Ghosts Tragedy Climax Isolation, The human psyche, Perceived crimes Punishment, Demons within and without, Sanity and madness, Denial, Confession and catharsis.

Metonymy in drama and the movies
Metonymy is a subtype of metaphor, in which something (like rain) is used to stand for something else (like sorrow). [Pathetic fallacy: relating mood to the natural world.] …the sky weeps, the wind moans, the stars blink, the moon grins on the sleeping harbour, For example, the film industry likes to use metonymy as a quick shorthand, so we often notice that it is raining in funeral scenes. Identify metonymy in the works of Tennessee Williams.

Past, present, future ‘Williams’ plays manipulate aspects of time, place and identity to allow characters to develop and deteriorate within the world of the play. Discuss.

Poetic style in drama The delicacy of THE GLASS MENAGERIE is a wonder of poetry set in playwriting form. Its form is set in a series of scenes framing episodes that move the story along. Everything about the play creates a unity of fragility that never ceases to awe audiences. It is as if Williams draws all of us into that floating state of memory, past images and bygone dreams. The power of his writing is his way of taking minute physical and emotional details of his own life and transforming them into a prayer for hope and peace for all families. Here is a mother, Amanda, who, through delusions and wishes for total control, forces her children to either stay and be destroyed or flee and become exiled. Later in his life, Williams once said he could only be with his mother for about fifteen minutes at a time.

Dramatic Action/ Plot/ Ideas of the play: Main Scenes:
i. Conflict Emerging: Amanda and Tom’s power struggle is introduced and her background of callers sets up the main conflict of the play. ii. Laura’s Life: Since Laura dropped out of business school, Amanda becomes adamant that Laura needs a husband or she’ll be nothing the rest of her life. iii. Escape: Tom finally vents to Amanda about how he wants to leave and how if he were serving himself he wouldn’t work in the factory. iv. Restlessness: Tom gets home right before Amanda wakes as he can’t stand to be there, then Amanda confronts him about his wanting to leave and her wish for Laura to have a husband. v. Making a Fuss: Amanda fusses over Tom’s smoking habit, then over the preparations for Jim’s visit. vi. Psychological Trap: Jim comes over and Laura is very uncomfortable about it. Amanda is also playing matchmaker with both Jim and Laura. vii. The Exchange: Jim tells Laura he thinks she has an inferiority complex and how to try getting over it, and Laura gifts the horn-less unicorn to Jim.

Statements about Humanity/Human Existence:
Tom implies that when we don’t want to see something it has to be “shoved down our throats” before we’ll pay attention: “Their eyes had failed them, or they had failed their eyes, and so they were having their fingers pressed down on the fiery Braille alphabet of a dissolving economy.” Tom implies that it is hard to forget that which you wish for: “Laura, I tried to leave you behind me, but I am more faithful than I ever intended to be!”

Setting and staging This is as Tennessee Williams wrote in his stage directions: ‘“The Wingfield apartment is in the rear of the building, one of those vast hive-like conglomerations of cellular living-units that flower as warty growths in overcrowded urban centres of lower-middleclass population. The apartment faces an alley and is entered by a fire-escape, a structure whose name is a touch of accidental truth, for all these huge buildings are always burning with the slow and implacable fires of human desperation. The fire-escape is included in the set – that is the landing of it and steps descending from it’.

Director: Polly Teale ‘Both Tom’s and Amanda’s inner worlds are strongly influenced by movies and memories. When Tom explains why he has to leave St. Louis it is because he wants to experience the life he’s seen in the movies. Amanda’s life is only bearable because she escapes into fantastical memories of her charmed youth. The stories play out like scenes from old films, as if she were the star in her own movie. So in order to conjure more vividly the characters’ experience we have created our own cinema – the celluloid movie stars projected huge behind our flesh and blood characters, just as they exist in their minds. Williams wrote in the introduction to The Glass Menagerie that productions of the play should be “Expressionistic” and free from the constraints of naturalism. “The scene is memory. Memory takes a lot of poetic licence. It omits some details and exaggerates others according to the emotional value of the articles it touches”. In the pages of notes with which he prefixes the play he urges us to find a language that goes beyond the surface of life and expresses a deeper truth:’

Production Notes Tennessee Williams left unusually specific production notes as part of his play’s manuscript. The detail and points of reference of these notes give insight into the deep sensitivity of Williams’ artistic talent. Being a “memory play,” THE GLASS MENAGERIE can be presented with unusual freedom. Even if the play has unconventional techniques, the goal is a closer approach to truth through poetic interpretation. In Williams’ first version, there was a screen onto which were projected magic-lantern slides with images or titles. The purpose of this was to give certain values or a particular point to a scene. Meaning was to be found not only in the spoken word; the screen was to give the primary point of each scene.

The music is another literary accent
The music is another literary accent. A single tune is repeated to underline certain emotions. It is like circus music — the lightest, most delicate tune and, to Williams, “the saddest.” It shows the vitality of life and the sorrow, carried as if by the wind, changing all the time. It is a link between the narrator and the subject of the story. In each scene, the music is a reference to the nostalgia of the play - the condition and spirit of the piece. The music belongs mainly to Laura and is heard most clearly when the play focuses on her and the fragility of glass, which is her image. The lighting also reflects the meaning of the play. Laura has the clearest pool of light on her, like the light used in early religious portraits. The atmosphere for the figures on stage is radiant. These production notes were written not only for this play, but as imaginative ideas for directors. The notes encourage the poetry of the playwriting, along with specific descriptions of real, everyday life.

amanda BRIEF CHARACTER SKETCHES Amanda Wingfield Much of her life revolves around the past, particularly her time as a privileged debutante in the Mississippi Delta. She is the quintessential Southern Belle and a proud member of the Daughters of the American Revolution. (Right wing, racist connotations) She has only momentary flashes of confronting reality in the present, particularly in terms of her daughter and son. She attempts to control both her children’s lives and experiences and has almost no success in this endeavour with respect to her son Tom. She was abandoned by her husband 15 years ago and has struggled to keep her family together ever since. She comforts herself with the memories of the numerous gentlemen callers she entertained as a young lady. She is terrified by the fact that her children are not strong enough to navigate a Darwinian world.

tom Tom Wingfield A poet trapped by lower-middle class family circumstances and tethered to a job that offers no creative or emotional outlet. He struggles with his duty to support his mother and sister and yearns for the day that he can be free of the constraints they represent. At work, he is nicknamed “Shakespeare” because of his ambition to become a successful writer. One of his few acquaintances on the job is Jim O’Connor. Tom is also the narrator of this “memory” play, through which he intends to memorialize Laura.

laura Laura Wingfield Tom’s older sister, nearly 24, who wears a brace on her foot due to a childhood illness. She is physically and emotionally frail, painfully shy, insecure, and isolated. Laura sympathizes with Tom’s dreams, but attempts to keep peace in the family by placating her mother. She has suffered a great deal throughout her life and constitutes a powerful effect upon Tom. As a romantic, she seeks escape in nature, art and music. Laura dropped out from high school, in part due to her shyness, and later struggles with classes at Rubicam’s Business College.

Jim o’Connor James Delaney O’Connor, “Jim” Tom’s colleague at the shoe warehouse, and the gentleman caller for Laura whom Tom persuades to come to dinner. As an ambitious “self-starter,” he is strongly grounded in reality, though not necessarily as a sympathetic character.

The photograph symbol Mr. Wingfield His picture is displayed prominently in the Wingfield apartment, despite the fact that he abandoned his family fifteen years before the play begins. Served in World War I as a military officer. Described as a particularly handsome and romantic man who stole Amanda’s heart from her multiple gentlemen callers. Later, “a telephone man who fell in love with long distances.” Though Mr. Wingfield never appears in the play, and the audience never learns his first name, his presence is deeply felt.

Betty ghost character, prosopopiea
Betty Jim’s fiancée, who never appears in the play. She and Jim are to be married in June, just a few months after the night of the climactic dinner.

Themes escapism Escapism is an action of turning away from reality. Apter (1982: 6), in his book’s Fantasy Literature, states that: ‘fantasy offers escape from reality, but the purpose and effect of the escape ranges from wish- fulfilment, excitement or sheer entertainment, to release from habitual assumptions, thus providing a vantage point from which new possibilities can be realized.’

Tennessee williams “I don’t think I would have been the poet I am without that anguished familial situation.” Tennessee Williams, 26th March th February 1983

The play The Glass Menagerie is the most autobiographical of all Williams’ plays. Tom, the central character, is given Tennessee’s real name. Not only does much of the story come directly from Williams’ own life and experience but he places the writer at the heart of his own creation. The writer tells us the story. In The Glass Menagerie we are taken inside the author’s mind as he conjures up characters and places; as he returns to his past in order to face the guilt he feels about abandoning his family for another life.

“The Wingfield apartment is in the rear of the building, one of those vast hive-like conglomerations of cellular living-units that flower as warty growths in overcrowded urban centres of lower-middleclass population. The apartment faces an alley and is entered by a fire-escape, a structure whose name is a touch of accidental poetic truth, for all of these huge buildings are always burning with the slow and implacable fires of human desperation.”

“Memory takes a lot of poetic license. It omits some
Stage directions “The Glass Menagerie can be presented with unusual freedom from convention... Expressionism and all other unconventional techniques have only one valid aim, and that is a closer approach to truth.” “Memory takes a lot of poetic license. It omits some details; others are exaggerated for memory is seated predominantly in the heart” (Stage Directions, Scene One, The Glass Menagerie)

The golden age of hollywood
The golden age of hollywood. the movies as a symbol of the american dream. “When Tom explains why he has to leave St Louis, it’s because he wants to experience the life he’s seen in the movies. Amanda’s life is only bearable because she escapes into her fantastical memories of her charmed youth. The stories play out like scenes from old films, as if she was the star of her own movie. So, in order to conjure more vividly the characters experience, we have created our own cinema. The celluloid movie stars projected huge behind our flesh and blood characters, just as they exist in their minds.” Tom’s images are to do with escape and adventure; “Tom feels he’s under siege, being trapped and suffocated. In expressionistic terms, it describes his inner state, his psyche.”

“I give you truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion.– Tom
“Oh, Laura, Laura, I tried to leave you behind, but I am more faithful than I intended to be!” TOM “I give you truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion.– Tom “I don’t tell truth, I tell what ought to be truth. And if that is sinful, then let me be damned for it!” Blanche DuBois “I knew in my heart that the legend of Alexandra Del Lago couldn’t be separated from an appearance of youth…” Princess Kosmonopolis. Fantasy/Reality conflicts.

Tennessee williams “symbols are nothing but the natural speech of drama [. . .] the purest language of plays” ‘Symbols and their meanings must be arrived at through a period of time which is often a long one, requiring much patience, but if you wait out this period of time, if you permit it to clear as naturally as a sky after a storm, it will reward you, finally, with a puzzle which is still puzzling but which whether you fathom it or not, still has the beautifully disturbing sense of truth, as much of that ambiguous quality as we are permitted to know in all our seasons and travels and places of short stay on this risky planet.’ (Where I Live 146)

Symbolism representing life
Characterization, dialogue, plot and setting were all selected based on their potential to represent symbolically his identity and experience.

memories The memory of some past moments is more persuasive than the experience of present ones. —Henry David Thoreau(1) The past is never dead. It's not even past. —William Faulkner(2)

His Sister rose: past experiences
[O]n the shelves around [Rose’s] room she collected a large assortment of little glass articles, of which she was particularly fond. Eventually, the room took on a light and delicate appearance, in spite of the lack of outside illumination, and it became the only room in the house that I found pleasant to enter. When I left home a number of years later, it was this room that I recalled most vividly and poignantly when looking back on our home life in St. Louis. Particularly the little glass ornaments on the shelves. They were mostly little glass animals. By poetic association they came to represent, in my memory, all the softest emotions that belong to recollection of things past. They stood for all the small and tender things that relieve the austere pattern of life and make it endurable to the sensitive. (“The Author Tells Why It Is Called ‘The Glass Menagerie’” 68)

Recalling the past Tom Wingfield recalls the past for much the same reason that Willy Loman does in Death of a Salesman: guilt. He revisits the past because he knows that his own freedom, such as it is, has been purchased at the price of abandoning others…. He “writes” the play, more significantly, perhaps, because he has not effected that escape from the past which had been his primary motive for leaving. The past continues to exert a pull on him, as it does on his mother and sister, as it does on the South which they inhabit.

Tragic last lines… Think Blanche, CHANCE and TOM…
I didn’t go to the moon, I went much further—for time is the longest distance between two places. …but I was pursued by something. It always came upon me unawares, taking me altogether by surprise.… Then all at once my sister touches my shoulder. I turned and looked into her eyes…. Oh Laura, Laura, I tried to leave you behind me, but I am more faithful than I intended to be! (pp ) I reach for cigarette, I cross the street, I run into the movies or a bar, I buy a drink, I speak to the nearest stranger—anything that can blow your candles out! (p. 115) For nowadays the world is lit by lightning! Blow out your candles, Laura—so goodbye…. (p. 115)

The cycle of escape Tom has tried “anything that can blow out [the] candles” while wandering in his spiritual limbo, but he has never succeeded in achieving his goal while drifting in the world. That is exactly why he finally comes back to the very starting point of his life escape or rather self-exile and begs the shadow of Laura to blow them out for him once and for all. But taking all the above references into consideration, we can naturally come to the conclusion that Tom’s restless guilty soul cannot and will not be resting, no matter how earnestly and in whatever ways Tom tries to get the candles blown out. The connections of the symbolic meanings of glass between Laura and Tom in the play can help to illustrate this point more clearly.

memory as myth “Memory becomes myth, a story to be endlessly repeated as a protection against present declines.… The South does no less and Williams …, like William Faulkner, acknowledges the seductive yet destructive power of a past reconstituted as myth” Discuss. “Jim’s vision of himself as a man of the promising future is as deceptive as Amanda’s vision of herself as a woman from the gallant past” Contrast their self-perceptions

Real and unreal Biography and imagination
What [Williams’ mother] Edwina was witnessing was in no real sense an autobiographical account of Tom’s family life in St. Louis. It was a transmutation created by the artist who had taken refuge in the identity of Tennessee Williams—for it is true, as critic Frank Rich has said, that “anyone can write an autobiography, but only an artist knows how to remake his past so completely, by refracting it through a different aesthetic lens.”

Tom and tennessee blanche and tennessee

task Monologue Read through Amanda’s speech below. And then try performing the speech using these 2 different objectives: 1. Amanda wants to prove to Tom that she is of value and importance (emphasise the status and wealth of her suitors) 2. Amanda wants to inspire Laura to become a Southern Belle in her own image (try to involve and excite Laura with the story)

The Glass Menagerie, Scene 1
Amanda: “…My callers were all gentlemen – all! Among my callers were some of the most prominent young planters of the Mississippi Delta – planters and sons of planters! (Tom motions for music and a spot of light on Amanda. Her eyes lift, her face glows, her voice becomes rich and elegiac.) There was young champ Laughlin who later became vice-president of the Delta Planters Bank. Hadley Stevenson who was drowned in Moon Lake and left his widow one hundred and fifty thousand in Government bonds. There were the Cutrere brothers, Wesley and Bates. Bates was one of my bright particular beaux! He got in a quarrel with that wild Wainwright boy. They shot it out on the floor of Moon Lake Casino. Bates was shot through the stomach. Died in the ambulance on his way to Memphis. His widow was also well provided for, came into eight or ten thousand acres, that’s all. She married him on the rebound – never loved her – carried my picture on him the night he died! And there was that boy that every girl in the Delta had set her cap for! That brilliant, brilliant young Fitzhugh boy from Greene County!”

Past, present and future
The memory of some past moments is more persuasive than the experience of present ones. — Henry David Thoreau The past is never dead. It's not even past. —William Faulkner

Delma E. Presley (1990) This “memory play,” as the author preferred to classify it, effectively uses lightening, music, screens, and other devices to reveal how past events can forcefully affect the present. Second, set in a bleak period of American history, it provides insight into the ways different members of a family cope with forces of change. Finally the play explores a universal conflict between the urge toward self-fulfillment and the love of family, a conflict that often arises when an individual seeks independence. Delma E. Presley (1990)

Carl Jung Once a man’s instinct is suppressed by the environment, it will not be suddenly eliminated as if it never existed. On the contrary, it will merge into the unconscious part of human mentality. The collective unconscious, owing to its inappropriateness and incompatibility in real life, is oftentimes concealed in our deep psychology (Jung 997).

inner reality: life felt, rather than as seen
Glass Menagerie is mostly expressionistic: the first sentence of the Production Notes declares that “it is a memory play.” The term “memory play” suggests that it is a play worked out in one’s mental process, rather than a realistic representation. Instead of external reality, the inner vision becomes the primary concern of expressionistic drama.

Surviving through fantasy
Children use fantasy to survive chaos and pain. Children in dysfunctional homes frequently invent “a private world that gives them a way to escape from time to time so they can keep from being pulled into the craziness”

Overview The play is set in St. Louis, Missouri during the 1930s, first in winter with scene five in spring. The climate is moderate with winters being cold and having some snow, while summers can be hot. Throughout the scenes we see many times of day from afternoon and evening to early morning in scene four. In scene five we are told very specifically that it is dusk, likely right after dinner. America’s economy is beginning to fail, yet the majority of people still refuse to see it at the time. There were some labour disturbances, some become violent. The Wingfields live in an apartment complex dense with other people, who are basically enslaved to their factory jobs to survive. The political environment at the time of Tom’s narration is one of war as World War II rages. The only reference to religion is from Jim saying that his girl is Catholic, so the religious environment isn’t well indicated.

Characters Tom: Tom’s overall desire is to be free of the trapping in St. Louis and move. He demonstrates that he is not averse to using his means to provide for himself instead of for the family by not paying the light bill. His speech is rougher than Amanda would like from working at the factory and he usually avoids Amanda and the apartment. He is 22 years old, son of Amanda, sister of Laura, co-worker of Jim. Amanda: Amanda’s overall desire is to have a good future. She is not above using Tom and Laura to get what she wants, even though she makes it seem like it’s for them. She is very proper—a southern lady—who fusses over everything and needs control. Probably in her late 40s. She is Laura and Tom’s mother. Laura: Laura’s overall intention is to live by enjoying the small things—like the outdoors and the menagerie. Laura lets her insecurities overpower any work ethic she has outside the apartment, but is dedicated to the menagerie. She is very shy, doesn’t speak unless spoken to, and avoids strangers. She is 24.

KEY POINTS IN THE PLAY i. Conflict Emerging: Amanda and Tom’s power struggle is introduced and her background of callers sets up the main conflict of the play. ii. Laura’s Life: Since Laura dropped out of business school, Amanda becomes adamant that Laura needs a husband or she’ll be nothing the rest of her life. iii. Wanting Escape: Tom finally vents to Amanda about how he wants to leave and how if he were serving himself he wouldn’t work in the factory. iv. Restless: Tom gets home right before Amanda wakes as he can’t stand to be there, then Amanda confronts him about his wanting to leave and her wish for Laura to have a husband. v. Making a Fuss: Amanda fusses over Tom’s smoking habit, then over the preparations for Jim’s visit. vi. Psychological Trap: Jim comes over and Laura is very uncomfortable about it. Amanda is also playing matchmaker with both Jim and Laura. vii. The Exchange: Jim tells Laura he thinks she has an inferiority complex and how to try getting over it, and Laura gifts the horn-less unicorn to Jim.

overview The fact that the first scenes occur in winter is vital to dialogue between Amanda and Laura about her being out in the cold and getting ill. The geographical location is not vital at all to the meaning of the play since the same scenario could play out just as well in any other large town with a factory presence. Other than the narration, the economic and political environments don’t add much or anything to the memories.

Dependence and family obligations
AMANDA: I mean that as soon as Laura has got somebody to take care of her, married, a home of her own, independent— why, then you’ll be free to go wherever you please, on land, on sea, whichever way the wind blows you! But until that time you’ve got to look out for your sister. I don’t say we because I’m old and don’t matter! I say for your sister because she’s young and dependent. (175) The final interchange between Tom and his mother illustrates the fatal feature of the controlling parent: AMANDA: Don’t think about us, a mother deserted, an unmarried sister who’s crippled and has no job! Don’t let anything interfere with your selfish pleasure! Just go, go, go—to the movies! TOM: All right, I will! The more you shout about my selfishness to me the quicker I’ll go, and I won’t go to the movies! AMANDA: Go, then! Go to the moon—you selfish dreamer!

HAUNTING MEMORIES In his farewell address to the audience, Tom confesses that his mother’s imposition of guilt was effective. To this day he thinks with regret of how he left Laura: “Oh, Laura, Laura, I tried to leave you behind, but I am more faithful than I intended to be!”

Amanda I’ve seen such pitiful cases in the South—barely tolerated spinsters living upon the grudging patronage of sister’s husband or brother’s wife!—stuck away in some little mousetrap of a room—encouraged by one in-law to visit another—little birdlike women without any nest—eating the crust of humility all their life! (Glass 19)

Laura At the beginning of Scene Six, she is almost described as a fragile object: The arrangement of Laura’s hair is changed; it is softer and more becoming. 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)

Context Around 1941, Williams began the work that would become The Glass Menagerie. The play evolved from a short story entitled “Portrait of a Girl in Glass,” which focused more completely on Laura than the play does. In December of 1944, The Glass Menagerie was staged in Chicago, with the collaboration of a number of well-known theatrical figures. When the play first opened, the audience was sparse, but the Chicago critics raved about it, and eventually it was playing to full houses. In March of 1945, the play moved to Broadway, where it won the prestigious New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award. This highly personal, explicitly autobiographical play earned Williams fame, fortune, and critical respect, and it marked the beginning of a successful run that would last for another ten years. Two years after The Glass Menagerie, Williams won another Drama Critics’ Circle Award and a Pulitzer Prize for A Streetcar Named Desire. Williams won the same two prizes again in 1955, for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.

Themes, Motifs and Symbols
Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas explored in a literary work. The Difficulty of Accepting Reality Among the most prominent and urgent themes of The Glass Menagerie is the difficulty the characters have in accepting and relating to reality. Each member of the Wingfield family is unable to overcome this difficulty, and each, as a result, withdraws into a private world of illusion where he or she finds the comfort and meaning that the real world does not seem to offer. Of the three Wingfields, reality has by far the weakest grasp on Laura. The private world in which she lives is populated by glass animals—objects that, like Laura’s inner life, are incredibly fanciful and dangerously delicate.

Unlike his sister, Tom is capable of functioning in the real world, as we see in his holding down a job and talking to strangers. But, in the end, he has no more motivation than Laura does to pursue professional success, romantic relationships, or even ordinary friendships, and he prefers to retreat into the fantasies provided by literature and movies and the stupor provided by drunkenness. Amanda’s relationship to reality is the most complicated in the play. Unlike her children, she is partial to real-world values and longs for social and financial success. Yet her attachment to these values is exactly what prevents her from perceiving a number of truths about her life. She cannot accept that she is or should be anything other than the pampered belle she was brought up to be, that Laura is peculiar, that Tom is not a budding businessman, and that she herself might be in some ways responsible for the sorrows and flaws of her children. Amanda’s retreat into illusion is in many ways more pathetic than her children’s, because it is not a wilful imaginative construction but a wistful distortion of reality.

Although the Wingfields are distinguished and bound together by the weak relationships they maintain with reality, the illusions to which they succumb are not merely familial quirks. The outside world is just as susceptible to illusion as the Wingfields. The young people at the Paradise Dance Hall waltz under the short-lived illusion created by a glass ball—another version of Laura’s glass animals. Tom opines to Jim that the other viewers at the movies he attends are substituting on-screen adventure for real-life adventure, finding fulfilment in illusion rather than real life. Even Jim, who represents the “world of reality,” is banking his future on public speaking and the television and radio industries—all of which are means for the creation of illusions and the persuasion of others that these illusions are true. The Glass Menagerie identifies the conquest of reality by illusion as a huge and growing aspect of the human condition in its time.

The Impossibility of True Escape At the beginning of Scene Four, Tom regales Laura with an account of a magic show in which the magician managed to escape from a nailed-up coffin. Clearly, Tom views his life with his family and at the warehouse as a kind of coffin— cramped, suffocating, and morbid—in which he is unfairly confined. The promise of escape, represented by Tom’s missing father, the Merchant Marine Service, and the fire escape outside the apartment, haunts Tom from the beginning of the play, and in the end, he does choose to free himself from the confinement of his life. The play takes an ambiguous attitude toward the moral implications and even the effectiveness of Tom’s escape. As an able-bodied young man, he is locked into his life not by exterior factors but by emotional ones—by his loyalty to and possibly even love for Laura and Amanda. Escape for Tom means the suppression and denial of these emotions in himself, and it means doing great harm to his mother and sister. The magician is able to emerge from his coffin without upsetting a single nail, but the human nails that bind Tom to his home will certainly be upset by his departure. One cannot say for certain that leaving home even means true escape for Tom. As far as he might wander from home, something still “pursue[s]” him. Like a jailbreak, Tom’s escape leads him not to freedom but to the life of a fugitive.

The Unrelenting Power of Memory According to Tom, The Glass Menagerie is a memory play—both its style and its content are shaped and inspired by memory. As Tom himself states clearly, the play’s lack of realism, its high drama, its overblown and too-perfect symbolism, and even its frequent use of music are all due to its origins in memory. Most fictional works are products of the imagination that must convince their audience that they are something else by being realistic. A play drawn from memory, however, is a product of real experience and hence does not need to drape itself in the conventions of realism in order to seem real. The creator can cloak his or her true story in unlimited layers of melodrama and unlikely metaphor while still remaining confident of its substance and reality. Tom—and Tennessee Williams— take full advantage of this privilege. The story that the play tells is told because of the inflexible grip it has on the narrator’s memory. Thus, the fact that the play exists at all is a testament to the power that memory can exert on people’s lives and consciousness. Indeed, Williams writes in the Production Notes that “nostalgia is the first condition of the play.” The narrator, Tom, is not the only character haunted by his memories. Amanda too lives in constant pursuit of her bygone youth, and old records from her childhood are almost as important to Laura as her glass animals. For these characters, memory is a crippling force that prevents them from finding happiness in the present or the offerings of the future. But it is also the vital force for Tom, prompting him to the act of creation that culminates in the achievement of the play.

Motifs Motifs are recurring structures, contrasts, and literary devices that can help to develop and inform the text’s major themes. Abandonment The plot of The Glass Menagerie is structured around a series of abandonments. Mr. Wingfield’s desertion of his family determines their life situation; Jim’s desertion of Laura is the centre of the play’s dramatic action; Tom’s abandonment of his family gives him the distance that allows him to shape their story into a narrative. Each of these acts of desertion proves devastating for those left behind. At the same time, each of them is portrayed as the necessary condition for, and a natural result of, inevitable progress. In particular, each is strongly associated with the march of technological progress and the achievements of the modern world. Mr. Wingfield, who works for the telephone company, leaves his family because he “fell in love with [the] long distances” that the telephone brings into people’s consciousness. It is impossible to imagine that Jim, who puts his faith in the future of radio and television, would tie himself to the sealed, static world of Laura. Tom sees his departure as essential to the pursuit of “adventure,” his taste for which is whetted by the movies he attends nightly. Only Amanda and Laura, who are devoted to archaic values and old memories, will presumably never assume the role of abandoner and are doomed to be repeatedly abandoned.

The Words and Images on the Screen One of the play’s most unique stylistic features is the use of an onstage screen on which words and images relevant to the action are projected. Sometimes the screen is used to emphasize the importance of something referred to by the characters, as when an image of blue roses appears in Scene Two; sometimes it refers to something from a character’s past or fantasy, as when the image of Amanda as a young girl appears in Scene Six. At other times, it seems to function as a slate for impersonal commentary on the events and characters of the play, as when “Ou sont les neiges”(words from a fifteenth-century French poem praising beautiful women) appear in Scene One as Amanda’s voice is heard offstage. What appears on the screen generally emphasizes themes or symbols that are already established quite obviously by the action of the play. The device thus seems at best ironic, and at worst somewhat pretentious or condescending. Directors who have staged the play have been, for the most part, very ambivalent about the effectiveness and value of the screen, and virtually all have chosen to eliminate it from the performance. The screen is, however, an interesting epitome of Tennessee Williams’s expressionist theatrical style, which downplays realistic portrayals of life in favour of stylized presentations of inner experience.

Music Music is used often in The Glass Menagerie, both to emphasize themes and to enhance the drama. Sometimes the music is extra-diegetic—coming from outside the play, not from within it—and though the audience can hear it the characters cannot. For example, a musical piece entitled “The Glass Menagerie,” written specifically for the play by the composer Paul Bowles, plays when Laura’s character or her glass collection comes to the forefront of the action. This piece makes its first appearance at the end of Scene One, when Laura notes that Amanda is afraid that her daughter will end up an old maid. Other times, the music comes from inside the diegetic space of the play—that is, it is a part of the action, and the characters can hear it. Examples of this are the music that wafts up from the Paradise Dance Hall and the music Laura plays on her record player. Both the extra-diegetic and the diegetic music often provide commentary on what is going on in the play. For example, the Paradise Dance Hall plays a piece entitled “The World Is Waiting for the Sunrise” while Tom is talking about the approach of World War II.

Symbolic use of music Symbols Symbols are objects, characters, figures, and colours used to represent abstract ideas or concepts. Laura’s Glass Menagerie As the title of the play informs us, the glass menagerie, or collection of animals, is the play’s central symbol. Laura’s collection of glass animal figurines represents a number of facets of her personality. Like the figurines, Laura is delicate, fanciful, and somehow old-fashioned. Glass is transparent, but, when light is shined upon it correctly, it refracts an entire rainbow of colours. Similarly, Laura, though quiet and bland around strangers, is a source of strange, multifaceted delight to those who choose to look at her in the right light. The menagerie also represents the imaginative world to which Laura devotes herself—a world that is colourful and enticing but based on fragile illusions.

The Glass Unicorn The glass unicorn in Laura’s collection—significantly, her favourite figure— represents her peculiarity. As Jim points out, unicorns are “extinct” in modern times and are lonesome as a result of being different from other horses. Laura too is unusual, lonely, and ill-adapted to existence in the world in which she lives. The fate of the unicorn is also a smaller-scale version of Laura’s fate in Scene Seven. When Jim dances with and then kisses Laura, the unicorn’s horn breaks off, and it becomes just another horse. Jim’s advances endow Laura with a new normalcy, making her seem more like just another girl, but the violence with which this normalcy is thrust upon her means that Laura cannot become normal without somehow shattering. Eventually, Laura gives Jim the unicorn as a “souvenir.” Without its horn, the unicorn is more appropriate for him than for her, and the broken figurine represents all that he has taken from her and destroyed in her.

Motifs “Blue Roses” Like the glass unicorn, “Blue Roses,” Jim’s high school nickname for Laura, symbolizes Laura’s unusualness yet allure. The name is also associated with Laura’s attraction to Jim and the joy that his kind treatment brings her. Furthermore, it recalls Tennessee Williams’s sister, Rose, on whom the character of Laura is based. The Fire Escape Leading out of the Wingfields’ apartment is a fire escape with a landing. The fire escape represents exactly what its name implies: an escape from the fires of frustration and dysfunction that rage in the Wingfield household. Laura slips on the fire escape in Scene Four, highlighting her inability to escape from her situation. Tom, on the other hand, frequently steps out onto the landing to smoke, anticipating his eventual getaway.

Tom Wingfield Tom’s double role in The Glass Menagerie—as a character whose recollections the play documents and as a character who acts within those recollections—underlines the play’s tension between objectively presented dramatic truth and memory’s distortion of truth. Unlike the other characters, Tom sometimes addresses the audience directly, seeking to provide a more detached explanation and assessment of what has been happening onstage. But at the same time, he demonstrates real and sometimes juvenile emotions as he takes part in the play’s action. This duality can frustrate our understanding of Tom, as it is hard to decide whether he is a character whose assessments should be trusted or one who allows his emotions to affect his judgment. It also shows how the nature of recollection is itself problematic: memory often involves confronting a past in which one was less virtuous than one is now. Because The Glass Menagerie is partly autobiographical, and because Tom is a stand-in for the playwright himself (Williams’s given name was Thomas, and he, like Tom, spent part of his youth in St. Louis with an unstable mother and sister, his father absent much of the time), we can apply this comment on the nature of memory to Williams’s memories of his own youth.

Tom Even taken as a single character, Tom is full of contradiction. On the one hand, he reads literature, writes poetry, and dreams of escape, adventure, and higher things. On the other hand, he seems inextricably bound to the squalid, petty world of the Wingfield household. We know that he reads D. H. Lawrence and follows political developments in Europe, but the content of his intellectual life is otherwise hard to discern. We have no idea of Tom’s opinion on Lawrence, nor do we have any indication of what Tom’s poetry is about. All we learn is what he thinks about his mother, his sister, and his warehouse job—precisely the things from which he claims he wants to escape.

Tom Tom’s attitude toward Amanda and Laura has puzzled critics. Even though he clearly cares for them, he is frequently indifferent and even cruel toward them. His speech at the close of the play demonstrates his strong feelings for Laura. But he cruelly deserts her and Amanda, and not once in the course of the play does he behave kindly or lovingly toward Laura—not even when he knocks down her glass menagerie. Critics have suggested that Tom’s confusing behaviour indicates an incestuous attraction toward his sister and his shame over that attraction. This theory casts an interesting light on certain moments of the play—for example, when Amanda and Tom discuss Laura at the end of Scene Five. Tom’s insistence that Laura is hopelessly peculiar and cannot survive in the outside world, while Amanda (and later Jim) claims that Laura’s oddness is a positive thing, could have as much to do with his jealous desire to keep his sister to himself as with Laura’s own quirks.

Amanda Wingfield If there is a signature character type that marks Tennessee Williams’s dramatic work, it is undeniably that of the faded Southern belle. Amanda is a clear representative of this type. In general, a Tennessee Williams faded belle is from a prominent Southern family, has received a traditional upbringing, and has suffered a reversal of economic and social fortune at some point in her life. Like Amanda, these women all have a hard time coming to terms with their new status in society—and indeed, with modern society in general, which disregards the social distinctions that they were taught to value. Their relationships with men and their families are turbulent, and they staunchly defend the values of their past. As with Amanda, their maintenance of genteel manners in very ungenteel surroundings can appear tragic, comic, or downright grotesque. Amanda is the play’s most extroverted and theatrical character, and one of modern American drama’s most coveted female roles (the acclaimed stage actress Laurette Taylor came out of semi-retirement to play the role in the original production, and a number of legendary actresses, including Jessica Tandy, have since taken on the role).

Amanda Amanda’s constant nagging of Tom and her refusal to see Laura for who she really is are certainly reprehensible, but Amanda also reveals a willingness to sacrifice for her loved ones that is in many ways unparalleled in the play. She subjects herself to the humiliating drudgery of subscription sales in order to enhance Laura’s marriage prospects, without ever uttering so much as a word of complaint. The safest conclusion to draw is that Amanda is not evil but is deeply flawed. In fact, her flaws are centrally responsible for the tragedy, comedy, and theatrical flair of her character. Like her children, Amanda withdraws from reality into fantasy. Unlike them, she is convinced that she is not doing so and, consequently, is constantly making efforts to engage with people and the world outside her family. Amanda’s monologues to her children, on the phone, and to Jim all reflect quite clearly her moral and psychological failings, but they are also some of the most colourful and unforgettable words in the play.

Laura Wingfield The physically and emotionally crippled Laura is the only character in the play who never does anything to hurt anyone else. Despite the weight of her own problems, she displays a pure compassion—as with the tears she sheds over Tom’s unhappiness, described by Amanda in Scene Four—that stands in stark contrast to the selfishness and grudging sacrifices that characterize the Wingfield household. Laura also has the fewest lines in the play, which contributes to her aura of selflessness. Yet she is the axis around which the plot turns, and the most prominent symbols—blue roses, the glass unicorn, the entire glass menagerie—all in some sense represent her. Laura is as rare and peculiar as a blue rose or a unicorn, and she is as delicate as a glass figurine.

Laura Other characters seem to assume that, like a piece of transparent glass, which is colourless until light shines upon it, Laura can take on whatever colour they wish. Thus, Amanda both uses the contrast between herself and Laura to emphasize the glamour of her own youth and to fuel her hope of re-creating that youth through Laura. Tom and Jim both see Laura as an exotic creature, completely and rather quaintly foreign to the rest of the world. Yet Laura’s crush on the high school hero, Jim, is a rather ordinary schoolgirl sentiment, and a girl as supposedly fragile as Laura could hardly handle the days she spends walking the streets in the cold to avoid going to typing class. Through actions like these, Laura repeatedly displays a will of her own that defies other’s perceptions of her, and this will repeatedly goes unacknowledged.

Escapism TOM: Disappointed with his life Laura: Disabled with inferiority complex Amada: Disillusioned with family All characters are in conflict for different reasons All characters are linked by familial obligations, duty and love. All characters are in denial. Tragedy seems inevitable. Father influence is felt throughout. Suffering is the cause of Amanda’s escape, the inferiority complex is the cause of Laura’s escape, and the disappointment is the cause of Tom’s escape They ALL think that they are worse than others. They ALL have no confidence in themselves..

Escapism Laura creates her own sparkling, cold world which gives the illusion of warmth but is as eternal in its unreality as the glass from which it is composed; Amanda strikes out with all her power against her fate by clinging to the past as to the shield; and Tom, recognizing the plight of his family, can do no more that drift away from them.

Objects/Places symbols and abstractions
Glass Menagerie: The glass menagerie is Laura's escape from reality. She is completely withdrawn from society. Her shyness and her minor disability make interactions with others difficult. She seems to care only for the little glass animals she collects, and does not seek friendship or companionship with others.

Photograph of the Father: The enlarged photograph of Mr. Wingfield that hangs smiling in the living room is a reminder to Tom that escape is possible. The photograph seems to mock Tom; he got away and left his son to fill his shoes as the breadwinner and protector of the house; all Tom really wants to do is find adventure and write poetry.

Fire Escape: The fire escape is the entrance to the Wingfield's apartment, and that is where Tom goes to smoke cigarettes, for which his mother harasses him endlessly. From the fire escape the sounds of the nightclub across the street can be heard, and although it is an 'escape,' it is still the doorway to the trap that is Tom's life. The fire escape is also a pretty clear symbolic object as it represents a way to escape from the issues of the Wingfield household.

Movies: Tom goes to the movies to get out of the apartment and experience adventure. He goes to the movies every night, but after a while he grows tired of watching the adventure and longs to experience it. The movies are his escape from the mundane life he leads.

Jonquils: Jonquils are the flowers that Amanda couldn't get enough of the summer she had 17 gentleman callers. They are the flowers of her youth and represent beauty and charm. Her life once held such promise; she was desired by many and had not yet been abandoned by the man she chose. Amanda uses jonquils to decorate for the gentleman caller's arrival, and it seems that this spreads the curse; the gentleman caller leaves Laura just as things look promising. Amanda equates this to her husband leaving them sixteen years ago.

Blue Mountain: Amanda's home when she was a young girl, before she married Mr. Wingfield. Blue Mountain is Amanda's rendition of the good ol' days, back when she was young and popular and loved and sought after. Laura's shyness prevents her from attracting suitors as Amanda had in her youth.

The Souvenir: The souvenir is the glass unicorn that is Laura's favorite. While she and Jim are dancing around the living room, the unicorn is knocked from the table and its horn is broken off. She gives the broken unicorn to Jim as a reminder of her.

The Victrola: The Victrola is like a coping mechanism for Laura. Whenever she's in a situation that makes her nervous, she plays the old records that her father left behind and draws enough security from them to make it through whatever ordeal she's facing.

D.A.R.: The Daughters of the American Revolution is a woman's society for descendants of the patriots of the Revolutionary War. It is an exclusive group only for women who can prove their ancestry and its membership is very prestigious. These meetings are very high-society, and Amanda's place among these women is unusual. It's a way of holding on to her faded glory. That's why she wears her best outfit (all imitation) and presents her sugary Southern charm to the other D.A.R. members. The D.A.R. is like the cool clique with whom she must associate.

Quotes Quote 1: "long-delayed but always expected something that we live for." Part 1, Scene 1, pg. 5 Quote 2: "a long distance man who fell in love with long distances" Part 1, Scene 1, pg. 5 Quote 3: "Hello -- Goodbye!" Scene 1, pg. 5 Quote 4: "Mother, when you're disappointed, you get that awful suffering look on your face, like the picture of Jesus' mother in the museum." Part 1, Scene 2, pg. 15 Quote 5: "I've seen such pitiful cases in the South -- barely tolerated spinsters living upon the grudging patronage of sister's husband or brother's wife! -- stuck away in some little mousetrap of a room -- encouraged by one in-law to visit another -- little birdlike women without any nest -- eating the crust of humility all their life!" Part 1, Scene 2, pg. 16 Quote 6: "Blue Roses" Part 1, Scene 2, pg. 17 Quote 7: "Like some archetype of the universal unconscious, the image of the gentleman caller haunted [their] small apartment . . ." Part 2, Scene 3, pg. 19

Quote 8: "a Christian martyr." Part 2, Scene 3, pg. 20
Quote 9: "Every time you come in yelling that Goddamn 'Rise and Shine! Rise and Shine!' I say to myself, 'How lucky dead people are!' But I get up. I go! For sixty-five dollars a month I give up all that I dream of doing and being ever! And you say self -- self's all I ever think of. Why, listen, if self is what I though of, Mother, I'd be where he is -- GONE!" Part 2, Scene 3, pg. 23 Quote 10: "But the wonderfullest trick of all was the coffin trick. We nailed him into a coffin and he got out of the coffin without removing one nail. There is a trick that would come in handy for me -- get me out of this two-by-four situation." Part 2, Scene 4, pg. 27 Quote 11: "Rise and Shine! Rise and shine!" Part 2, Scene 4, pg. 28

Quote 12: "I know your ambitions do not lie in the warehouse, that like everybody in the whole wide world -- you've had to -- make sacrifices, but -- Tom -- Tom -- life's not easy, it calls for -- Spartan endurance!" Part 2, Scene 4, pg. 32 Quote 13: "This was the compensation for lives that passed like mine, without any change or adventure. Adventure and change were imminent in this year. They were waiting around the corner for all these kids. Suspended in the mist over Berchtesgaden, caught in the folds of Chamberlain's umbrella. In Spain there was Guernica! 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 All the world was waiting for bombardments!" Part 3, Scene 5, pg. 39 Quote 14: "You are the only young man that I know of who ignores the fact that the future becomes the present, the present becomes the past, and the past turns into everlasting regret if you don't plan for it!" Part 3, Scene 5, pg. 45

Quote 15: "a world of her own -- a world of glass ornaments
Quote 15: "a world of her own -- a world of glass ornaments." Part 3, Scene 5, pg. 48 Quote 16: "Shakespeare" Part 3, Scene 6, pg. 50 Quote 17: "[a]ll pretty girls are a trap, a pretty trap, and men expect them to be." Part 3, Scene 6, pg. 52 Quote 18: "I know I seem dreamy, but inside -- well, I'm boiling! Whenever I pick up a shoe, I shudder a little thinking how short life is and what I am doing! Whatever that means, I know it doesn't mean shoes -- except as something to wear on a traveler's feet!" Part 3, Scene 6, pg. 62 Quote 19: "You think of yourself as having the only problems, as being the only one who is disappointed. But just look around you and you will see lots of people as disappointed as you are." Part 4, Scene 7, pg. 76 Quote 20: "Glass breaks so easily. No matter how careful you are." Part 4, Scene 7, pg. 86 Quote 21: "You don't know things anywhere! You live in a dream: you manufacture illusions." Part 4, Scene 7, pg. 95 Quote 22: "I didn't go to the moon, I went much further -- for time is the longest distance between two places." Part 4, Scene 7, pg. 96 Quote 23: "For nowadays the world is lit by lightning! Blow out your candles, Laura -- and so, goodbye . . ." Part 4, Scene 7, pg. 97

Scenes 1&2 1. What is the effect of the actors eating without food or utensils at the beginning of the play? 2. What is the importance of Blue Mountain for Amanda? How is this important in the play as a whole? 3. Do you sense any early conflict between Amanda and Tom? What is the source of this conflict? 4. What’s the purpose of introducing the idea of Laura’s old high school love interest at this point? 5. Sum up the situations at the end of scene 2 in terms of those themes or conflicts that are important for the play as a whole.

Scenes 3&4 1. What’s the significance of our seeing Amanda on the phone selling subscriptions at the beginning of scene 3? 2. Why is Amanda especially angry at Tom’s drinking? 3. What’s the point of their conflict over the kind of books Tom reads (D.H. Lawrence)? 4. What’s the point of Tom’s making up the stories about himself on pgs ? 5. We see at the beginning of scene 4 a dramatization of Tom’s drinking. What is the significance to his story of Malvolio the Magician? ( ) 6. What different attitudes toward humanity do Tom and Amanda express when they discuss things like instinct and spirit? Does the play as a whole suggest that one of them is right?

Scene 5 1. How much time has passed between the previous scenes and this scene? What’s the purpose of this skip in time? 2. What does it tell us about Amanda that as soon as she hears there is to be a gentleman caller she starts to quiz Tom about whether he drinks, what his nationality is, etc? 3. Who is right, Amanda or Tom, in their discussion of Laura on pg. 309? Discuss. 4. What does Amanda’s concern for the moon and wishing on it tell us about her?

Scene 6 1. What do the changes in the set and the dress of the characters tell us? 2. What’s the significance of the description of Laura on pg. 312, especially “a piece of translucent glass touched by light not actual”? 3. What’s the point of Amanda’s near-monologue on pgs about her past? 4. What’s the point of having the gentleman caller be someone Laura knew in the past? What does this add to the situation? 5. What do you suppose our reaction as an audience is supposed to be when we see Amanda come out in her old southern dress with all her southern charm? Are we supposed to laugh at her, sympathize with her, or what? 6. Are we prepared for Laura’s reaction of getting sick, not being able to answer the door, etc? Explain.

Scene 7 1. Is it plausible that someone so painfully shy can actually get involved as she does with Jim in this scene? If you think so, consider the elements that make it plausible. 2. What is the significance of Jim’s old name for Laura – Blue Roses? 3. How accurate is Jim’s analysis of Laura’s problems on pg. 334? How do you judge Jim as he is saying all this? Is he cruel? Understanding? Does the tone of his remarks tell us anything about him? 4. What’s the significance of the glass menagerie and in particular the unicorn? What is the significance of the unicorn losing its horn? 5. Is Jim leading her on, or does he experience sincere feelings? How do you know? 6. Look at Amanda’s statement to Tom on pg. 347 about his living in a dream. Would this apply to her too? How so?

Tennessee Williams left unusually specific production notes as part of his play’s manuscript. The detail and points of reference of these notes give insight into the deep sensitivity of Williams’ artistic talent. Being a “memory play,” THE GLASS MENAGERIE can be presented with unusual freedom. Even if the play has unconventional techniques, the goal is a closer approach to truth through poetic interpretation. In Williams’ first version, there was a screen onto which were projected magic-lantern slides with images or titles. The purpose of this was to give certain values or a particular point to a scene. Meaning was to be found not only in the spoken word; the screen was to give the primary point of each scene. The music is another literary accent. A single tune is repeated to underline certain emotions. It is like circus music — the lightest, most delicate tune and, to Williams, “the saddest.” It shows the vitality of life and the sorrow, carried as if by the wind, changing all the time. It is a link between the narrator and the subject of the story. In each scene, the music is a reference to the nostalgia of the play - the condition and spirit of the piece. The music belongs mainly to Laura and is heard most clearly when the play focuses on her and the fragility of glass, which is her image. The lighting also reflects the meaning of the play. Laura has the clearest pool of light on her, like the light used in early religious portraits. The atmosphere for the figures on stage is radiant. These production notes were written not only for this play, but as imaginative ideas for directors. The notes encourage the poetry of the playwriting, along with specific descriptions of real, everyday life.

Tennessee Williams left unusually specific production notes as part
of his play’s manuscript. The detail and points of reference of these notes give insight into the deep sensitivity of Williams’ artistic talent. Being a “memory play,” THE GLASS MENAGERIE can be presented with unusual freedom. Even if the play has unconventional techniques, the goal is a closer approach to truth through poetic interpretation . In Williams’ first version, there was a screen onto which were projected magic-lantern slides with images or titles. The purpose of this was to give certain values or a particular point to a scene. Meaning was to be found not only in the spoken word; the screen was to give the primary point of each scene.

The music is another literary accent
The music is another literary accent. A single tune is repeated to underline certain emotions. It is like circus music — the lightest, most delicate tune and, to Williams, “the saddest.” It shows the vitality of life and the sorrow, carried as if by the wind, changing all the time. It is a link between the narrator and the subject of the story. In each scene, the music is a reference to the nostalgia of the play - the condition and spirit of the piece. The music belongs mainly to Laura and is heard most clearly when the play focuses on her and the fragility of glass, which is her image. The lighting also reflects the meaning of the play. Laura has the clearest pool of light on her, like the light used in early religious portraits. The atmosphere for the figures on stage is radiant. These production notes were written not only for this play, but as imaginative ideas for directors. The notes encourage the poetry of the playwriting, along with specific descriptions of real, everyday life.

1. Pick one theme in the play THE GLASS MENAGERIE and write your own story using
the same idea. 2. Describe how you think the Wingfield family deals with their problems. 3. If you could change something for the better in your family life, what would it be? How would you help this change happen? 4. What do you think are the strengths or weaknesses of each character in THE GLASS MENAGERIE? Describe. 5. Is there anyone in the play who reminds you of someone you know? Explain. 6. Pick a character in the play and pretend you are that person. Make up the story of your life before the time when the play begins.

7. Whom do you most identify with and why
7. Whom do you most identify with and why? Whom do you least identify with? 8. Describe what the play, THE GLASS MENAGERIE, is about. 9. Read another play by Tennessee Williams and compare the two plays. Include plot, characters and themes. 10. What is a menagerie? How does it relate to the story of the play THE GLASS MENAGERIE? If you have ever seen one or had such a menagerie yourself, describe it. Be specific. 11. This is called a “memory” play. Write a “memory” story based on your family life that happened over five years ago. Make sure to mention how old you were at that time. 12. What do you think of Laura and Amanda’s relationship? Why does Amanda keep referring to “us” when she is talking about Laura?

How is the fire escape a symbol that reveals something about each character’s personality? Do you think the fire escape represents one character more than another? Explain. 2. In what way is Laura’s limp symbolic of her inner nature? In what ways are her glass animals symbols of her personality? 3. When, in scene seven, the unicorn is knocked off the table and it loses its horn, how does this incident relate to Laura? What is the playwright saying about Laura when she says, “now the unicorn will be like the other animals”? 4. What other symbols can you find in the play? Be specific. Make up a symbol that describes what you think about your school. 5. At the very end of the play, Tom asks Laura to blow out her candles. What do you think that action symbolizes to Tom?

1. Using pictures and words from magazines, construct a collage for each character in
the play that describes the essence of his or her personality. Remember that it is not just the individual items or words, but the total feeling of the picture that will provide insight into the personality being described. For example, Laura’s collage may have a faint, gauzy, pastel look to it, and might include images of fragile objects such as glass, flowers or lace. 2. Do the same activity to construct a collage for and about yourself. You could include images of who you are as well as images that reflect your dreams, hopes and aspirations. 3. Select or compose music that gives an impression of one of the characters in the play. Title it for the character you have chosen (e.g., “Laura’s Theme” or “Daydream Hero” for Tom or Jim). Share your selection with the class, and explain why that particular music and title were chosen. 4. Make a class project using the symbol of hanging lanterns. Ask each student to write the main goal of his or her life, in five words or less, on the top of a lantern, and string them across the classroom. 5. Paint a mural with both abstract and realistic qualities to depict a scene from THE GLASS MENAGERIE. 6. Study American/European art of the 1930s, and search for paintings that evoke the same mood as in THE GLASS MENAGERIE. 7. Picasso, like Tennessee Williams, created art which was autobiographical. Study the work that Picasso produced during the 1930s, the same period of time in which THE GLASS MENAGERIE takes place. How was the painting “Guernica” part of Picasso’s life? Why did Williams mention it in THE GLASS MENAGERIE?

13. What would you do if you had a mother like Amanda?
14. Is there anyone in your past who haunts you as Tom is haunted by the presence of Laura? Describe. 15. What do you think of the ending of the play? Write a different ending to THE GLASS MENAGERIE. 16. Read about the life of the playwright, Tennessee Williams. Find at least three examples in THE GLASS MENAGERIE that relate to Williams’ life. Be specific. 17. Choose Tom or Amanda and argue how that character should be considered the main character of the play. 18. What do you think are Williams’ ideas about illusion and reality. Explain. 19. Which characters face life most realistically? Defend your choice. 20.Write a paper depicting Amanda’s strengths and weaknesses. Do you think she is an admirable person or simply a silly, frustrated woman, why? 21. The scenes in this play are told as Tom remembers them. Do you think the story might be different if Amanda were telling it? Write one or more of the scenes as one of the other characters might tell them. You may use some of the dialogue from the play, if you wish. 22. Most people have dreams or goals. Write about one of your dreams or make one up. 23. Imagine life in the tenement apartment from the point of view of Amanda. Write a brief description, as if you were Amanda, of your neighbourhood, your day-to-day life, your worries about your children, and your hopes for the future. 24. Imagine the characters from THE GLASS MENAGERIE ten years into the future. Select one of the characters and write a letter as if you were that person describing what you are feeling and how you feel now about the events that happened in the play

Consider the following:
In small groups, each choose one of the characters from the play and devise 2 short scenes; one presenting that character in their ideal and fantasy life, what they truly desire, and the other their worst case scenario; what that character truly fears. Consider the following: • What is Tom’s true ambition and what is stopping him from living the life he wants? • When was Amanda happiest? Why does she push her children to succeed? • How does Laura feel about Jim? Why does she lie to her mother about attending the business course at college? • What are Jim’s aspirations? How has Jim changed since High School?

When writing an essay you should:
• Say what you saw • Say what you think • Reflect on your responses • Write freely from the heart • Don’t worry about given theories • Describe the tiniest moment that remains vivid • Say why it spoke to you

Consider: • The light, the sound, the movement, the colours and textures of the play • The words, the music, the rhythms of the text • The set, the costumes, the style of the production, the objects • The Themes • The Characters • The Story • The Ending

THE GLASS MENAGERIE By Tennessee Williams

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THE GLASS MENAGERIE By Tennessee Williams

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Presentation on theme: "THE GLASS MENAGERIE By Tennessee Williams"— Presentation transcript:

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