Analysis
In Tennessee Williams’ play “The Glass Menagerie,” the story is told of a small family. The father of the family deserted them many years ago and the mother, Amanda, from old Southern genteel stock, finds it nearly impossible to accept her current conditions, instead constantly talking to her children about the good old days when she was popular and surrounded by beaus. The son, Tom, is the younger of the two children and the play opens with him working at a job he detests as a means of supporting his female relatives while secretly dreaming of traveling and being a writer.
However, he knows he will never accomplish his dreams while he is supporting his mother and sister and his frustration is taken out in drinking and going to the movies, which disgusts his mother who feels he should be spending his time in loftier pursuits. Finally, there’s Laura, a young woman who is extremely shy, partly because of her crippling disease (pleurosis) which forces her to wear a brace on her leg and walk with a limp. Too shy to attend the business school her mother enrolled her in and without any friends of her own, Amanda decides marriage is the only answer for Laura and forces Tom to find a beau for his sister. Unfortunately, the one he finds, while perfectly acceptable to both Laura and Amanda, is already engaged and leaves Laura with a broken heart, symbolized by the broken unicorn Laura encourages him to keep as a souvenir. The play is a tragedy because Laura, having already had the opportunity to learn from her past, continues to live in a dream-world of her own creation. She does this by failing to recognize the real strengths and weaknesses of her children and in encouraging her daughter to live the same way.
Throughout the play, Amanda regales her children with stories about when she was young, in the process pointing out the various ways in which Laura is a failure as a daughter. Although this is not necessarily done in a mean way or with deliberate intentions, as she discusses her own days of youth, Amanda continuously points out the various ways in which Laura does not measure up to her expectations. She indicates girls in her time “knew how to entertain their gentleman callers. It wasn’t enough for a girl to be possessed of a pretty face and a graceful figure – although I wasn’t slighted in either respect. She also needed to have a nimble wit and a tongue to meet all occasions” (I, 148).
It is noticed that while Laura has the pretty face, she does not possess the graceful figure her mother deems important thanks to the braced leg nor does she have the sparkling personality her mother lists, being too shy to mumble more than a word or two when confronted by strangers. Amanda’s imagined world is made obvious as the family finishes dinner and Amanda sends Laura out into the family room to prepare for the “flood, there must have been a tornado” of gentlemen callers prepared to spend the evening vying for Laura’s attention rather than recognizing and working with Laura’s true nature. Laura’s feelings of inadequacy are captured with her response to her mother’s preparations, “It isn’t a flood, it’s not a tornado, Mother. I’m just not popular like you were in Blue Mountain” (I, 150). Rather than focusing on the strengths actually possessed by her daughter that can be utilized to help ease her out into society, Amanda insists there is only one way of accomplishing her goals and that is through determined charm and wit, attempting to force Laura into behavior that is completely alien to her and erasing any source of self-confidence Laura might have had.
Like her blind spot regarding Laura’s shyness, Amanda is equally unaware of Tom’s limitations and lack of friends. She’s constantly angry with him for first not bringing home enough money so that she is forced to work on the phone and then for his tendency to go out at night as the only way he can work out his frustrations. Her expectations for him seem to go well beyond the possible for anyone as they are often contradictory or insist upon extreme self-denial. When she asks him to find a gentleman for Laura, the pressure is not just to find someone for Laura to meet, but to find someone willing to marry Laura immediately. Although she tells him she wants him to “Find out one that’s clean-living – doesn’t drink and ask him out for sister … To meet! Get acquainted!” (IV, 176), Tom realizes that a simple acquaintance is not what his mother is seeking. While it seems to Amanda that Tom is putting off inviting someone to dinner, it emerges in scene six that Tom is nearly as friendless as Laura. “I had known Jim slightly in high school … He was the only one at the warehouse with whom I was on friendly terms” (VI, 190). That he genuinely tried to find someone for Laura is evidenced in his recollection that Laura had known Jim in high school and had spoken “admiringly of his voice” (VI, 191). However, his “best friend down at the warehouse” (VII, 235) has a surprise Tom didn’t know about, that he was getting married in June, which Amanda uses to blame Tom for once again thinking only about himself, making the scene even worse for Laura as the play comes to an end.
Although she has had plenty of opportunity to learn how devastating living in a dream world can be, Amanda is constantly building up Laura’s hopes and dreams for a brighter future by washing her in waves of make-believe. Laura simply does not have the same personality that her mother was given, nor does she have the luxurious entertainment space or the opportunity for attending social events that her mother evidently enjoyed. Thus, she cannot possibly meet the number of men Amanda apparently had opportunity to know, nor would she feel comfortable talking with them. Despite this, Amanda continues to encourage her to hold out hopes for a good marriage. This starts with her own recitation of the quality of her suitors, “My callers were gentlemen – all! Among my callers were some of the most prominent young planters of the Mississippi Delta – planters and sons of planters” (I, 148).
As she talks about them, it emerges that about the only one that didn’t amount to anything was the one she married. Immediately upon Tom telling her that he has a friend coming over for dinner, Amanda already considers him her daughter’s future husband. Tom tries to reign her in by stating “Lots of fellows meet girls whom they don’t marry” (V, 184), but Amanda just tells him to “talk sensibly.” She instills in Laura the sense that without a husband, she will be worth nothing and will end up living a worse life even than the one she lives now. She builds up Laura’s hope and secret belief that the boy her brother is bringing home will ‘take her away from all this.’ When it is discovered that the boy is the same boy Laura had a deep crush on in high school, this dream bursts into full flower only to be completely crushed as the family discovers Jim is already planning to be married to someone else very soon.
Conclusion
Throughout the play, it can be seen that Amanda has little idea of how to handle having two children who don’t share her same outlook on life or outgoing personality. She is incapable of seeing how their desperate living conditions, as well as physical conditions in the case of Laura, have affected her children, causing them to be closed off to the outside world. This is made worse by her constantly informing her children of their own failures – Tom’s in not being the inhuman paragon of strength she expects him to be and Laura by not being the vivacious thing Amanda herself used to be in her own youth. By failing to take their individual personalities into consideration, she forces a situation in which both children are sure to fail, proving herself to be, ultimately, the cause for Laura’s broken heart by the end of the play.
Works Cited
Williams, Tennessee. “The Glass Menagerie.” The Theatre of Tennessee Williams. Vol. 1. New York: New Directions Books: 1971.