Glass Menagerie Essay

An Escape from Confine custodytThe Wingfield family in Tennessee Williams The Glass zoo is iodine that is held together by the bonds of illusion, dysfunction, and entrapment. Amanda Wingfield lives in a lower middle-class flatcar that Williams tells us is diagnostic of the impulse of this largest and fundamentally enslaved section of Ameri stick come out of the closet ordering to avoid fluidness and differentiation and to function as one interfused atomic pile of automatism (Williams, 1945, 400). Amanda and her two children, Laura and Tom, are enslaved in different ways. Amanda is a slave to a past when the bloom was not off the rose, so-to-speak. Tom is enslaved by condole with for his mother and sister that keeps him working in a warehouse romp he hates as he is a poet. Laura is enslaved by her illusions. There is a constant struggle among universe and illusion in this encounter, something wry in light of the fact that Williams attempted to avoid realism.As sedative drug (1960) notes As a writer he is basically a poet, and he has done much to develop the possibilities of poetic expression in a theater that was created as a home for relentless realism (222). Lauras development through the bunk influences the evolution of the idea, that one must campaign enslavement to have the chance for a fulfilling existence. The truly dysfunctional family of the play didnt manage to send off their confined existence. At first it could calculate as if their lives are anything but normal, but Amandas impulse to continue her single-parent family seems as familiar as the morning newspaper (Presley 53). The Wingfields are a typical family just struggling to get by.Their problems, however, stem from their inability to efficaciously communicate with each other. Instead of talking out their differences, they resort to larger-than- brio acts. The desperation that the Wingfields embrace has led them to create illusions in their minds and in unit of ammunition become deceptive. Amanda, Tom, and Laura are caught up in a web of desperation, denial, and deception, and it is this entrapment that prevents them, as it would any family, from living productive andemotionally fulfilled life. All of the plays characters make attempts at escape. The let is the ultimate symbol of escape because of his desertion. Laura continually escapes into a world of fantasy through the glass zoological garden and the old phonograph records. Amanda tries to escape her current life by retelling stories of when she was boylike and life had limitless possibilities.Tom escapes his life and his mind-numbing job by personnel casualty to the movies and sometimes getting drunk. Even the flatbed where they live is something from which they would like to escape. The Wingfield apartment is in the rear of the building, one of those vast hive-like conglomerations of cellular living-units that flower as warty growths in overcrowded urban centers of lower middle-class popul ations and are symptomatic of the impulse of this largest and fundamentally enslaved section of American society to avoid fluidity and differentiation and to exist and function as one interfused mass of automatism (stage directions, 1.1, Williams 1175). Williams uses a description of the setting to establish the prison-like feel .The play takes an ambiguous view toward the moral implications and even the effectiveness of Toms escape. As cold as he might wander from home, something still pursues him. Like a jailbreak, Toms escape leads him not to freedom but to the life of a fugitive.In their attempts to escape reality, all of the characters back away into some smorgasbord of fantasy, whether it is films or glass animals. They find a source of comfort and cheer in these fantasy realms that they do not seem to find in 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 sh e finds the comfort and kernel 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 be by glass animals that, like Lauras inner life, are implausibly delicate. Unlike his sister, Tom is capable of functioning in the real world. But, in the end, he has no more motivation than Laura does to pursue professional success, amatory relationships, and he prefers to retreat into the fantasies. Amandas relationship to reality is the most abstruse in the play. Unlike her children, she is partial to real-world values and longs for social and financial success. backup in the past is Amandas way of escaping her pitiful present reality (Knorr). She never forgets to tell Laura and Tomabout her receiving seventeen gentlemen callers in meritless Mountain when she was young One Sunday afternoon-your mother received-seventeen-gentlemen callers Why, sometimes there werent enough chairs enough to accommodate them all (Williams 26). Amandas retreat into illusion is in many ways more pathetic than her childrens, because it is a distortion of reality. In The Glass Menagerie, memory plays an important part, both thematically and in terms of the plays presentation.Thematically, a referee sees the bad effects of memory in the form of Amandas living in the past. As far as the plays presentation is concerned, the integral story is told from the memory of Tom, the narrator .When he begins to speak in facet 1 of The Glass Menagerie, one of the first things he tells the audience is, The play is memory. Being a memory play, it is dimly lighted, it is sentimental, it is not realistic. The influence and position of memory is an important theme in the play and influences all the characters, which are trapped by memory. Tom is haunted by the memory of deserting his sister.Amanda cant move past the memory of living a wear out life in Blue Mountain. A blown-up photograph of the father h angs on the wall of the living room, to the leftover of the archway. It is the face of a rattling handsome young man in a doughboys introductory World War cap. He is gallantly smiling, ineluctably smiling, as if to give tongue to I will be smiling forever. (Stage directions, scene One, Williams 1178). Just as the portrait of Amandas husband hangs in the house, so does the past loom over the present of the play.Laura allows herself to become lost in phonograph records left by their father, the records themselves holding memories of the past. Even Jim is entangled by the memories of his days as a high school hero instead of just another(prenominal) guy working at a factory. The play examines the conflict between ones obligations and ones real desires, suggesting that being neat to one may necessitate abandonment of the other. In the Glass Menagerie the characters have failed to escape enslavement, thus, losing the chance for a fulfilling existence.The quotation from Thoreau, The mass of men lead lives of the quiet desperation, applies directly to the characters, as they were all unhappy, but took no action to improve their situation in any significant way. breaking down the chain of a vicious circle is an ongoing going that can be found in a work life, item-by-itemised relationships, and even in relationships with oneself resulting in addictions. The Glass Menagerie gives a reader an incentive to act up onthe stigmas, bias, and prejudices that one might have. Its impossible to become a fulfilled and harmoniously accomplished individual without facing the dichotomy of ones character. One has to get out of the world of fragile illusions and face the reality in order to be a happy person, as illusions create nothing but desperation.?