1461 "Where are the snows of yesteryear?" asks Tennessee Williams in the opening screen of The Glass Menagerie (401), quoting a poem by Francis Villon. Williams explains in the production notes to this famous play that he has left in the manuscript a device omitted from the "acting version" of the play (Williams 395), a series of messages projected on screens, some verbal, some pictorial, that prompt and reflect the action on stage
1461 "Where are the snows of yesteryear?" asks Tennessee Williams in the opening screen of The Glass Menagerie (401), quoting a poem by Francis Villon. Williams explains in the production notes to this famous play that he has left in the manuscript a device omitted from the "acting version" of the play (Williams 395), a series of messages projected on screens, some verbal, some pictorial, that prompt and reflect the action on stage
Themes of mental illness, paternal abandonment, and the breakdown of traditional Southern social norms pervade the play. Using rich symbolism and metaphor, Williams crafts a semi-autobiographical "memory play," (Durham p
(Monarch Notes, 1963) Since Tom occupies the central place in the play and it is through his soliloquies that we are introduced to Amanda and Laura, we cannot exclude Tom's relationship with two female figures in his life while studying the relationship between Laura and Amanda. This is because many critics are of the view that Tom's own hatred for his mother is responsible for giving a negative shade to Amanda relationship with her daughter (King, 1987)
Amanda Wingfield is perhaps the most psychologically disturbed of the entire family although this is not obvious at first glance. The woman is psychologically trapped by the past and all her actions are designed to recapture a long ago moment (Bluefarb)
There is no one reason why these three people do not get along well together but rather there are many things in their family life which negatively contributes to the psychology of these three characters. Paramount in these factors is the money problems which plague the Wingfields (Hammer)
Time is extremely important to Tom's character and to understanding what is important to him. This is evident in the fact that Tom narrates The Glass Menagerie from some indistinct period in the future (King)
Despite her many disabilities, Laura is in a way the most honest character in the piece. This is not accidental as it is a trademark of Tennessee Williams's plays to have the least mentally stable character portray the secret truth of the dynamic being depicted in the play's plot (O'Connor 11)
Many families are like the Wingfields, highly dysfunctional and also highly destructive even though they are supposed to be supportive of one another. This is a truth that few were willing to admit in the middle of the twentieth century (Scanlon)
At the beginning, Linda tells Willy, when he feels confused and exhausted, "But you didn't rest your mind. Your mind is overactive and the mind is what counts" (Miller, Death of a Salesman, p
Laura, who already is insecure because of her disability, is made all the more so, because she cannot transform herself into Amanda's dream child. When Amanda was a young girl, she was a popular Southern Belle in Blue Mountain with "seventeen gentleman callers! Why sometimes there weren't chairs enough to accommodate them all," (Williams xx), or so she says
¶ … Glass Menagerie In the case of Amanda and Laura in "The Glass Menagerie" by Tennessee Williams, gender is an important factor because as Levy maintains, Amanda "exploits her maternal concern about Laura's lack of marital prospects as a means of identifying with her own past" (Levy)
With this in consideration, gender is significant because the issue is all about being a woman. The first thing Amanda tells Laura is to resume her seat because she wants her to be "fresh and pretty - for gentlemen callers!" (Williams 1714)
" CONCLUSION: The helplessness of Laura as she tries to get through the pain of her physical disability, her shyness, and the razor-sharp barbs thrown at her by Amanda, comes to life far more poignantly on stage than it does on the pages of a book. And indeed Williams wrote about that dynamic in his 1945 article, "How to Stage the Glass Menagerie" (Beattie, 2005)
Meanwhile there were state laws that were blatantly discriminatory against women in the 1940s. By law in Oklahoma, for example, a woman could not be elected governor, secretary of state, attorney general, superintendent of public instruction, or state auditor (Furman, 1941)
.conflicts between the old Southern values and the brute force of the new, Northern values" (Haley 2005)
A recent interview with Barbara Kling, noted public relations professional in New York City, examined her struggles to be respected in the American workplace in the 1940s. After graduating from Smith College, she wanted to be a "political journalist" (Shaw, 2008), so she accepted a job with United Press International as a "copy girl
We believed she had to do that. We remembered all the young men her father had driven away, and we knew that with nothing left, she would have to cling to that which had robbed her, as people will" (Faulkner)
She remembers, "One Sunday afternoon in Blue Mountain, your mother received seventeen gentlemen callers! Why, sometimes there weren't chairs enough to accommodate them all. We had to send the nigger over to bring in folding chairs from the parish house" (Williams)
Tom cannot forget Laura, but he leaves just the same, and it seems he never returns. In fact, some critics "blame" Tom for leaving Laura persistently a virgin and always alone (Adler 39)