73 pages • 2 hours read
Tennessee WilliamsThe Glass Menagerie
Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 1945A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
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The Glass Menagerie
Laura’s collection of glass animals seems to stand as a clear comparison for Laura herself. Like the glass, she is unspeakably delicate. The glass is clear and colorless, waiting to be filled with the versions of herself that her family places on her. When the glass is disturbed, Laura cries out as if she herself has been hurt. Like the glass animals, Laura becomes broken with the slightest wrong touch. Rather than simply symbolizing her fragility, the menagerie comes to represent Laura’s small, subjugated sense of selfhood. She hides the animals when her mother approaches, instead pretending to study typing, which represents her mother’s most recent formulation of who Laura should be. Laura hides and protects the animals just as she hides herself away. In particular, the unicorn symbolizes Laura selfhood. When she hands it to Jim, she says, “Oh, be careful–if you breathe, it breaks!” (779).Yet she insists she trusts him with it, even after he warns her that he is clumsy.
The unicorn is different, but lives among horses “and doesn’t complain about it” (780). By trusting Jim with the unicorn, Laura is opening herself up to him and trusting that he will handle her carefully. When the unicorn breaks, Laura is surprisingly calm—contrary to her earlier reactions to any threat to her glass collection. She says, “I’ll just imagine he had an operation. The horn was removed to make him feel less–freakish!” (781). To Laura, uniqueness has been her burden, the source of her mother’s criticism. As Amanda says to Laura when she claims to be too sick for dinner: “Why can’t you and your brother be normal people?” (771). The horn is like Laura’s disabled leg. She is self-conscious about the way it makes her different. Although Laura is unlikely to suddenly become self-assured after her encounter with Jim, her gift of the hornless unicorn seems to suggest that she might be able to overcome her feelings about her peculiarities.
Amanda’s Dress
While Laura humors Amanda’s tendency to live in the past and tell the same stories over and over, Tom becomes frustrated. Her focus on her youth reaches a new level of delusion when she puts on the dress she wore as a teen to greet gentleman callers. Curling her hair in ringlets and holding a bouquet of flowers, Amanda tries to wedge herself into the role of the teenaged debutante. Of course, the fact that Jim barely reacts (as opposed to Tom’s horror) suggests that perhaps Tom is amplifying the absurdity in his memory. Throughout the night, the dress seems to ignite Amanda’s charm. She laughs loudly and girlishly, offering an exaggerated version of Southern hospitality. The bouquet of jonquils she holds represents a link to her past, recalling the fields of flowers from her youth. These common flowers contrast with Laura’s nickname, Blue Roses, which are not only uncommon, but imaginary. The evening centers on Amanda’s construction of illusion, beginning with her dress and including the redecoration of the apartment, the pink scarf over the lamp which softens Laura’s face as she rests on the sofa, and the masking of the blackout—a mark of their poverty—with candlelight.
The Fire Escape
As the only method of entrance and exit to the apartment, the fire escape represents many things. It is foremost the undisguisable ugliness of their apartment:
[O]ne of those vast hive-like conglomerations of cellular living-units that flower as warty growths in overcrowded urban centers of lower middle-class population 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 (752).
If the apartment speaks to the systematic enslavement and dehumanization of the middle class, the fire escape is the threshold. The name literally suggests that it is the only escape from certain death in the event of a fire. It references the urgency and desperation of those who are trapped in those “hive-like” apartments. Fire escapes are rickety and dangerous, always threatening to plunge those who mount them several stories to the ground if burdened with too much weight. This means that leaving the apartment is always a bit hazardous.
Repeatedly throughout the play, Tom goes out to the fire escape to smoke. These are false starts to his eventual getaway, always holding him at the threshold. Laura slips on the fire escape as she exits to go to the store, showing that this method of egress is particularly perilous for her and she is unlikely to ever leave. It is also dangerous to return each time, and yet the Wingfields have no choice. They are trapped by their status in the middle class. Amanda dreams of the suitors she might have married, planters who would have allowed her to spend her later years on plantations as land owners. An apartment is ultimately temporary housing, denying ownership to inhabitants and erasing their lives once the lease ends to make room for new dwellers. Williams describes the fire escape as “a structure whose name is a touch of accidental poetic truth, for all of these huge buildings are always burning with the slow and implacable fires of human desperation” (752). The fire escape represents the narrow avenue out of the urgency of their situation.
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By Tennessee Williams
