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
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)
Louis in 1918. It was here that he encountered his first publishing success in the form of a $5 prize for an essay entitled "Can a Good Wife Be a Good Sport?" (Cash 2003)
Despite the wide acclaim of this play, some critics have been negative. One reviewer for example mentions a deficiency in humor (Evans in Devlin 14)
Reviewers are favorably inclined towards the play. Clive Barnes for example mentions the humor of the contrast in pretension between the refined Blanche and the oafish Stan (Falk 61)
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof Williams here attempts to universalize his themes. He attempts to write into his characters recognizable human qualities that all of his audience can identify with (Waters in Devlin 37)
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) In The Glass Menagerie, we find the character of Tom held hostage by his sister's illness, his mother's demands and his own passive misery
It's you that make me rush through meals with your hawklike attention to every bite I take." (Williams, p
When his mother, Amanda, accuses him of going to the movies far too much, he tells her that his life in the warehouse forces him to seek excitement elsewhere. "Man is by instinct a lover, a hunter, a fighter, and none of those instincts are given much play at the warehouse," (Williams 33) he tells her, illustrating that the fictional worlds afford him the freedom to reinvent himself in a way that conventional life does not
¶ … Laura Wingfield, Tennessee Williams' Subsumed and Symbolic Self in the Glass Menagerie The Glass Menagerie, the famous play written by Tennessee Williams in 1944, is a story that centers on the life of 20th century Americans evolving in a dynamic environment where social changes have been taking place (Cash, 2004)
It is through Laura that Williams' achieves a balanced and complete depiction of his own self, as represented b Laura (unrealized self) and Tom (Williams' realized self). Thus, Laura's character in The Glass Menagerie shows how, like Williams, she "actively resists both the role that society prescribes for women as well as Amanda's insistence to conform to it" (Single, 79)
This act of defiance and, ironically, self-pity and low self-esteem actually gives Laura the strength to become Williams' symbolic character, who expressed the author's unexpressed desires, feelings, and thoughts. It is through Laura that Williams' achieves a balanced and complete depiction of his own self, as represented b Laura (unrealized self) and Tom (Williams' realized self)