The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams

 

The Glass Menagerie is a memory play, and its action is drawn from the memories of the narrator, Tom Wingfield. Tom is a character in the play, which is set in St. Louis in 1937. He is an aspiring poet who toils in a shoe warehouse to support his mother, Amanda, and sister, Laura. Mr. Wingfield, Tom and Laura’s father, ran off years ago and, except for one postcard, has not been heard from since.

Amanda, originally from a genteel Southern family, regales her children frequently with tales of her idyllic youth and the scores of suitors who once pursued her. She is disappointed that Laura, who wears a brace on her leg and is painfully shy, does not attract any gentlemen callers. She enrolls Laura in a business college, hoping that she will make her own and the family’s fortune through a business career. Weeks later, however, Amanda discovers that Laura’s crippling shyness has led her to drop out of the class secretly and spend her days wandering the city alone. Amanda then decides that Laura’s last hope must lie in marriage and begins selling magazine subscriptions to earn the extra money she believes will help to attract suitors for Laura. Meanwhile, Tom, who loathes his warehouse job, finds escape in liquor, movies, and literature, much to his mother’s chagrin. During one of the frequent arguments between mother and son, Tom accidentally breaks several of the glass animal figurines that are Laura’s most prized possessions.

Amanda and Tom discuss Laura’s prospects, and Amanda asks Tom to keep an eye out for potential suitors at the warehouse. Tom selects Jim O’Connor, a casual friend, and invites him to dinner. Amanda quizzes Tom about Jim and is delighted to learn that he is a driven young man with his mind set on career advancement. She prepares an elaborate dinner and insists that Laura wear a new dress. At the last minute, Laura learns the name of her caller; as it turns out, she had a devastating crush on Jim in high school. When Jim arrives, Laura answers the door, on Amanda’s orders, and then quickly disappears, leaving Tom and Jim alone. Tom confides to Jim that he has used the money for his family’s electric bill to join the merchant marine and plans to leave his job and family in search of adventure. Laura refuses to eat dinner with the others, feigning illness. Amanda, wearing an ostentatious dress from her glamorous youth, talks vivaciously with Jim throughout the meal.

As dinner is ending, the lights go out as a consequence of the unpaid electric bill. The characters light candles, and Amanda encourages Jim to entertain Laura in the living room while she and Tom clean up. Laura is at first paralyzed by Jim’s presence, but his warm and open behavior soon draws her out of her shell. She confesses that she knew and liked him in high school but was too shy to approach him. They continue talking, and Laura reminds him of the nickname he had given her: “Blue Roses,” an accidental corruption of pleurosis, an illness Laura had in high school. He reproaches her for her shyness and low self-esteem but praises her uniqueness. Laura then ventures to show him her favorite glass animal, a unicorn. Jim dances with her, but in the process, he accidentally knocks over the unicorn, breaking off its horn. Laura is forgiving, noting that now the unicorn is a normal horse. Jim then kisses her, but he quickly draws back and apologizes, explaining that he was carried away by the moment and that he actually has a serious girlfriend. Resigned, Laura offers him the broken unicorn as a souvenir.

Amanda enters the living room, full of good cheer. Jim hastily explains that he must leave because of an appointment with his fiancée. 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.

 Summary Scenes One & Two

Summary: Scene One

The Wingfield apartment faces an alley in a lower-middle-class St. Louis tenement. There is a fire escape with a landing and a screen on which words or images periodically appear. Tom Wingfield steps onstage dressed as a merchant sailor and speaks directly to the audience. According to the stage directions, Tom “takes whatever license with dramatic convention is convenient to his purposes.” He explains the social and historical background of the play: the time is the late 1930s, when the American working classes are still reeling from the effects of the Great Depression. The civil war in Spain has just led to a massacre of civilians at Guernica. Tom also describes his role in the play and describes the other characters. One character, Tom’s father, does not appear onstage: he abandoned the family years ago and, except for a terse postcard from Mexico, has not been heard from since. However, a picture of him hangs in the living room.

Tom enters the apartment’s dining room, where Amanda, his mother, and Laura, his sister, are eating. Amanda calls Tom to the dinner table and, once he sits down, repeatedly tells him to chew his food. Laura rises to fetch something, but Amanda insists that she sit down and keep herself fresh for gentlemen callers. Amanda then launches into what is clearly an oft-recited account of the Sunday afternoon when she entertained seventeen gentlemen callers in her home in Blue Mountain, Mississippi. At Laura’s urging, Tom listens attentively and asks his mother what appear to be habitual questions. Oblivious to his condescending tone, Amanda catalogues the men and their subsequent fates, how much money they left their widows, and how one suitor died carrying her picture.

Laura explains that no gentlemen callers come for her, since she is not as popular as her mother once was. Tom groans. Laura tells Tom that their mother is afraid that Laura will end up an old maid. The lights dim as what the stage directions term “the ‘Glass Menagerie’ music” plays.

Summary: Scene Two

An image of blue roses appears on the screen as the scene begins. Laura is polishing her collection of glass figurines as Amanda, with a stricken face, walks up the steps outside. When Laura hears Amanda, she hides her ornaments and pretends to be studying a diagram of a keyboard. Amanda tears up the keyboard diagram and explains that she stopped by Rubicam’s Business College, where Laura is supposedly enrolled. A teacher there informed her that Laura has not come to class since the first few days, when she suffered from terrible nervousness and became physically ill. Laura admits that she has been skipping class and explains that she has spent her days walking along the streets of winter, going to the zoo, and occasionally watching movies.

Amanda wonders what will become of the family now that Laura’s prospects of a business career are ruined. She tells Laura that the only alternative is for Laura to get married. Amanda asks her if she has ever liked a boy. Laura tells her that, in high school, she had a crush on a boy named Jim, the school hero, who sat near her in the chorus. Laura tells her mother that once she told Jim that she had been away from school due to an attack of pleurosis. Because he misheard the name of the disease, he began calling her “Blue Roses.” Laura notes that at graduation time he was engaged, and she speculates that he must be married by now. Amanda declares that Laura will nonetheless end up married to someone nice. Laura reminds her mother, apologetically, that she is “crippled”—that one of her legs is shorter than the other. Amanda insists that her daughter never use that word and tells her that she must cultivate charm.

Analysis: Scenes One & Two

With Tom’s direct address to the audience, describing the play and the other characters, the play acknowledges its status as a work of art and admits that it does not represent reality. Tom’s address also identifies the bias inherent in the portrayal of events that have already occurred: everything the audience sees will be filtered through Tom’s memory and be subject to all of its guesswork, colorings, and subconscious distortions. The idea of a play with an involved narrator is not a new one. For instance, the Chorus in classical tragedy frequently plays a role much like Tom’s, commenting on the actions as they occur. But these Choruses are seldom composed of characters who also play a part in the action. The presence of a character who both narrates and participates in the play is quite unusual, and Tom’s dual role creates certain conflicts in his characterization. As narrator, Tom recounts and comments on the action from an unspecified date in the future and, as such, has acquired a certain emotional distance from the action. As a character, however, Tom is emotionally and physically involved in the action. Thus, Tom first appears as a cool, objective narrator who earns the audience’s trust, but within minutes, he changes into an irritable young man embroiled in a petty argument with his mother over how he chews his food. As a consequence, the audience is never quite sure how to react to Tom—whether to take his opinions as the solid pronouncements of a narrator or the self-centered perspective of just another character.

Williams’s production notes and stage directions emphasize his innovative theatrical vision. He felt that realism, which aimed to present life as it was without idealizing it, had outlived its usefulness. It offered, as Tom puts it, “illusion that has the appearance of truth.” Williams sought the opposite in The Glass Menagerie: truth disguised as illusion. To accomplish this reversal of realism, the play employs elaborate visual and audio effects and expressionistic sets that emphasize symbolic meaning at the expense of realism. To underscore the illusions of the play, Tom makes a point of acknowledging these devices during his monologues as narrator.

Among the most striking effects in the play is the screen on which words or images that relate to the onstage action appear. The impression that this device creates on paper is sometimes confusing. In fact, the director of the original Broadway production of The Glass Menagerie chose to eliminate the screen from the performance. Sometimes the screen is used to emphasize the importance of something referred to by the characters, as when an image of blue roses appears in Scene Two as Laura recounts Jim’s nickname for her. Sometimes it refers to something from a character’s past or fantasy, as when Jim appears as a high school hero in the same scene, and sometimes it provides what seems like commentary from a witty outsider, as with “Ou sont les neiges d’antan?” in Scene One (“Ou sont les neiges . . .” is the title of a poem in praise of beautiful women by the fifteenth-century French poet François Villon). At times, the very obviousness of the symbols or themes that the screen emphasizes gives an ironic tone to the device. Like Tom’s speeches, it reminds the audience of the importance of literary gimmicks and tricks in the creation of what the audience is seeing.

Summary Scene Three

The words “After the fiasco—” appear on the screen as the scene opens. Tom stands on the fire escape landing and addresses the audience. He explains that in the wake of what Tom refers to as the “fiasco” with Laura’s college attendance, Amanda has become obsessed with procuring a gentleman caller for Laura. The image of a young man at the house with flowers appears on the screen. Tom says that in order to make a little extra money and thereby increase the family’s ability to entertain suitors, Amanda runs a telephone subscription campaign for a magazine called The Homemaker’s Companion.

The cover of a glamour magazine appears on the screen, and Amanda enters with a telephone. She makes a cheerful, elaborate, unsuccessful sales pitch to an acquaintance on the telephone, and then the lights dim. When they come up again, Tom and Amanda are engaged in a loud argument while Laura looks on desperately. Tom is enraged because his mother affords him no privacy and, furthermore, has returned the D. H. Lawrence novel he was reading to the library. She states that she will not permit that kind of “filth” in her house. Tom points out that he pays the rent and attempts to end the conversation by leaving the apartment. Amanda insists that Tom hear her out. She attributes his surly attitude to the fact that he spends every night out—doing something shameful, in her opinion—though he insists that he spends his nights at the movies. Amanda asserts that, by coming home late and depriving himself of sleep, he is endangering his job and, therefore, the family’s security. Tom responds with a fierce outburst. He expresses his hatred for the factory, and he claims to envy the dead whenever he hears Amanda’s daily call of “Rise and Shine!” He points out how he goes to work each day nonetheless and brings home the pay, how he has put aside all his dreams, and, if he truly were as selfish as Amanda claims, how he would have left long ago, just like his father.

Tom makes a move toward the door. Amanda demands to know where he is going. When she does not accept his response that he is going to the movies, he declares sarcastically that she is right and that he spends his nights at the lairs of criminals, opium houses, and casinos. He concludes his speech by calling Amanda an “ugly—babbling old—witch” and then grabs his coat. The coat resists his clumsy attempts to put it on, so he throws it to the other side of the room, where it hits Laura’s glass menagerie, her collection of glass animal figurines. Glass breaks, and Laura utters a cry and turns away. The words “The Glass Menagerie” appear on the screen. Barely noticing the broken menagerie, Amanda declares she will not speak to Tom until she receives an apology. Tom bends down to pick up the glass and glances at Laura as if he would like to say something but says nothing. The “Glass Menagerie” music plays as the scene ends.

Analysis

By the end of Scene Three, Williams has established the personalities of each of the three Wingfields and the conflicts that engage them. Tom’s frustration with his job and home life, Amanda’s nostalgia for her past and demands for the family’s future, and Laura’s social and physical handicaps all emerge quickly through the dialogue. There is almost no down time in the play because every scene is dominated by heightened emotions like anger and disillusionment or by major issues in the characters’ lives, such as Laura’s marriage prospects. The play always presents characters with measured ambiguity: each of them is deeply flawed, yet none is completely unsympathetic.

Amanda comes the closest to being a genuine antagonist. Her constant nagging suffocates and wounds her children, and her pettiness decreases her credibility in the eyes of her children and the audience. For example, her complaints about Tom’s nighttime excursions may be legitimate, but they get lost in the reproaches she heaps upon him for his eating habits. Yet the hardship of her life as a single mother inspires sympathy. Her magazine subscription campaign is humiliating work, but it is a sacrifice and indignity that she is willing to undergo out of concern for her daughter’s eventual happiness.

Mr. Wingfield’s photograph hangs over everything that occurs onstage, indicating that, though the family has not seen him for years, he still plays a crucial role in their lives. Tom has been forced to adopt his absent father’s role of breadwinner, and he is both tantalized and haunted by the idea that he might eventually adopt his father’s role as deserter. Tom voices this possibility explicitly at the end of Scene Three, and we suspect that this occasion is not the first time he has done so. In fact, Amanda’s apparently intrusive and unjustified concern with what her son reads and where he goes at night may stem from her awareness of this possibility. Her husband left her, we learn, because he “fell in love with long distances.” With that in mind, it seems perfectly reasonable that she should be suspicious whenever Tom strays, mentally or physically, into any world outside their cramped apartment. The landing on the fire escape, where Tom is seen standing in Scene Three, ominously represents just what its name suggests: a route of escape from the “slow and implacable fires of human desperation” that burn steadily in the Wingfield household.

Close-knit, dysfunctional families are among Williams’s favorite subjects, and the subject matter of The Glass Menagerie is closely connected to Williams’s own life. Williams (whose real name was Thomas) spent a number of difficult years in St. Louis with his family, and for some of that time, he worked in a shoe factory. As a child, he was very close to his older sister, Rose, who, like Laura, was delicate and absorbed in fantasy. Rose even kept a collection of glass animals. As an adult, Rose was diagnosed with schizophrenia and eventually underwent a lobotomy in 1937. Williams never forgave his mother, a domineering former Southern belle like Amanda, for ordering the procedure. The use of “Blue Roses” as a nickname and symbol for Laura in her happiest moments (which quickly turn painful) is an explicit tribute to Rose Williams.

Quote 1
Quote 2
JIM: It sure does shine!
LAURA: I shouldn’t be partial, but he is my favorite one.
JIM: What kind of a thing is this one supposed to be?
LAURA: Haven’t you noticed the single horn on his forehead?
JIM: A unicorn, huh? —aren’t they extinct in the modern world?
LAURA: I know!
JIM: Poor little fellow, he must feel sort of lonesome.
LAURA: Now it is just like all the other horses.
JIM: It’s lost its—
LAURA: Horn! It doesn’t matter. . . . [smiling] I’ll just imagine he had an operation. The horn was removed to make him feel less—freakish!

Summary Scene Four

You know it don’t take much intelligence to get yourself into a nailed-up coffin, Laura. But who in hell ever got himself out of one without removing one nail?

Summary

A bell tolls five times as Tom returns home. He has been drinking. After painstakingly extracting his key from a jumble of cast-off items in his pockets, he drops it into a crack on the fire-escape landing. Laura hears him fumbling about and opens the door. He tells her that he has been at the movies for most of the night and also to a magic show, in which the magician changed water to wine to beer to whiskey. Tom then gives Laura a rainbow-colored scarf, which he says the magician gave to him. He describes how the magician allowed himself to be nailed into a coffin and escaped without removing a nail. Tom remarks wryly that the same trick could come in handy for him but wonders how one could possibly get out of a coffin without removing a single nail. Mr. Wingfield’s photograph lights up, presenting an example of someone who has apparently performed such a feat. The lights dim.

At six in the morning, Amanda calls out her habitual “Rise and Shine!” This time, though, she tells Laura to pass the message on to Tom because Amanda refuses to talk to Tom until he apologizes. Laura gets Tom out of bed and implores him to apologize to their mother. He remains reluctant. Amanda then sends Laura out to buy groceries on credit. On the way down the fire escape, Laura slips and falls but is not hurt. Several moments of silence pass in the dining room before Tom rises from the table and apologizes. Amanda nearly breaks into tears, and Tom speaks gently to her. She speaks of her pride in her children and begs Tom to promise her that he will never be a drunkard. She then turns the discussion to Laura as the “Glass Menagerie” music begins to play. Amanda has caught Laura crying because Laura thinks that Tom is not happy living with them and that he goes out every night to escape the apartment. Amanda claims to understand that Tom has greater ambitions than the warehouse, but she also expresses her worry at seeing him stay out late, just as his father, a heavy drinker, used to do. She questions Tom again about where he goes at night, and Tom says that he goes to the movies for adventure, which, he laments, is so absent from his career and life in general. At the mention of the word “adventure,” a sailing vessel appears on the screen. “Man is by instinct a lover, a hunter, a fighter,” Tom says, and he points out that the warehouse does not offer him the chance to be any of those things. Amanda does not want to hear about instinct. She considers it the function of animals and not a concern of “Christian adults.”

Tom is impatient to get to work, but Amanda holds him back to talk about her worry over Laura’s future. Amanda has tried to integrate Laura into the rest of the world by enrolling her in business college and taking her to Young People’s League meetings at church, but nothing has worked. Laura is unable to speak to people outside her family and spends all her time with old records and her glass menagerie. Amanda tells Tom that she knows that he has gotten a letter from the merchant marine and is itching to leave, but she asks him to wait until Laura has someone to take care of her. She then asks him to find some decent man at the warehouse and bring him home to meet Laura. Heading down the fire escape, Tom reluctantly agrees. Amanda makes another call for the magazine subscription drive, and then the lights fade.

Analysis

For the first production of The Glass Menagerie, the composer Paul Bowles wrote a musical theme entitled “The Glass Menagerie.” This music plays when Amanda discusses Laura at the breakfast table with Tom and at other crucial moments involving Laura. The title and timing of the music equate Laura with her glass animals. Like the objects that she loves so well, Laura is incredibly delicate (a typing drill is enough to make her physically ill) and oddly fanciful. Somehow, the fights and struggles that shape Amanda’s and Tom’s lives have not hardened Laura. Amanda and Tom argue constantly about their respective responsibilities to the family, but Laura never joins in. Interestingly, Laura does not participate in supporting the family and, though Amanda is upset when Laura deceives her about the business college, neither Tom nor Amanda resents Laura’s dependence in any way. Her physical and resultant emotional disabilities seem to excuse her from any practical obligation to the household.

Though she does nothing to hold the family together financially, Laura holds it together emotionally. Amanda hits on this truth when she reminds Tom that he cannot leave as long as Laura depends on him. Both Tom and Amanda are capable of working to support themselves, and, without the childlike Laura, this family of three adults would almost certainly dissolve. In addition, Laura’s role as peacemaker proves crucial to ending the standoff between Tom and Amanda. Laura valiantly tries to douse the “slow and implacable fires” of her family’s unhappiness—to play firefighter, in a sense. Interestingly, she trips on the fire escape when she leaves the apartment. This event contributes to the reconciliation between Tom and Amanda, who are united in their concern for Laura, and it also draws attention to the fact that, for Laura, escape from the emotional fires of her family is impossible. Thus, she has no choice but to do everything she can to extinguish them.

The closeness and warmth of Tom’s relationship with Laura becomes evident when Tom comes home drunk at the beginning of Scene Four. In general, when Amanda is around, she tends to dominate the conversation, and the siblings can exchange very few words exclusive to the two of them. Here, though, they are alone. Laura’s love and concern for Tom are great enough to prompt her to wake up at five in the morning to see if he has come home. Tom uses his account of the magic show to share his most intimate experiences and thoughts with Laura. He subtly confesses to her about his drinking when he talks about the magician turning water to whiskey. Then, the coffin anecdote reveals both Tom’s sense of morbid confinement in his job and family life and his impossible dreams of escaping the family “without removing one nail”—that is, without destroying it. A number of critics have suggested that Tom feels an incestuous romantic attachment to Laura. This theory is supported by the subtly presented intensity of the relationship between these two young adults, both of whom are, in their different ways, incapable of establishing complete lives outside their family.

The imagery in Tom’s speech about the magic show contains several layers of symbolic meaning. The coffin trick, with its suggestions of rising from the dead, is a reference to Christian resurrection. Christian themes are also suggested by Tom’s tendency, when he reaches the limits of his patience with Amanda’s reproaches, to see himself as a martyr committing a supreme sacrifice for the family’s good. In addition, the rainbow-colored scarf that Tom brings home and gives to Laura reminds the audience of the rainbow of colors refracted by her glass animals. On a social and historical front, the coffin is representative of the condition of the American lower middle classes, whom Williams describes, in the stage directions, as a “fundamentally enslaved” sector of America.

Summary Scene Five

The screen reads “Annunciation.” Some time has passed since the last scene, and it is now the spring of 1937. Amanda and Laura clear the table after dinner. Amanda nags Tom about his disheveled appearance and his smoking habits. Tom steps onto the fire-escape landing and addresses the audience, describing what he remembers about the area where he grew up. There was a dance hall across the alley, he tells us, from which music emanated on spring evenings. Rainbow refractions from the hall’s glass ball were visible through the Wingfields’ windows, and young couples kissed in the alley. Tom says that the way youth entertained themselves at the dance hall was a natural reaction to lives that, like his own, lacked “any change or adventure.” He notes, however, that his peers would soon be offered all the adventure they wanted as America prepared to enter World War II.

Amanda joins Tom on the landing. They speak more gently than before, and each makes a wish on the moon. Tom refuses to tell what his wish is, and Amanda says that she wishes for the success and happiness of her children. Tom announces that there will be a gentleman caller: he has asked a nice young man from the warehouse to dinner. Amanda is thrilled, and Tom reveals that the caller will be coming the next day. This information agitates Amanda, who is overwhelmed by all the preparations that will need to be made before then. Tom tells her not to make a fuss, but he cannot stem the tide of her excitement. As she leads Tom back inside, Amanda frets about the linen, the silver, new curtains, chintz covers, and a new floor lamp, all the while despairing the lack of time to repaper the walls.

Amanda proceeds to brush Tom’s hair while interrogating him about the young gentleman caller. Her first concern is that he not be a drunkard. Tom thinks she is being a bit hasty in assuming that Laura will marry the visitor. Amanda continues to press him for information and learns that the caller, who is named Jim O’Connor, is a shipping clerk at the warehouse. Tom reveals that both sides of Jim’s family are Irish and that Jim makes eighty-five dollars a month. Jim is neither ugly nor too good-looking, and he goes to night school to study radio engineering and public speaking and is a proponent of self-improvement. Amanda is pleased by what she hears, particularly about his ambition. Tom warns her that Jim does not know that he has been invited specifically to meet Laura, stating that he offered Jim only a simple, unqualified invitation to dinner. This news does not matter to Amanda, who is sure that Laura will dazzle Jim. Tom asks her not to expect too much of Laura. He reminds Amanda that Laura is crippled, socially odd, and lives in a fantasy world. To outsiders who do not love her as family, Tom insists, Laura must seem peculiar. Amanda begs him not to use words like “crippled” and “peculiar” and asserts that Laura is strange in a good way.

Tom gets up to leave. Amanda demands to know where he is going. He replies that he is going to the movies and leaves despite his mother’s objections. Amanda is troubled, but her excitement quickly returns. She calls Laura out onto the landing and tells her to make a wish on the moon. Laura does not know what she should wish for. Amanda, overcome with emotion, tells her to wish for happiness and good fortune.

Analysis

Although Amanda seems to do everything she can to make her children happy, many of her expectations of what will make them happy are actually egocentric—that is, they are based on Amanda’s own definition of happiness. Amanda claims to value her children’s well-being above her own, and in some ways her behavior supports that claim. She does, for example, subject herself to the pedestrian work of subscription-selling in order to help Laura find a husband. Yet Amanda’s nagging of Tom and her refusal to recognize Laura’s flaws indicate her deep-rooted selfishness. She wants the best for Tom and Laura, but her concept of the best has far more to do with her own values than with her children’s interests and dreams. Tom wants intellectual stimulation and a literary life, and Amanda refuses to admit that these may provide as valid a vision of happiness as financial stability. Gentleman callers hold no interest for Laura, but they hold great interest for Amanda, who refuses to accept that her daughter is not identical to her in this regard.

There is much to condemn in Amanda’s selfishness. However, the trajectory of her life also offers much to pity. Amanda simply cannot accept her transition from pampered Southern belle to struggling single mother. Some of her richest dialogue occurs when the genteel manners of her past come to the surface—when she calls the moon a “little silver slipper” or bursts out with a string of Southern endearments in her subscription-drive phone calls. Such elegant turns of phrase seem tragically out of place in a St. Louis tenement.

The figure of the fallen Southern belle is based loosely on Williams’s own mother, who grew up in a prominent Mississippi family and suffered reversals of fortune in her adulthood. This figuration remains one of the best-known trademarks of Williams’s plays—Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire is perhaps the most famous representative of this type. The social and historical circumstances surrounding characters like Amanda point to some of the broader concerns of The Glass Menagerie. In the decades after the Civil War, many once-distinguished Southern families saw their economic fortunes decline. Daughters of these families, like Amanda, traditionally were raised to take pride in their social status. In a rapidly industrializing and modernizing America, however, that status was worth less and less. New money was seen as far more desirable than old but penniless family grandeur. The promise of Amanda’s past remains unfulfilled and always will remain so, but she refuses to accept this fact and convinces herself, wrongly, that Laura can still live the life that she expected for herself. At the end of the play, Amanda chides Tom for being a “dreamer.” It is clear, however, that the Wingfield children’s inability to deal with reality is inherited directly from their mother.

In Scene Five, Amanda’s far-fetched dreams for Laura appear to be within reach. The screen legend at the beginning of the scene is “Annunciation”—a word that, besides simply meaning “announcement,” also refers to the Catholic celebration of God’s announcement to the Virgin Mary that she is pregnant with Jesus Christ. Jim, then, may be seen as a savior—for Laura and for the entire family. Furthermore, Amanda’s description of the moon as a “little silver slipper” also calls to mind the Cinderella fairy tale, which Williams considered an important story. In one version of this tale, a handsome young prince rescues a maiden from a lifetime of domestic drudgery, and a glass slipper is crucial to cementing the match. Amanda’s hopes for Jim’s visit are high, and clues such as the slipper suggest that they may be correctly so. Soon, though, Williams’s references to the birth of a savior and of fairy-tale romance are revealed as ironic omens of tragedy.

Summary Scene 6

Tom leans against the rail of the fire-escape landing, smoking, as the lights come up. He addresses the audience, recollecting the background of the gentleman caller. In high school, Jim O’Connor was a star in everything he did—an athlete, a singer, a debater, the leader of his class—and everyone was certain that he would go far. Yet things did not turn out according to expectations. Six years out of high school, Jim was working a job that was hardly better than Tom’s. Tom remembers that he and Jim were on friendly terms. As the only one at the warehouse who knew about Jim’s past glories, Tom was useful to Jim. Jim called Tom “Shakespeare” because of his habit of writing poems in the warehouse bathroom when work was slow.

Tom’s soliloquy ends, and the lights come up on a living room transformed by Amanda’s efforts over the past twenty-four hours. Amanda adjusts Laura’s new dress. Laura is nervous and uncomfortable with all the fuss that is being made, but Amanda assures her that it is only right for a girl to aim to trap a man with her beauty. When Laura is ready, Amanda goes to dress herself and then makes a grand entrance wearing a dress from her youth. She recalls wearing that same dress to a cotillion (a formal ball, often for debutantes) in Mississippi, to the Governor’s Ball, and to receive her gentlemen callers. Finally, her train of memories leads her to recollections of Mr. Wingfield.

Amanda mentions Jim’s name, and Laura realizes that the visitor is the same young man on whom she had a crush in high school. She panics, claiming that she will not be able to eat at the same table with him. Amanda dismisses Laura’s terror and busies herself in the kitchen making salmon for dinner. When the doorbell rings, Amanda calls for Laura to get it, but Laura desperately begs her mother to open it instead. When Amanda refuses, Laura at last opens the door, awkwardly greets Jim, and then retreats to the record player. Tom explains to Jim that she is extremely shy, and Jim remarks, “It’s unusual to meet a shy girls nowadays.”

Jim and Tom talk while the women are elsewhere. Jim encourages Tom to join him in the public speaking course he is taking. Jim is sure that he and Tom were both meant for executive jobs and that “social poise” is the only determinant of success. However, Jim also warns Tom that, if Tom does not wake up, the boss will soon fire Tom at the warehouse. Tom says that his own plans have nothing to do with public speaking or executive positions and that he is planning a big change in his life. Jim, bewildered, asks what he means, and Tom explains vaguely that he is sick of living vicariously through the cinema. He is bored with “the movies” and wants “to move,” he says. Unbeknownst to Amanda, he has taken the money intended to pay for that month’s electric bill and used it to join the Union of Merchant Seamen. Tom announces rather proudly that he is taking after his father.

Amanda enters, talking gaily and laying on the Southern charm as she introduces herself to Jim. She praises Laura to him and, within minutes, gives him a general account of her numerous girlhood suitors and her failed marriage. Amanda sends Tom to fetch Laura for dinner, but Tom returns to say that Laura is feeling ill and does not want to eat. A storm begins outside. Amanda calls Laura herself, and Laura enters, stumbling and letting out a moan just as a clap of thunder explodes. Seeing that Laura is truly ill, Amanda tells her to rest on the sofa in the living room. Amanda, Jim, and Tom sit down at the table, where Amanda glances anxiously at Jim while Tom says grace. Laura, in the living room alone, struggles to contain a sob.

Analysis

Laura’s glasslike qualities become more explicit in Scene Six, where, according to the stage directions, she resembles “glass touched by light, given a momentary radiance.” She embodies the “momentary radiance” of glass more completely in Scene Seven. Here, however, it is the fragility of glass that is most evident in her character. Before now, we have merely heard about the panic that results from her shyness. In this scene, we witness it directly, as her reason breaks down in the face of the terror that Jim’s presence instills in her.

The straightforward, iron-willed Jim contrasts sharply with the elusive, delicate Laura. Jim is, as Tom says in Scene One, a representative from the “world of reality.” His entrance marks the first time in the play that the audience comes into contact with the outside world from which the Wingfields, in their various ways, are all hiding. As embodied by Jim, that world seems brash, bland, and almost vulgar. His confidence and good cheer never waver. He offers Tom, and later Laura, a steady stream of clichés about success, self-confidence, and progress. Whereas Laura’s life is built around glass, Jim plans to build his around the “social poise” that consists of knowing how to use words to influence people.

Jim is as different from the rest of the Wingfields as he is from Laura. Whereas Tom sees the warehouse as a coffin, Jim sees it as the starting point of his career. For Jim, it is the entrance to a field in which he will attain commercial success, the only kind of success that he can perceive. Amanda lives in a past riddled with traditions and gentility, while Jim looks only toward the future of science, technology, and business. Given these contrasts, one might expect Jim to be bewildered and disgusted by the Wingfields and to be repulsed by the claustrophobia and dysfunction of their household. Instead, he is generous with them. He is good-natured about Tom’s ambivalent performance at his job, and most important, he is charmed by Laura’s imagination and vulnerability. Given Jim’s philosophy of life and belief in the value of social grace, it is possible that his remarkable tolerance and understanding is not a result of genuine compassion but, rather, an expression of the belief that it is always in one’s best interest to try to get along with everyone.

While Jim’s presence emphasizes the alienation of the Wingfields from the rest of the world, it simultaneously lends a new dignity and comprehensibility to that alienation. Jim’s professed dreams present a nightmare vision of the impersonality of humanity—shallow, materialistic, and blindly, relentlessly upbeat. We are forced to consider the question of whether it is preferable to live in a world of Wingfields or a world of Jims. There is no easy answer to this question, but it seems possible that, for all their unhappiness, Amanda and Tom would choose the former because the Wingfields’ world is emotionally richer than Jim’s. Along these lines, it seems possible that the outside world has not so much rejected the Wingfields as they have rejected the outside world.

Summary Scene Seven

Oh, be careful—if you breathe, it breaks!

Summary

A half hour later, dinner is winding down. Laura is still by herself on the living-room couch. The floor lamp gives her face an ethereal beauty. As the rain stops, the lights flicker and go out. Amanda lights candles and asks Jim to check the fuses, but of course, he finds nothing wrong with them. Amanda then asks Tom if he paid the electric bill. He admits that he did not, and she assumes that he simply forgot, as Jim’s good humor helps smooth over the potentially tense moment. Amanda sends Jim to the parlor with a candelabra and a little wine to keep Laura company while Amanda and Tom clean up.

In the living room, Jim takes a seat on the floor and persuades Laura to join him. He gives her a glass of wine. Tongue-tied at first, Laura soon relaxes in Jim’s engaging presence. He talks to her about the Century of Progress exhibition in Chicago and calls her an “old-fashioned” girl. She reminds him that they knew each other in high school. He has forgotten, but when she mentions the nickname he gave her, Blue Roses, he remembers. They reminisce about high school and Jim’s glories. Laura also remembers the discomfort and embarrassment she felt over the brace on her leg. Jim tells her that she was far too self-conscious and that everybody has problems. Laura persuades him to sign a program from a play he performed in during high school, which she has kept, and works up the nerve to ask him about the girl to whom he was supposedly engaged. He explains that he was never actually engaged and that the girl had announced the engagement out of wishful thinking.

In response to his question about what she has done since high school, Laura starts to tell Jim about her glass collection. He abruptly declares that she has an inferiority complex and that she “low-rates” herself. He says that he also suffered from this condition after his post–high school disappointment. He launches into his vision of his own future in television production. Laura listens attentively. He asks her about herself again, and she describes her collection of glass animals. She shows him her favorite: a unicorn. He points out lightly that unicorns are “extinct” in modern times.

Jim notices the music coming from the dance hall across the alley. Despite Laura’s initial protests, he leads her in a clumsy waltz around the room. Jim bumps into the table where the unicorn is resting, the unicorn falls, and its horn breaks off. Laura is unfazed, though, and she says that now the unicorn can just be a regular horse. Extremely apologetic, Jim tells her that she is different from anyone else he knows, that she is pretty, and that if she were his sister he would teach her to have some self-confidence and value her own uniqueness. He then says that someone ought to kiss her.

Jim kisses Laura on the lips. Dazed, Laura sinks down onto the sofa. He immediately begins chiding himself out loud for what he has done. As he sits next to her on the sofa, Jim confesses that he is involved with an Irish girl named Betty, and he tells her that his love for Betty has made a new man of him. Laura places the de-horned unicorn in his hand, telling him to think of it as a souvenir.

Amanda enters in high spirits, carrying refreshments. Jim quickly becomes awkward in her presence. She insists that he become a frequent caller from now on. He says he must leave now and explains that he has to pick up Betty at the train station—the two of them are to be married in June. Despite her disappointment, Amanda bids him farewell graciously. Jim cheerily takes his leave.

Amanda calls Tom in from the kitchen and accuses him of playing a joke on them. Tom insists that he had no idea that Jim was engaged and that he does not know much about anyone at the warehouse. He heads to the door, intending to spend another night at the movies. Amanda accuses him of being a “dreamer” and rails against his selfishness as he leaves. Tom returns her scolding. Amanda tells him that he might as well go not just to the movies but to the moon, for all that he cares about her and Laura. Tom leaves, slamming the door.

Tom delivers his passionate closing monologue from the fire-escape landing as Amanda inaudibly comforts Laura inside the apartment and then withdraws to her room. Tom explains that he was fired soon after from the warehouse for writing a poem on a shoebox lid and that he then left the family. He says that he has traveled for a long time, pursuing something he cannot identify. But he has found that he cannot leave Laura behind. No matter where he goes, some piece of glass or quality of light makes it seem as if his sister is at his side. In the living room, Laura blows the candles out as Tom bids her goodbye.

Oh, Laura, Laura, I tried to leave you behind me, but I am more faithful than I intended to be!

Analysis

As Scene Seven begins, Laura’s face is made beautiful by the new floor lamp and its lampshade of “rose-colored silk.” Williams marshals the force of metaphor through the accrued weight of symbols. The delicate light represents Laura, and the rose represents Laura, whom Jim used to call “Blue Roses.” The glass unicorn that Jim breaks accidentally is yet another symbol that points to Laura. Like the unicorn, Laura is an impossible oddity. Jim’s kindness and kiss bring her abruptly into the normal world by shattering the protective layer of glass that she has set up around herself, but this real world also involves heartbreak, which she suffers at Jim’s hands.

Though Jim is an emissary from a very different world, he also shares some fundamental qualities with the Wingfields, each of whom is somehow unable to connect to the world around him or her. Jim seems to be well integrated into the outside world, to accept its philosophy of life, and to have latched onto a number of things that keep him afloat: public speaking, radio engineering, and Betty. But his long-winded speeches to Laura reveal an insecurity that he is fighting with all his might. He has somehow strayed off the glorious path on which he seemed destined to travel in high school. Lacking an inherent sense of self-worth, he is scrambling to find something that will give him such a sense. Jim talks as if he is trying to convince himself as much as all the others that he has the self-confidence he needs to succeed.

Each character in The Glass Menagerie is trying to escape from reality in his or her own way: Laura retreats into her imagination and the static world of glass animals and old records, Amanda has the glorious days of her youth, and Jim has his dreams of an executive position. Only Tom has trouble finding a satisfactory route of escape. Movies are not a real way out, as he comes to realize. Even descending the steps of the fire escape and wandering like his rootless father does not provide him with any respite from his memories of Laura’s stunted life and crushed hopes. Yet, in one way, he has escaped. A frustrated poet no longer, he has created this play. Laura’s act of blowing out the candles at the play’s end signifies the snuffing of her hopes, but it may also mark Tom’s long-awaited release from her grip. He exhorts Laura to blow out her candles and then bids her what sounds like a final goodbye. The play itself is Tom’s way out, a cathartic attempt to purge his memory and free himself through the act of creation.

Even so, when one considers the trajectory of Tennessee Williams’s life and writings, one senses a deep ambivalence in the play’s conclusion. The rose image continued to show up in Williams’s writings long after The Glass Menagerie, and the ghosts haunting Williams would eventually lead him to drug addiction and a mental hospital. For Williams and his character Tom, art may be an attempt to erase all pain. But although Williams’s world includes some survivors of deep pain and torment, they invariably bear ugly scars.

 Themes

The Difficulty of Accepting Reality

Among the most prominent and urgent themes of The Glass Menagerie is the difficulty the characters have in accepting and relating to reality. Each member of the Wingfield family is unable to overcome this difficulty, and each, as a result, withdraws into a private world of illusion where he or she finds the comfort and meaning that the real world does not seem to offer. Of the three Wingfields, reality has by far the weakest grasp on Laura. The private world in which she lives is populated by glass animals—objects that, like Laura’s inner life, are incredibly fanciful and dangerously delicate. Unlike his sister, Tom is capable of functioning in the real world, as we see in his holding down a job and talking to strangers. But, in the end, he has no more motivation than Laura does to pursue professional success, romantic relationships, or even ordinary friendships, and he prefers to retreat into the fantasies provided by literature and movies and the stupor provided by drunkenness. Amanda’s relationship to reality is the most complicated in the play. Unlike her children, she is partial to real-world values and longs for social and financial success. Yet her attachment to these values is exactly what prevents her from perceiving a number of truths about her life. She cannot accept that she is or should be anything other than the pampered belle she was brought up to be, that Laura is peculiar, that Tom is not a budding businessman, and that she herself might be in some ways responsible for the sorrows and flaws of her children. Amanda’s retreat into illusion is in many ways more pathetic than her children’s, because it is not a willful imaginative construction but a wistful distortion of reality.

Although the Wingfields are distinguished and bound together by the weak relationships they maintain with reality, the illusions to which they succumb are not merely familial quirks. The outside world is just as susceptible to illusion as the Wingfields. The young people at the Paradise Dance Hall waltz under the short-lived illusion created by a glass ball—another version of Laura’s glass animals. Tom opines to Jim that the other viewers at the movies he attends are substituting on-screen adventure for real-life adventure, finding fulfillment in illusion rather than real life. Even Jim, who represents the “world of reality,” is banking his future on public speaking and the television and radio industries—all of which are means for the creation of illusions and the persuasion of others that these illusions are true. The Glass Menagerie identifies the conquest of reality by illusion as a huge and growing aspect of the human condition in its time.

The Impossibility of True Escape

At the beginning of Scene Four, Tom regales Laura with an account of a magic show in which the magician managed to escape from a nailed-up coffin. Clearly, Tom views his life with his family and at the warehouse as a kind of coffin—cramped, suffocating, and morbid—in which he is unfairly confined. The promise of escape, represented by Tom’s missing father, the Merchant Marine Service, and the fire escape outside the apartment, haunts Tom from the beginning of the play, and in the end, he does choose to free himself from the confinement of his life.

The play takes an ambiguous attitude toward the moral implications and even the effectiveness of Tom’s escape. As an able-bodied young man, he is locked into his life not by exterior factors but by emotional ones—by his loyalty to and possibly even love for Laura and Amanda. Escape for Tom means the suppression and denial of these emotions in himself, and it means doing great harm to his mother and sister. The magician is able to emerge from his coffin without upsetting a single nail, but the human nails that bind Tom to his home will certainly be upset by his departure. One cannot say for certain that leaving home even means true escape for Tom. As far as he might wander from home, something still “pursue[s]” him. Like a jailbreak, Tom’s escape leads him not to freedom but to the life of a fugitive.

The Unrelenting Power of Memory

According to Tom, The Glass Menagerie is a memory play—both its style and its content are shaped and inspired by memory. As Tom himself states clearly, the play’s lack of realism, its high drama, its overblown and too-perfect symbolism, and even its frequent use of music are all due to its origins in memory. Most fictional works are products of the imagination that must convince their audience that they are something else by being realistic. A play drawn from memory, however, is a product of real experience and hence does not need to drape itself in the conventions of realism in order to seem real. The creator can cloak his or her true story in unlimited layers of melodrama and unlikely metaphor while still remaining confident of its substance and reality. Tom—and Tennessee Williams—take full advantage of this privilege.

The story that the play tells is told because of the inflexible grip it has on the narrator’s memory. Thus, the fact that the play exists at all is a testament to the power that memory can exert on people’s lives and consciousness. Indeed, Williams writes in the Production Notes that “nostalgia . . . is the first condition of the play.” The narrator, Tom, is not the only character haunted by his memories. Amanda too lives in constant pursuit of her bygone youth, and old records from her childhood are almost as important to Laura as her glass animals. For these characters, memory is a crippling force that prevents them from finding happiness in the present or the offerings of the future. But it is also the vital force for Tom, prompting him to the act of creation that culminates in the achievement of the play.

Motifs

Motifs are recurring structures, contrasts, and literary devices that can help to develop and inform the text’s major themes.

Abandonment

The plot of The Glass Menagerie is structured around a series of abandonments. Mr. Wingfield’s desertion of his family determines their life situation; Jim’s desertion of Laura is the center of the play’s dramatic action; Tom’s abandonment of his family gives him the distance that allows him to shape their story into a narrative. Each of these acts of desertion proves devastating for those left behind. At the same time, each of them is portrayed as the necessary condition for, and a natural result of, inevitable progress. In particular, each is strongly associated with the march of technological progress and the achievements of the modern world. Mr. Wingfield, who works for the telephone company, leaves his family because he “fell in love with [the] long distances” that the telephone brings into people’s consciousness. It is impossible to imagine that Jim, who puts his faith in the future of radio and television, would tie himself to the sealed, static world of Laura. Tom sees his departure as essential to the pursuit of “adventure,” his taste for which is whetted by the movies he attends nightly. Only Amanda and Laura, who are devoted to archaic values and old memories, will presumably never assume the role of abandoner and are doomed to be repeatedly abandoned.

The Words and Images on the Screen

One of the play’s most unique stylistic features is the use of an onstage screen on which words and images relevant to the action are projected. Sometimes the screen is used to emphasize the importance of something referred to by the characters, as when an image of blue roses appears in Scene Two; sometimes it refers to something from a character’s past or fantasy, as when the image of Amanda as a young girl appears in Scene Six. At other times, it seems to function as a slate for impersonal commentary on the events and characters of the play, as when “Ou sont les neiges” (words from a fifteenth-century French poem praising beautiful women) appear in Scene One as Amanda’s voice is heard offstage.

What appears on the screen generally emphasizes themes or symbols that are already established quite obviously by the action of the play. The device thus seems at best ironic, and at worst somewhat pretentious or condescending. Directors who have staged the play have been, for the most part, very ambivalent about the effectiveness and value of the screen, and virtually all have chosen to eliminate it from the performance. The screen is, however, an interesting epitome of Tennessee Williams’s expressionist theatrical style, which downplays realistic portrayals of life in favor of stylized presentations of inner experience.

Music

Music is used often in The Glass Menagerie, both to emphasize themes and to enhance the drama. Sometimes the music is extra-diegetic—coming from outside the play, not from within it—and though the audience can hear it the characters cannot. For example, a musical piece entitled “The Glass Menagerie,” written specifically for the play by the composer Paul Bowles, plays when Laura’s character or her glass collection comes to the forefront of the action. This piece makes its first appearance at the end of Scene One, when Laura notes that Amanda is afraid that her daughter will end up an old maid. Other times, the music comes from inside the diegetic space of the play—that is, it is a part of the action, and the characters can hear it. Examples of this are the music that wafts up from the Paradise Dance Hall and the music Laura plays on her record player. Both the extra-diegetic and the diegetic music often provide commentary on what is going on in the play. For example, the Paradise Dance Hall plays a piece entitled “The World Is Waiting for the Sunrise” while Tom is talking about the approach of World War II.

Symbols

Symbols are objects, characters, figures, and colors used to represent abstract ideas or concepts.

Laura’s Glass Menagerie

As the title of the play informs us, the glass menagerie, or collection of animals, is the play’s central symbol. Laura’s collection of glass animal figurines represents a number of facets of her personality. Like the figurines, Laura is delicate, fanciful, and somehow old-fashioned. Glass is transparent, but, when light is shined upon it correctly, it refracts an entire rainbow of colors. Similarly, Laura, though quiet and bland around strangers, is a source of strange, multifaceted delight to those who choose to look at her in the right light. The menagerie also represents the imaginative world to which Laura devotes herself—a world that is colorful and enticing but based on fragile illusions.

The Glass Unicorn

The glass unicorn in Laura’s collection—significantly, her favorite figure—represents her peculiarity. As Jim points out, unicorns are “extinct” in modern times and are lonesome as a result of being different from other horses. Laura too is unusual, lonely, and ill-adapted to existence in the world in which she lives. The fate of the unicorn is also a smaller-scale version of Laura’s fate in Scene Seven. When Jim dances with and then kisses Laura, the unicorn’s horn breaks off, and it becomes just another horse. Jim’s advances endow Laura with a new normalcy, making her seem more like just another girl, but the violence with which this normalcy is thrust upon her means that Laura cannot become normal without somehow shattering. Eventually, Laura gives Jim the unicorn as a “souvenir.” Without its horn, the unicorn is more appropriate for him than for her, and the broken figurine represents all that he has taken from her and destroyed in her.

“Blue Roses”

Like the glass unicorn, “Blue Roses,” Jim’s high school nickname for Laura, symbolizes Laura’s unusualness yet allure. The name is also associated with Laura’s attraction to Jim and the joy that his kind treatment brings her. Furthermore, it recalls Tennessee Williams’s sister, Rose, on whom the character of Laura is based.

The Fire Escape

Leading out of the Wingfields’ apartment is a fire escape with a landing. The fire escape represents exactly what its name implies: an escape from the fires of frustration and dysfunction that rage in the Wingfield household. Laura slips on the fire escape in Scene Four, highlighting her inability to escape from her situation. Tom, on the other hand, frequently steps out onto the landing to smoke, anticipating his eventual getaway.

But the wonder-fullest trick of all was the coffin trick. We nailed him into a coffin and he got out of the coffin without removing one nail. . . . There is a trick that would come in handy for me—get me out of this two-by-four situation! . . . You know it don’t take much intelligence to get yourself into a nailed-up coffin, Laura. But who in hell ever got himself out of one without removing one nail?

At the beginning of Scene Four, Tom, returning home from the movies, tells Laura about a magic show in which the magician performs the coffin trick. Tom, who dreams of adventure and literary greatness but is tied down to a mindless job and a demanding family, sees the coffin as a symbol of his own life situation. He has been contemplating an escape from his private coffin since the beginning of the play, and at the end, he finally goes through with it, walking out on his family after he is fired from his job. But Tom’s escape is not nearly as impressive as the magician’s. Indeed, it consists of no fancier a trick than walking down the stairs of the fire escape. Nor is Tom’s escape as seamless as the magician’s. The magician gets out of the coffin without disturbing one nail, but Tom’s departure is certain to have a major impact on the lives of Amanda and Laura. At the beginning of Scene One, Tom admits that he is “the opposite of a stage magician.” The illusion of escape that the magician promotes is, in the end, out of Tom’s reach.

Well, in the South we had so many servants. Gone, gone, gone. All vestige of gracious living! Gone completely! I wasn’t prepared for what the future brought me. All of my gentlemen callers were sons of planters and so of course I assumed that I would be married to one and raise my family on a large piece of land with plenty of servants. But man proposes—and woman accepts the proposal! To vary that old, old saying a bit—I married no planter! I married a man who worked for the telephone company! . . . A telephone man who—fell in love with long-distance!

This quote is drawn from Scene Six, as Amanda subjects Jim, who has just arrived at the Wingfield apartment for dinner, to the full force of her high-volume, girlish Southern charm. Within minutes of meeting him, Amanda introduces Jim to the broad arc of her life history: her much-lamented transition from pampered belle to deserted wife. As she does throughout the play, Amanda here equates her own downfall with that of a system of “gracious living” associated with the Old South, which contrasts starkly with the vulgarity and squalor of 1930s St. Louis. Naturally, Amanda’s intense nostalgia for a bygone world may have something to do with the fact that neither she nor her children have managed to succeed in the more modern world in which they now live.

Amanda’s memories of her multitudinous “gentlemen callers” are responsible for the visit of Jim, whom Amanda sees as a comparable gentleman caller for Laura. Amanda’s decision to tell Jim immediately about her gentlemen callers demonstrates the high hopes she has for his visit. Indeed, the speech quoted might be taken as rather tactless move—a sign that Amanda’s social graces have a touch of hysterical thoughtlessness to them and that putting herself and her story at the center of attention is more important to her than creating a favorable atmosphere for Laura and Jim’s meeting.

Quote 3

LAURA: Little articles of [glass], they’re ornaments mostly! Most of them are little animals made out of glass, the tiniest little animals in the world. Mother calls them a glass menagerie! Here’s an example of one, if you’d like to see it! . . . Oh, be careful—if you breathe, it breaks! . . . You see how the light shines through him?

This exchange occurs in Scene Seven, after Jim’s warmth has enabled Laura to overcome her shyness in his presence and introduce him to the collection of glass animals that is her most prized possession. By this point in the play, we are well aware that the glass menagerie is a symbol for Laura herself. Here, she warns him about the ease with which the glass figurines might be broken and shows him the wonderful visions produced when they are held up to the right sort of light. In doing so, she is essentially describing herself: exquisitely delicate but glowing under the right circumstances.

The glass unicorn, Laura’s favorite figurine, symbolizes her even more specifically. The unicorn is different from ordinary horses, just as Laura is different from other people. In fact, the unicorn is so unusual a creature that Jim at first has trouble recognizing it. Unicorns are “extinct in the modern world,” and similarly, Laura is ill-adapted for survival in the world in which she lives. The loneliness that Jim identifies in the lone unicorn is the same loneliness to which Laura has resigned herself and from which Jim has the potential to save her.

Quote 4

JIM: Aw, aw, aw. Is it broken?

This exchange, also from Scene Seven, occurs not long after the previous one. After persuading Laura to dance with him, Jim accidentally bumps the table on which the glass unicorn rests, breaking the horn off of the figurine. Apparently, Laura’s warning to him about the delicacy of the glass objects reflects a very reasonable caution, but Jim fails to take the warning seriously enough. The accident with the unicorn foreshadows his mishandling of Laura, as he soon breaks her heart by announcing that he is engaged.

Just as Jim’s clumsy advances make Laura seem and feel like an ordinary girl, his clumsy dancing turns her beloved unicorn into an ordinary horse. For the time being, Laura is optimistic about the change, claiming that the unicorn should be happy to feel like less of a misfit, just as she herself is temporarily happy because Jim’s interest in her makes her feel like less of an outcast. Laura and the glass unicorn have similar fragility, however, and Laura, perhaps knowingly, predicts her own fate when she implies that no matter how careful Jim might be, her hopes will end up shattered.

Quote 5

I descended the steps of this fire escape for a last time and followed, from then on, in my father’s footsteps, attempting to find in motion what was lost in space. . . . I would have stopped, but I was pursued by something. . . . I pass the lighted window of a shop where perfume is sold. The window is filled with pieces of colored glass, tiny transparent bottles in delicate colors, like bits of a shattered rainbow. Then all at once my sister touches my shoulder. I turn around and look into her eyes. Oh, Laura, Laura, I tried to leave you behind me, but I am more faithful than I intended to be!

The play closes with this speech by Tom, at the end of Scene Seven. Here, Tom speaks as the narrator, from some point in time years after the action of the play. He describes how he leaves Amanda and Laura after being fired from his job and embarks on the life of the wanderer, just as his father did years ago. This escape is what Tom dreams of aloud in Scene Four, and it is Tom’s chosen means of pursuing the “adventure” that he discusses with Amanda in Scene Four and Jim in Scene Six. From Tom’s vague description of his fate after leaving home, it is unclear whether he has found adventure or not. What is clear is that his escape is an imperfect, incomplete one. Memories of Laura chase him wherever he goes, and those memories prove as confining as the Wingfield apartment.

Tom’s statement that “I am more faithful than I intended to be!” indicates that Tom is fully aware that deserting his family was a faithless and morally reprehensible act, and the guilt associated with it may have something to do with his inability to leave Laura fully behind. But the word “faithful” also has strong associations with the language of lovers. A number of critics have suggested that Tom’s character is influenced by an incestuous desire for Laura. The language used in this sentence and the hold that Laura maintains over Tom’s memory help to support this theory.