The Glass Menagerie Synopsis
Playwright Background Information
Primary characters:
Amanda - The mother of the family, a southern belle with a bubbly personality. Amanda is paranoid and often lives in her past.
Tom - Son of Amanda and narrator of the piece. Tom craves “adventure,” and goes to the movies every night. He wants to run away because he is fed up with his family’s oppressive dependence on him
Laura - Daughter of Amanda. She has one leg shorter than the other (disability) and is painfully shy. She dropped out of high school and business college and is obsessive about playing her “victrola” and with her glass collection.
Jim - The “gentleman caller” set up by Tom for Laura. A high school hero who is ambitious. However, he turns out to be engaged to “Betty.”
The Father: Never actually appears, but is talked about. His portrait hangs in the apartment and he left the family years ago because he “fell in love with long distances”.
Setting
- Fmily resides in St. Louis with Tom working at a warehouse and Amanda, who never states where she works, involved in different organizations and activities such as DAR. Laura, who secretly dropped out of school, helps her mother around the house and plays with glass figurines.
- Amanda confronts Tom about him being too much like his father. She confesses she is worried about him, while Tom states that he is out late at night at the movies because he craves adventure. Amanda then pleads Tom to find Laura a “gentleman caller” or future husband.
- Tom brings a “gentleman caller” named Jim for dinner one night. Jim went to high school with Laura and was her secret crush.
- Jim and Laura dance after dinner in the living room, but breaks Laura’s glass unicorn horn that was part of her figurine collection. Jim confesses to Laura that he is engaged, abruptly gets up and leaves.
- Amanda blames Tom for bringing Jim over to dinner despite Tom not knowing Jim was engaged. Tom becomes very upset and reaches his breaking point. He packs up his stuff and leaves the house to end the play.
Key Quotes
- "I'm going to the movies" - Tom (7.135)
- "Blow out your candles Laura - and so goodbye..." (7.137)
- “Poor little fellow, he must feel sort of lonesome.” (7.122)
- “Well, if he does, he doesn’t complain about it. He stays on a shelf with some horses that don’t have horns and all of them seem to get along nicely together.” (7.122)
- Abandonment; the words and images on the screen; music. Picture of the father.
- Laura’s Glass Menagerie-Laura’s collection of glass animal figurines represents her personality. Like the glass figures Laura is delicate, fanciful, and somehow old-fashioned.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-represents Laura’s peculiarity. The fate of the unicorn’s fate foreshadows Laura’s fate in Scene Seven. Laura cannot become normal without somehow shattering.
- “Blue Roses”- Jim’s high school nickname for Laura, symbolizes Laura’s uniqueness yet allure. Associated with Laura’s attraction to Jim and the memory of their unusual acquaintance. Also, recalls Tennessee Williams’s sister, Rose, on whom the character of Laura is based.
- The Fire Escape- an escape from the frustration and dysfunction in the Wingfield household. Laura slips on the fire escape in Scene Four which highlights her inability to escape from her situation. Tom, on the other hand, frequently steps out,foreshadowing his eventual getaway.
- The difficulty of accepting reality-
- the impossibility of true escape-
- the unrelenting power of memory-
- Williams found realism to be a flat, outdated, and insufficient way of approaching emotional experience.
- The Glass Menagerie is fundamentally a non realistic play.
- Distortion, illusion, dream, symbol, and myth are the tools by which the action onstage is unraveled.
- A screen displays words and images relevant to the action for example “[Screen Image: Blue Roses.]” (2.44)
- Music intrudes with melodramatic timing
- The lights rise or dim according to the mood onstage, not the time of day
- The play’s style is expressionistic—underlying meaning is emphasized at the expense of realism.
- The play’s lack of stylistic realism—Tom’s memory, yet it still has some elements of reality to make it relatable.
Similarly, the lower-middle-class life of the Wingfield family is portrayed with a great deal of truth to historical and social realities.
Rationale
Prompt: 1990. Choose a novel or play that depicts a conflict between a parent (or a parental figure) and a son or daughter. Write an essay in which you analyze the sources of the conflict and explain how the conflict contributes to the meaning of the work. Avoid plot summary.
Thesis:
In Tennessee William’s The Glass Menagerie, Amanda’s desire to prevent Tom from becoming like his father and her desire to force Laura to become more like Amanda creates conflict, illuminating the fact that the more Amanda tries to shape the lives of her children, the more they deviate from what she wants, exemplifying that only a shattering of an individual's “glass menagerie” - their idealized perception of reality - is enough to create a change in a character’s personality.
Amanda is constantly nagging Laura to be more outgoing, more like she herself was as a young woman in Blue Mountain. With Tom, Amanda’s main worry is that he will turn out like his father - a drunkard who abandons his family - so she constantly tries to keep him at home. However, despite having a modicum of success with Laura by showing her that there is more to life than old records and glass, Amanda fails to break Tom’s idealization of a life of adventure, and he ends up leaving the family out to dry when he joins the Merchant Marine.
Another point in favor of choosing this prompt is that it addresses the complexity of the relationship between the characters in the text. Although Laura did become more outgoing, it was not a direct result of Amanda’s constant nagging, but rather a consequence of Jim (the “Gentleman Caller”) kissing her, and breaking her “glass menagerie.” Prior to this occurrence, Amanda’s attempts to change Laura (signing her up for business school and sending her to the church’s “Young People’s League”) backfired by causing Laura to lose confidence in herself and close herself off to socialization even more. Also, the more Amanda tries to control Tom, the more he tries to gain independence by staying out late at the movies, and eventually not paying the bills and leaving the family entirely.
In choosing the scenes to use for the video presentation, we tried to choose scenes that would exemplify the familial conflict and explore the complexity of the play. Scene 1 introduces the conflict between Amanda and Laura by showing Amanda’s fear of Laura becoming an “old maid” and the conflict between Amanda to Tom when she micromanages Tom’s every move. Scene 4 further develops the conflict between Amanda and Laura as Amanda expresses her concerns about Laura’s lifestyle to Tom. By expressing her concerns about Tom’s night-owl habits and tendency to drink, the scene adds more tension to the relationship. This scene was chosen because it is the main turning point for family, with Tom agreeing to find Laura a “gentleman caller,” and the revelation that Tom is unhappy in the apartment and has plans to leave. Scene 7, contrary to expectations, does not resolve the conflict, but brings it to its logical conclusion. Laura’s gentleman caller is revealed to be engaged to marry somebody else, and Tom leaves the family in the dark (literally - he neglects to pay the electric bill). The encounter with Jim was not a complete failure, as the symbolism of the glass menagerie is brought full circle, with the breaking of the unicorn coinciding with the breaking of Laura’s perceptions of herself (that her “clump” is horrible and she is inferior to others).
The portrayal of the selected scenes was made doubly important by the time constraints, so stylistic choices had to be very deliberate and effective. Some of the more important choices were camera angle, lighting, and the modern lens through which we reenacted the play.
A common camera angle we used was the over the shoulder shot. This angle allows the viewers to focus on a specific character, allowing for a greater degree of acting and plot interpretation by the actor. Similar to this angle, the point of view shot allows the audience to “become” a character, in that they can experience a conversation from the point of view of the character. Once in scene 7, the point of view is that of the glass unicorn lying broken on the ground, allowing the audience to more closely feel and understand the conversation between Jim and Laura. The basic, mid-range shot is frequently used to accurately and objectively convey the goings-on of the play. When the camera is below the characters, looking up, the characters become more powerful, as seen once when Tom and Amanda are arguing in scene 4. The effect on the interpretation of this sequence is that the audience can see two strong-willed characters in conflict, and feel the tension the way a little kid feels the tension when their parents are arguing.
For most of the play, the lighting is natural, and the camera angles are relied upon to explore the nuances of the plot and theme. Scene 7, however, is an important exception. In scene 7, the lighting is dimmer, almost like mood lighting, to emphasize the intense emotional battle going on within Laura - she is terrified by Jim because of her shyness, but she likes him. Then, once out of her shell, she is crushed to find out he is engaged to another girl. Similarly, in the sequence on the floor around the broken glass unicorn, the lighting is from below, illuminating Jim’s and Laura’s faces. This difference is important in that it draws more attention to an important part of the play, and highlights Laura’s realization that she is not inferior to others. She sympathizes strongly with the unicorn because its horn sets it apart from other horses, while her clump sets her apart from other people. The breaking of the horn symbolizes her acceptance of her difference.
The modern lens through which we reenacted and interpreted the play was the reality show Keeping Up with the Kardashians. This was fitting because of the family conflict that appears in both the play and the show, and the fatherless families in both. In addition, the mother of both families is a strong character that tries to control her children, perhaps illuminating an effect of a missing paternal presence.
