The Glass Menagerie

Concepts of Memory, Illusion and Abandonment

The memory, illusion and abandonment of the glass menagerie starts with the introduction of the three main characters as they share a meal in their dingy St. Louis apartment. The mother, Amanda, who romanticizes her southern ubpringing, is a woman of social aspirations living in less-than-genteel poverty. Her son, Tom, struggling to find himself as a writer, suffers with a dead-end job in a shoe factory, while Laura, Tom's sister, lame and terribly shy, finds solace in her phonograph records and collection of glass animals. Silent but ever present through his portrait on the wall is the father who, long ago, abandoned the family.

Amanda hopes desperately to find a suitor for her daughter and prevails on Tom to bring a young man from the shoe factory home for dinner. The fatal evening arrives, and Laura is shocked to discover that Jim, the "gentleman caller," is a boy she distantly knew and admired in high school. The lights in the apartment go out—Tom has failed to pay the electric bill—and Amanda conspires to leave Laura and Jim alone together. Jim's friendly and optimistic demeanor encourages Laura to open up. Shyly, in the candlelight, she dances with him to music coming from a dance hall across the alley. As they dance, they bump against Laura's glass animals and her unicorn falls to the floor, breaking the horn from the body. Attaching a poetic significance to the event, Laura tells Jim that the animal is now more normal, less freakish. Amanda interrupts the two with lemonade, but, after impulsively kissing Laura, Jim apologizes and hastily departs to meet his returning fiancée at the train station. Amanda is dumbstruck, feeling she has been tricked into entertaining a boy who is "spoken for"; in the ensuing argument, Tom flees the apartment, never to return.

Make the Right Decision

In context of Tom making the right decision at the end of the play, Tom, clothed as a merchant marine, confesses that Laura is forever on his mind; he cannot escape her memory, and in a moment that fuses past and present, he steps toward her, begging her to blow out the candles illuminating the scene. Separate from him, in her own moment in time, she does so, thus extinguishing, momentarily, Tom's anguished feelings of bereavement, self-recrimination, and guilt.

The Glass Menagerie develops thematic concerns and qualities of character Williams would go on to explore in subsequent plays. The quintessential Williams protagonist is torn by opposing desires: Sensual appetites conflict with spiritual longing—the need to discover and embrace a higher purpose. Tom, in his drinking and escapist film-going, offers a restrained view of the one extreme, while Amanda, despite being depicted as a comic fantasist, provides a glimpse of the other. In later dramas, Williams locates this opposition—desires of the flesh in conflict with spiritual aspiration—in a single individual, but this thematic obsession is clearly embedded in the divisiveness that pits Tom against Amanda. Williams's other recurring themes are also observable in the play: ...