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)
When this fails, she rallies for the valiant but hopeless attempt to marry the girl off. This second failure, we feel, is less tragic for the daughter than for the mother" (Bloom 35)
Laura is a tragic figure in this play because even her family admits she is flawed, but they do not help her deal with her fears and distress. Her brother Tom says, "Mother, you mustn't expect too much of Laura" (Williams PAGE #), which dooms her to failure and allows her to remain tragically alone throughout her life
As Bloom emphasizes, "The Glass Menagerie is nonetheless Tennessee Williams' most autobiographical play, accurate to the imaginative reality of his experience even when it departs from fact in detail." (Bloom 43) It is absolutely clear how and why the central character feels an inferiority complex as the plot unfolds
"Without illusion, Amanda would realize the hopelessness of Laura's condition." (Ehrenhaft & Williams 20) Instead, she keeps bombarding her daughter with information that also makes it difficult for Laura to accept who she is
"While the characters adopt such an approach, it discourages them to fight against adverse circumstances of real-life in any form; it weakens their inner strength to lead a normal life resulting in the disintegration of their inner-self." (Singh 56) Laura is certainly one of the most hopeless characters in the play
The moment when Laura's glass unicorn gets broken stands as the perfect example for this, as she realizes that it became "just like all the other horses." (Williams 135) Even though this event is not enough to get Laura out of her imaginary world, it is nonetheless important in helping audiences gain a more complex understanding of this character and of the idea of illusion
With Tom leaving, the light has gone out of Laura's life, along with any hope of escape or a life of her own. (Cardullo, 1997) Tom says, The cities swept about me like dead leaves, leaves that were brightly colored but torn away from the branches
The women in this play already have something against them and that is the fact that the world in which they live is hostile. Roger Boxill claims the outside world is hopeless with "dark alleyways and murky canyons of tangled clotheslines, garbage cans, and neighbouring fire escapes" (Boxill)
With Laura, denial emerges through her fantasy world. Laura gets "caught in the middle" (Burnett 147) of Amanda's "constant desire to change her life to suit that of a normal girl" (147)
This impression demonstrates how the family might need to find an escape from their world. Roger Levy says each of the Wingfields is "hampered in relating to others by the need to inhabit a private world where the fundamental concern is with self-image" (Levy)
A shattered rainbow describes how he feels and this haunts him. Roger Stein says this ending "enhances the credibility of the dramatic situation" (Stein
She represents all individuals in the world that are misunderstood and considered different from the rest. Nancy Tischler says Williams uses symbolism to provide "stimulating contrasts to the realism of his characterization" (Tischler 376)
We need to be aware of his need to escape to another place because eventually, he does, abandoning his mother and sister. When Tom steps out onto the fire escape or goes to a movie, he retreats to another world and avoids the "slow and implacable fires of human desperation" (Williams 968), that exist with Amanda and Laura in the apartment
Unfortunately though, this make-believe world they have built is like Laura's glass menagerie -- fragile and easily breakable; once this occurs the "real" reality will set in. The narrator of the play is Tom, and as "a 'memory play,' he recalls scenes from his youth during the Depression (Frederic, 2007)
Amanda Winfield, the mother in the play who hailed from the South and has had the misfortune of being left by her husband some decades of so back. The loss suffered by Amanda Wingfield is both physical and psychological, and the result of which saw her retreating into a distant past that is as much myth as it is reality (Janardanan, 2007)
Further, the departure of her husband left her poor and destitute that she had to find ways of rearing and supporting her two children, Tom and Laura, on her own. The sad part of this all is that instead of facing up to reality and fighting her misfortunes to make a better life for herself and her children, she is a "woman of confused vitality clinging frantically to another time and place (Williams, 1945)
"Remembering the South as a kind of "prelapsarian Paradise" (xii), Williams later transformed memories of people he met or knew into immortal characters, and their distinctive use of southern speech became, in Williams's romantic imagination, a medium of poetic expression at once universal in appeal and importance." (Holditch et al
This is perhaps best contended by the notation in Pagan's text, that "at the end of The Glass Menagerie, Tom cannot help thinking of the life that he left behind as 'the cities swept about [him] like dead leaves, leaves that were brightly colored but torn away from the branches." (Pagan, 53) Here, Pagan seemes to reinforce the idea that Williams, through a character like Tom, is willfully separating himself from his family but remains driven by a sense of awareness, perhaps even guilt, related to his inextricable attachment to this family history
Clearly, however, the family shared the burden for what happened to Rose, and no matter what he said, Williams would seek many times to exorcise his guilt over Rose's illness." (O'Connor, 3) This is an important moment in his life, for without question, Rose's figure looms like a ghost in the world of the playwright