The Glass Menagerie 1155FamILy in The Glass Menagerie
With The Glass Menagerie, Tennessee Williams lays
the foundation for a string of postdepression-era
plays virtually obsessed with the dynamic of the
American family that remains to this day and has
often been employed by dramatists such as Arthur
Miller, Edward Albee, Sam Shepard, August Wil-
son, and Paula Vogel. The Wingfields, on whom the
play is centered, have been nicknamed “America’s
first dysfunctional family.” First performed in Chi-
cago in 1944, this play was Williams’s first major
success, and the drama’s Broadway run in 1945 coin-
cided with the end of World War II. In Menagerie,
Williams presciently criticizes the popular image of
the American family that dominated the television
landscape after the war.
The playwright reveals the Wingfields’ noni-
dyllic life in the depiction of their home, which
he describes as “one of those vast hive-like conglom-
erations that flower as warty growths in overcrowded
urban centers of lower middle-class population.” The
apartment building “is flanked on both sides by dark,
narrow alleys which run into murky canyons of tangled
clotheslines garbage cans, and the sinister latticework
of neighboring f ire escapes.” Williams complements
this impoverished condition outside the Wingfield
apartment with the broken family within. In his
monologue opening the play, Tom says his family
is “somehow set apart . . . from reality” and reveals
that he; his mother, Amanda; and sister, Laura,
were abandoned by “our father who left us a long
time ago” but whose presence dominates the stage
nonetheless in the figure of a “larger-than-life-size
photograph over the mantel.”
To her credit, Amanda attempts to maintain
a high level of vivacity in her dreary home. Her
attempts to do so, however, ultimately cripple her
relationships with her children. Caught in a web of
illusion in which she is a southern belle attending
a never-ending cotillion ball, Amanda harbors the
secret terror that she will be left entirely alone with
no man to take care of her. This fear prompts her
to ceaselessly nag her son, who wants to be a poet
instead of an employee at a shoe factory, about his
responsibilities to the two women in his life. For
Laura, Amanda envisions a career as a reception-
ist. When this fails, she hatches a plot to find her
daughter a husband and enlists Tom in the crusade.
Believing domesticity is the only ticket to a happy
future for her daughter, Amanda fails to realize her
own failed marriage provided a less-than-healthy
primer from which her daughter could learn.
As for Tom, the audience sympathizes with his
plight. Like Amanda, Tom is trapped—trapped in
a world in which his dreamer’s heart has no outlet
other than the artificial Hollywood movies he inces-
santly attends into the early hours of the morning.
Like his father, Tom must summon up the courage
to leave Amanda and Laura, but, as the playwright
notes, “[h]is nature is not remorseless,” which com-
pels him to linger until disaster essentially forces
him to act.
This disaster is Laura’s failed date with Jim
O’Connor, whom Amanda convinces Tom to bring
home for dinner in a thinly veiled attempt to get
Jim to meet and ultimately marry Laura, a tragically
neurotic young woman who is completely detached
from the outside world. When Jim, who is ironi-
cally the one boy Laura loved in high school, reveals
he is engaged, the family’s machinations fall apart
as Laura finally retreats from the world entirely.
Typically, Amanda blames Tom, and the young
man finally finds either the courage or the despera-
tion to leave when he gets fired from his job at the
warehouse shortly after Jim’s visit. The scene ends
with Laura blowing out a candle, leaving her and
Amanda in the dark, ostensibly defenseless against
the menacing world that beckons at their doorstep.
Although unforgivably sad, Williams’s depiction
of the Wingfield family offers a necessary truth
within the popular, carefully crafted illusion of the
perfect American postdepression-era family. The
enduring portrait of these characters, whose lives
are reflective of the American family, stands as part
of the play’s importance and remains central to the
debate about the reality of the American family.
Chris Bellmemor y in The Glass Menagerie
The most important aspect of Tennessee Williams’s
The Glass Menagerie is the theme of memory. With
this play, Williams offered his personal brand of
expressionism, which he labeled “plastic theater”
and hoped would “take the place of the exhausted