The Glass Menagerie

I'm sick.

I don't like being sick and having to go to school because I don't usually complete my best homework with a headache and hacking cough...

Speaking of school and illnesses, last week my class and I finished reading Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie!

//I'm finishing this review in April.. I'm a little fuzzy on the details so if this is the bullshit, feel free to call me out on it! :)

♥ - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - ♥

The Glass Menagerie | Tennessee Williams
Genre: Theatre
Published: 1945
Read: March, 2014

This work is actually a play, a memory play to be specific. This means that the play is recounted from the narrator's past. You can't fully trust all the events that have occurred because everything is as the narrator remembers it.

The main characters are Tom, the main character; Amanda, his mother; Laura, his sister; and Jim, his work friend. Williams says that this play is an autobiography but I never really payed that much attention to that aspect of the work.

Williams is also super literal. He doesn't want any of his play to be misinterpreted, he has stage notes suggesting displaying a background that illustrates a symbol or theme from the scene. His stage notes also describe legends, or slides with text on them denoting the upcoming scenes. He knows what he means and he wants you to know what he knows and possibly that he knows.

I personally think this book highlights the disadvantages that families like them face in an increasingly industrialized world. They are a dysfunctional family that fight often and are vulnerable in the face of society and each other. They are disconcertingly isolated and I wouldn't be surprised if they were diagnosed with mental illnesses. They have problems and that is pretty well understood when one reads the play.

This play is staged in the 30's, during the Great Depression. I don't know if the general attitude was discouraged and inactive or tenacious and motivated. Either way, the Wingfields are doing it wrong. Tom wants to be a poet and writes in a closet during his warehouse job. Amanda sells magazine subscriptions over the telephone. Laura is supposed to be going to typing school but she polishes her glass menagerie all day. They're struggling but they're making it, if only by the skin of their teeth and that's mainly because of Tom's salary.

Tom is constantly complaining, he's dreaming of bigger and better worlds, he wants to leave the warehouse and his family's dependence on him behind and ride on the wheels that his writing career might give him. If that doesn't bear fruit, he's thinking of the army. He could follow in the footsteps of his absent father and make his own way in life, punching through the roof of a nearly nailed in coffin like an action star from the movies. He knows that he can't do this because he truly does care for his family. Amanda's only power over him is her position as his mother so it isn't technically hard for him to leave. He isn't cruel and he does have eyes, a mind, and a conscience.

Amanda  is living in the past while looking out for her future. She is thinking of jonquils, faded Southern summer days, enough gentlemen callers to fill a warehouse, and the properties that a lady should have if she would ever hope to do well in this world. She must assume the position of a subservient provider, she must know her place as a human set down on Earth to spread loveliness and able children. The family dynamic is concrete and if there is any piece missing, you make do with what you have and rearrange the pieces. Everyone has set roles and humans don't act on instinct, they have purpose, they have thought. Amanda is blind yet she remembers the guidelines of yesteryear with astonishing clarity.

Laura is a blue rose. She's delicate, fragile, rare. She's acutely aware of her status as an anomaly and nobody, not her family nor society lets her forget it. Her glass menageries grants her daily comfort and she reserves herself not in the way that her mother wishes. She's scared of something or perhaps simply wary as she confines herself to an extreme degree. Her first true experience with the outside occurs in a whirlwind and she is left breathless and broken yet exposed and ready to be mended. Laura is a mystery and is the main reason why Tom resists leaving home.

I find the book to hold very strong notions of what it means to be human. Amanda mentions instinct in Scene 4. She says that good Christian men do not follow instinct and insinuates that they are men of thought and purpose. They think before they speak and they plan before they act. She says that humans are different from animals in that regard. The book exemplifies how that isn't true by showing how Laura follows her base instincts and hides from everything that may pose as a threat. It shows how Tom wants to flee from such a suffocating environment. Their father left because he detected treachery in Amanda's coy smile and her set grip on how life is supposed to work out. Nature is order in the ultimate form and man is a part of nature. Society is order and the Wingfields are attempting to follow it. That is shown in the way that Amanda knows that she cannot replace her husband's place with Tom yet she tries anyway. That is shown by how Laura gazed at the pages of her yearbook, regretting past memories. That is shown by Tom hiding out in the warehouse's storeroom, writing poems where he could. Which is more human? The adherence to instinct or the purposed reach to follow it?