A Raisin in the Sun, by Lorraine Hansberry, and The Glass Menagerie, by Tennessee Williams, exhibit the various types of American lifestyles and the aspiration that surface among each character. They are the exact opposite of what a family is considered to be. However, both Amanda and Laura can see their present situations, and they do try to make their realities better. . There in her protected fortress she cares for her collection of glass animals, a collection her mother calls the glass menagerie. The window is filled with pieces of colored glass, tiny transparent bottles in delicate colors, like bits of a shattered rainbow. Therefore, Tom could only recognize his own instinctual drives by leaving home.
In the closing soliloquy Tom recounts how he lives and re-lives the story in his memory, though he is detached from the participants in the original affair. These symbols also add to the major themes, which develop as the play gains momentum. This essay will examine in detail, the aspects of the play that contribute to the development of the above mentioned elements. In the drama, symbols play the… 2243 Words 9 Pages and Escape in The Glass Menagerie None of the characters in The Glass Menagerie is capable of living in the present. She is hopeless and beautiful all at the same time. The Glass Menagerie exposes the lost dreams of a southern family and their desperate struggle to escape reality. And will I be glad, will I be happy, and so will you be! He was the free spirit who had to curb his wings by working at a dreaded and disliked job in a shoe warehouse.
It is set in a memory, so it creates a soft, dream-like setting. After perfecting his play for many years, The Glass Menagerie was first introduced to Broadway on March 31, 1945. The play is introduced to the audience by Tom, the narrator and protagonist, as a memory play based on his recollection of his mother Amanda and his sister Laura. I turn around and look into her eyes. One of the most dominant symbols in the play is the fire escape.
The play has strong autobiographical elements, featuring characters based on its author, his mother, and his mentally fragile sister Laura. In Tom's opening addresses, he explains to the audience that the play's fifth character is his absent father present only in the form of a picture that hangs on the wall. Lack of a Father leaves Tom the responsibility of caring for the family. The play is based around a fragile family and their difficulties coping with life. Tom is a sensitive, artistic man who is forced by circumstances into a Tennessee Williams gives us no indication that Tom's escape from his father, Amanda, Laura, and Jim ever happens - what is most compelling about the play is that Tom passes to the reader and the audience the responsibility of making meaning out of his life. Tom wants adventure, excitement, new experiences, new places; in short, the opposite of what he was getting working at the warehouse and living at home.
These various symbols appear throughout the entire piece, and they are usually disguised as objects or imagery. In her old life, she was once a Southern Belle with a genteel manner who lived on Blue Mountain. Oh I could tell you many things to make you sleepless. Tom goes to the movies every night to watch an escapist fantasy on the screen. Especially when it came to her children, constantly putting them down and making them feel as if they were inferior and couldn't do anything right.
Subsequent years have been less kind to Jim; however, and by the time of the play's action, he is working as a shipping clerk at the same shoe warehouse as Tom. All of the figures are glass, but the animals in it vary, and thus fit, one definition of the word. Many people can relate their problems one way or another with Williams. What characteristics sets apart a good mother from a bad one. Williams' use of symbols adds depth to the play. This is our father who left us a long time ago.
The play premiered in Chicago in 1944. Instead, Tom is bound to his family by guilt and emotion. In fact, Tom seems quite surprised by this, and it is possible that Jim was only making up the story of the engagement as he felt that the family was trying to set him up with Laura, and he had no romantic interest in her. Tom Wingfield, a wannabe poet working at a shoe warehouse, the son of Amanda Wingfield a former Southern belle left by her husband, and the brother of Laura Wingfield, his older sister. So, nothing out of sorts happens. The Iranian film 2011 is also an adaptation of the play, in a contemporary Iranian setting.
Amanda wishes for Laura to meet a husband, and pushes her repeatedly to talk to men and socialize with gentleman callers. 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. For her performance as Laura, Flockhart received a 1995 for Most Promising Actress. Williams' parallels this play to his true life experience with his own family, which makes The Glass Menagerie an even more tragic version of what happens to a family when love is lost and abandonment is reality. The story is also written from the point of view of narrator Tom Wingfield, and many of his soliloquies from The Glass Menagerie seem lifted straight from this original.