A World of Their Own. Review on Glass Menagerie, The - Tennessee Williams

This play is very short, but Williams has packed in a lot of symbolism, emotions and a delineation of human characters. I really liked it. It was performed at Broadway for a long time. There are only 4 characters in this play. Williams has also artistically woven his own life into this play.

First, the characters of the play are:

Amanda: the mother

Tom: her son

Laura: her daughter

Jim: the gentleman caller

The play takes place in St. Louis. Tom is a character in the play and its narrator. He clearly states the theme of the play when he tells the audience that, ?I give you truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion.? Tom works in a shoe warehouse and he hates it. He prefers to write poems and his buddies call him ?Shakespeare.? His favorite line in the play is ?I?m going to the movies??. To escape his boring work and the life at home, he watches movies. His dream is to travel around the world and be free from the burdens of home.

Amanda is the mother. She dwells on her past; she was popular, from a rich Southern family and had many suitors. She still feels she did the wrong thing by marrying her husband because he leaves her after the kids are born. Now, her obsession is to find a suitable husband for her daughter, Laura.

Laura is the most important character. She has a disability which makes her self-conscious and shy. To escape from the harsh realities of the world, she has a small collection of glass animals (the glass menagerie).

Amanda asks Tom to invite one of the warehouse boys to come home for dinner and have a look at Laura. The ?gentleman caller? happens to be Jim, someone Laura had known in high school. After finding this out, Laura is even more shy and doesn?t come to the dinner table. As the evening goes on, however, Laura and Jim talk about their past and Jim tells her that she is beautiful in spite of her disability.

This makes Laura have more self confidence and a new outlook on life. Jim explains that he wouldn?t be able to come again because he is getting engaged. The play ends here.

Many of the characters are a reflection of Tennessee William?s own life. He hated his first job as a shoe salesman, his real father had also left the family, and his sister suffered from mental disabilities.

The symbolism the The Glass Menagerie is profound. Laura is often compared to her glass collection-both are fragile and easily hurt. Amanda, Tom and Laura all live in a world of their own, hoping to escape the real world. The Glass Menagerie is supposed to seem like an unrealistic play with realistic characters.