Introduction
Tennessee Williams, a prominent playwright of his own epoch was born on 26 March 1911 in Columbus where he lived with his family consisting of his grandfather who was a religious man in the church, his father who was a salesman who travels a lot working in trade, his mother who was an aggressive woman and his sister Rose who was suffering from a mental disease. He also had a brother whose name was Dakin but he was away from that relationship.
From the very beginning, he had a talent in writing, he began to write poetry while he was in high school, he published his early writings and so he got lots of admiration and prizes, then he joined the University of Iowa, working menial jobs and traveling from city to city. He continued to work on drama. During the Second World War he worked as a scriptwriter, but he despised it. He decided to submit his own work entitled “The Glass Menageries” It becomes one of the most beloved plays of that time.
Main body
His famous play «The Glass Menageries” acquired William most of his fame. It was a kind of personal or autobiographical play.
One important key to the play is that it’s highly connected with William’s own life. The character of Amanda is related to his own mother, and the physically handicapped Laura is based on his sister Rose. In addition during Williams lift he felt guilty to leave his ill sister to live far from her brother and to die. The same happens in the play the hero Tom feels as if he is betraying his sister by leaving home.
More over the character of Tom is based on the character of Williams whose first name was Thomas. Although Williams’s first professionally produced play, Battle of Angels, closed in 1940 because of poor reviews and a censorship controversy, his early amateur productions of Candles to the Sun and Fugitive Kind were well-received by audiences in St. Louis. By 1945 he had completed and opened on Broadway The Glass Menagerie, perhaps his best-known play, which won that year’s New York Critics Circle,Donaldson, and Sidney Howard Memorial awards.
Williams ‘ The Glass Menagerie is considered as a memory play as its actions are drawn from the memories of its narrator, the hero of the play” Tom”. Tom’s character in somehow fits the character of the author himself” Williams” who wrote the play as an autobiography.
Tennessee Williams claimed that all of his major plays fell in the kind of a “memory play” format he described in his production notes for The Glass Menagerie. The memory play consists of a three-part structure:
- a character experiences something profound;
- that experience happens what Williams terms an “arrest of time,” a situation in which time literally loops upon itself; and
- the character must re-live that profound experience (caught in a sort of mobius loop of time) until she or he makes sense of it.
The overarching theme for his plays, he claimed, is the negative impact that conventional society has upon the “sensitive nonconformist individual.”
Quotations
“On those occasions they call me – Ell Diablo! Oh, I could tell you things to make you sleepless! My enemies plan to dynamite this place. They’re going to blow us all sky-high some night! I’ll be glad, very happy, and so will you! You’ll go up, up on a broomstick, over Blue Mountain with seventeen gentlemen callers!” Tom says this to Amanda in a fit of rage.
“But the most wonderfullest trick of all was the coffin trick…. There is a trick that would come in handy for me-get me out of this 2 by 4 situation.” Tom says this to Laura after coming back drunk from the movies and magic show.
“Laura! Why, Laura, you are sick, darling! Tom, help your sister into the living room, dear!… I told her that it was just too warm this evening, but – Is Laura all right now?” Amanda tells this to Laura, Jim and Tom at the dinner.
“You know what I judge to be the trouble with you? Inferiority complex! Know what that is? That’s what they call it when someone low-rates himself! I understand it because I had it, too. Although my case was not so aggravated as yours seems to be.” Jim tells this to Laura when they are alone together after the dinner.
Summary of the play
The play talks about the life of a middle –class family located in the south of USA. It is consists of Amanda, the mother , Tom and Laura. Unfortunately the father left he home several years ago. Laura was a handicapped girl, so she is always disappointed that nobody admire her and she will never got married. Tom was a careless guy, he didn’t care about his family especially his ill sister. He left his work to find himself in movies literature and always he returns home late at night drunk. Amanda and her son decided to help Laura to get out from her disappointment, they call a casual fried “Jim” for dinner, they intended to get Laura and the caller alone.
At the beginning she refused to sit with him but later as the dinner ended they had a chance to be alone, soon she began to get out from her shyness shell. After they spend a good time together dancing she realized that Jim is engaged. He left to meet her girlfriend. Amanda sees him off warmly but, after he is gone, turns on Tom, who had not known that Jim was engaged. Amanda accuses Tom of being an inattentive, selfish dreamer and then throws herself into comforting Laura. From the fire escape outside of their apartment, Tom watches the two women and explains that, not long after Jim’s visit, he gets fired from his job and leaves Amanda and Laura behind. Years later, though he travels far, he finds that he is unable to leave behind guilty memories of Laura.
References
“The Glass Menagerie By Tennessee Williams”. Anti Essays. 2008. Web.
J. Devlin, Albert. Conversations with Tennessee Williams. University Press of Mississippi: Mississippi, 1986.
Tennessee Williams, Harold Bloom (editor). Comprehensive Research and Study Guide Bloom’s Major Dramatists. Pennsylvania: Broomall, 2000.