Introduction
The play “The Glass Menagerie” is a melancholy family drama written by Tennessee Williams. Laura is the daughter of Amanda Wingfield and sister of Tom, the narrator. She is described as “Six years out of high school. Incredibly shy and introverted. She fixates on her collection of glass figurines”. Laura suffers from a deformed foot. But she is more mentally fragile and is a weak girl who does not have the courage to face reality. She is happy to live in a closeted world and is not ambitious or confident to carve her own future. In the words of her brother: “…in the eyes of others—strangers— she’s terribly shy and lives in a world of her own and those things make her seem a little peculiar to people outside the house”. Overall, the character of Laura can be described as childish, shy, and possessing a low self-image.
Main body
Laura’s childish nature is seen through her playfulness, imagination, and creativity. She plays with her glass animals and enjoys her victrola but is unable to cope with typewriters, offices, flirtations, and strangers. Laura is the gentle portrayal of a girl fixed forever in childhood. At the age of twenty, she believes that stars are five-pointed because they are represented as such on the Star of Bethlehem which she fixes on top of her Christmas tree. She treats the characters in her favorite book as real and responds to her gentleman caller not because they had shared the same high school, but because in her mind, he resembles a character from her favorite book. Laura reveals her subconscious thoughts when she suddenly addresses Jim as Freckles, the protagonist of the novel which is no longer alluded to. Her playful conversation with Jim brings out the child in her. Talking about her favorite glass unicorn Laura says playfully: “He stays on the shelf with some horses that don’t have horns and all of them seem to be along nicely together” (221). In short, when Laura is not pretending, she is playing and remarkably her play involves imagination too. Laura’s playfulness stands in sharp contrast to all of the other characters. Laura indicates that she is secretly spending her time creating dialogic make-believe. She is creating plays involving her glass characters. Thus one finds that Laura is like a child: playful, imaginative, and creative.
She is too shy for this world, too withdrawn and sweet. Although the other characters rush around making plans for her success, she seems to have no ambitions regarding her future. Williams describes her as “a piece of her own glass collection, too exquisitely fragile to move from the shelf” (129). Seemingly happy with her collection of glass, Laura tends to her miniature animals, and listens to old records; during the day she walks and looks at the animals in the zoo (Gross 43). Her shyness is also reflected in the way she talks, at her own pace, using simple vocabulary, refusing to respond to usual signals, and is marked by her quiet withdrawal (Tischler 35). Her shyness gets her in the midst of conflicts between Tom and Amanda and makes her indulge in a world of dreams. Amanda forces her to join a young people’s church group where she might meet some nice boys. Because Laura won’t or can’t talk, the girl is humiliated. She is shy to the point that she becomes physically ill when forced to meet strangers. The Gentleman Caller scene in The Glass Menagerie provides a perfect example. She lets go of her inhibitions very slowly in the company of Jim.
Laura is a woman with a very low self-image. She does not have the confidence to meet the plans her mother makes for her. During her final semester in high school, she becomes nervously ill, fails her final examinations, and does not graduate. When her desperate mother spends fifty dollars on a secretarial course, Laura becomes nauseated during the typing speed test. Her reluctance to socialize is also indicative of her low self-image. Laura had been in love with Jim’s pictures in her high-school annual but did not have the courage to express her feelings probably due to fear of rejection. Her low self-image may be attributed to her crippled leg.
Conclusion
Thus, in the play “The Glass Menagerie” by Tennessee Williams, Laura comes across as a sweet and shy girl, self-conscious about her deformed foot. She is inwardly a charming trusting child who is playful, imaginative, and creative.