The characters of The Glass Menagerie are limited and unable for various reasons to obtain what they desire. Select one character from the play. What does he or she desire? What prevents him or her from achieving it? How does the play resolve the conflict between desire and reality for this particular character?
Throughout the play, Amanda refers to Tom’s hope for a life other than the one he has as selfish. Do you agree with this assessment? Does Tom’s departure at the end of the play represent an unethical abandonment of his responsibilities, or a necessary choice to escape the controlling nature of his mother?
Audiences and critics of Williams’s play have often focused on the glass menagerie and understood it to be the central symbol of the play. What is the meaning of the menagerie? How does it help us to explain and understand Laura Wingfield?
Please note:

Your answer to the question you select should serve as the thesis of your paper. This thesis should be included in an introductory paragraph.
The paragraphs following the introduction should support and defend this thesis by analyzing and discussing specific examples and quotations from the play.
Make sure to focus on the various literary elements we have been discussing throughout this course.
Please format your paper using APA style and employ excerpts from the play to support your ideas. Include in-text and reference citations using APA style. At this point, there is no need to use “outside” sources to complete this essay. For now, your evidence should consist of experiential knowledge (what you have learned throughout your life) and the play’s text. Quoted material should never exceed 25% of the document.
Apply critical reading, thinking, and writing skills to literary works such as fiction, drama, and poetry, analyzing, interpreting, and evaluating their arguments, points of view, and multiple meanings.

Express, illustrate, and defend claims about literary works in discussions and in analytical essays, using one’s own interpretation, textual evidence, and critical approaches, as appropriate.

Demonstrate an understanding of the privacy, security, and ownership of information located through the use of correct APA documentation.

Apply knowledge of proper sentence construction and basic rules of grammar, mechanics, and spelling in one’s own work and in reviewing and commenting on peers’ writing.

Amanda Wingfield, the mother. A little woman of great but confused vitality clinging frantically to another time and place. Her characterization must be carefully created, not copied from type. She is not paranoiac, but her life is paranoia. There is much to admire in Amanda, and as much to love and pity as there is to laugh at. Certainly she has endurance and a kind of heroism, and though her foolishness makes her unwittingly cruel at times, there is tenderness in her slight person.

Laura Wingfield, her daughter. Amanda, having failed to establish contact with reality, continues to live vitally in her illusions, but Laura’s situation is even graver. A childhood illness has left her crippled, one leg slightly shorter than the other, and held in a brace. This defect need not be more than suggested on the stage. Stemming from this, Laura’s separation increases till she is like a piece of her own glass collection, too exquisitely fragile to move from the shelf.

Tom Wingfield, her son. And the narrator of the play. A poet with a job in a warehouse. His nature is not remorseless, but to escape from a trap he has to act without pity.

Jim O’Connor, the gentleman caller. A nice, ordinary, young man.Tom motions for music and a spot of light on Amanda. Her eyes lift, her face glows, her voice becomes rich and elegiac.
(Screen Legend: “Oü Sont Les Neiges D’antan?”)
There was young Champ Laughlin who later became vice-president of the Delta Planters Bank. Hadley Stevenson who was drowned in Moon Lake and left his widow one hundred and fifty thousand in Government bonds. There were the Cutrere brothers, Wesley and Bates. Bates was one of my bright particular beaux! He got in a quarrel with that wild Wainright boy. They shot it out on the floor of Moon Lake Casino. Bates was shot through the stomach. Died in the ambulance on his way to Memphis. His widow was also well-provided for, came into eight or ten thousand acres, that’s all. She married him on the rebound—never loved her—carried my picture on him the night he died! And there was that boy that every girl in the Delta had set her cap for! That beautiful, brilliant young Fitzhugh boy from Green County!
Tom: What did he leave his widow?

Amanda: He never married! Gracious, you talk as though all of my old admirers had turned up their toes to the daisies!

Tom: Isn’t this the first you mentioned that still survives?

Amanda: That Fitzhugh boy went North and made a fortune—came to be known as the Wolf of Wall Street! He had the Midas touch, whatever he touched turned to gold! And I could have been Mrs. Duncan J. Fitzhugh, mind you! But—I picked your father!

Laura (rising): Mother, let me clear the table.

Amanda: No dear, you go in front and study your typewriter chart. Or practice your shorthand a little. Stay fresh and pretty!—It’s almost time for our gentlemen callers to start arriving. (She flounces girlishly toward the kitchenette.) How many do you suppose we’re going to entertain this afternoon?

Tom throws down the paper and jumps up with a groan.
Laura (alone in the dining room): I don’t believe we’re going to receive any, Mother.

Amanda (reappearing, airily): What? No one—not one? You must be joking! (Laura nervously echoes her laugh. She slips in a fugitive manner through the half-open portieres and draws them gently behind her. A shaft of very clear light is thrown on her face against the jaded tapestry of the curtains.) (Music: “The Glass Menagerie” Under Faintly.) (Lightly.) Not one gentleman caller? It can’t be true! There must be a flood, there must have been a tornado!

Laura: It isn’t a flood, it’s not a tornado, Mother. I’m just not popular like you were in Blue Mountain. . . . (Tom utters another groan. Laura glances at him with a faint, apologetic smile. Her voice catching a little.) Mother’s afraid I’m going to be an old maid.

(The Scene Dims Out With “Glass Menagerie” Music.)

Tennessee Williams: The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams (with production notes). Copyright © 1945, renewed 1973 The University of the South. Reprinted by permission of Georges Borchardt, Inc. for the Estate of Tennessee Williams.

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SCENE II

“Laura, Haven’t You Ever Liked Some Boy?”

On the dark stage the screen is lighted with the image of blue roses.

Gradually Laura’s figure becomes apparent and the screen goes out.

The music subsides.

Laura is seated in the delicate ivory chair at the small clawfoot table.

She wears a dress of soft violet material for a kimono—her hair tied back from her forehead with a ribbon.

She is washing and polishing her collection of glass.

Amanda appears on the fire-escape steps. At the sound of her ascent, Laura catches her breath, thrusts the bowl of ornaments away and seats herself stiffly before the diagram of the typewriter keyboard as though it held her spellbound. Something has happened to Amanda. It is written in her face as she climbs to the landing: a look that is grim and hopeless and a little absurd.

She has on one of those cheap or imitation velvety-looking cloth coats with imitation fur collar. Her hat is five or six years old, one of those dreadful cloche hats that were worn in the late twenties, and she is clasping an enormous black patent-leather pocketbook with nickel clasp and initials. This is her full-dress outfit, the one she usually wears to the D.A.R.

Before entering she looks through the door.

She purses her lips, opens her eyes wide, rolls them upward and shakes her head.

Then she slowly lets herself in the door. Seeing her mother’s expression Laura touches her lips with a nervous gesture.

Laura: Hello, Mother, I was—(She makes a nervous gesture toward the chart on the wall. Amanda leans against the shut door and stares at Laura with a martyred look.)

Amanda: Deception? Deception? (She slowly removes her hat and gloves, continuing the sweet suffering stare. She lets the hat and gloves fall on the floor—a bit of acting.)

Laura (shakily): How was the D.A.R. meeting? (Amanda slowly opens her purse and removes a dainty white handkerchief which she shakes out delicately and delicately touches to her lips and nostrils.) Didn’t you go to the D.A.R. meeting, Mother?

Amanda (faintly, almost inaudibly):—No.—No. (Then more forcibly.) I did not have the strength—to go to the D.A.R. In fact, I did not have the courage! I wanted to find a hole in the ground and hide myself in it forever! (She crosses slowly to the wall and removes the diagram of the typewriter keyboard. She holds it in front of her for a second, staring at it sweetly and sorrowfully—then bites her lips and tears it in two pieces.)

Laura (faintly): Why did you do that, Mother? (Amanda repeats the same procedure with the chart of the Gregg Alphabet.) Why are you—

Amanda: Why? Why? How old are you, Laura?

Laura: Mother, you know my age.

Amanda: I thought that you were an adult; it seems that I was mistaken. (She crosses slowly to the sofa and sinks down and stares at Laura.)

Laura: Please don’t stare at me, Mother.SCENE III

(Legend On The Screen: “After The Fiasco—”)
Tom speaks from the fire-escape landing.
Tom: After the fiasco at Rubicam’s Business College, the idea of getting a gentleman caller for Laura began to play a more important part in Mother’s calculations. It became an obsession. Like some archetype of the universal unconscious, the image of the gentleman caller haunted our small apartment. . . . (Image: Young Man At Door With Flowers.) An evening at home rarely passed without some allusion to this image, this specter, this hope. . . . Even when he wasn’t mentioned, his presence hung in Mother’s preoccupied look and in my sister’s frightened, apologetic manner—hung like a sentence passed upon the Wingfields! Mother was a woman of action as well as words. She began to take logical steps in the planned direction. Late that winter and in the early spring—realizing that extra money would be needed to properly feather the nest and plume the bird—she conducted a vigorous campaign on the telephone, roping in subscribers to one of those magazines for matrons called The Home-maker’s Companion, the type of journal that features the serialized sublimations of ladies of letters who think in terms of delicate cup-like breasts, slim, tapering waists, rich, creamy thighs, eyes like wood-smoke in autumn, fingers that soothe and caress like strains of music, bodies as powerful as Etruscan sculpture.Laura (shrilly): My glass!— menagerie. . . . (She covers her face and turns away.)

But Amanda is still stunned and stupefied by the “ugly witch” so that she barely notices this occurrence. Now she recovers her speech.
Amanda (in an awful voice): I won’t speak to you—until you apologize! (She crosses through portieres and draws them together behind her. Tom is left with Laura. Laura clings weakly to the mantel with her face averted. Tom stares at her stupidly for a moment. Then he crosses to shelf. Drops awkwardly to his knees to collect the fallen glass, glancing at Laura as if he would speak but couldn’t.)

(“The Glass Menagerie” Music Steals In As The Scene Dims Out.)
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SCENE IV

The interior is dark. Faint in the alley.

A deep-voiced bell in a church is tolling the hour of five as the scene commences.

Tom appears at the top of the alley. After each solemn boom of the bell in the tower, he shakes a little noise-maker or rattle as if to express the tiny spasm of man in contrast to the sustained power and dignity of the Almighty. This and the unsteadiness of his advance make it evident that he has been drinking.

As he climbs the few steps to the fire-escape landing light steals up inside. Laura appears in night-dress, observing Tom’s empty bed in the front room.

Tom fishes in his pockets for the door-key, removing a motley assortment of articles in the search, including a perfect shower of movie-ticket stubs and an empty bottle. At last he finds the key, but just as he is about to insert it, it slips from his fingers. He strikes a match and crouches below the door.

Tom (bitterly): One crack—and it falls through!Gesture.
Amanda: Find one that’s clean-living—doesn’t drink—and ask him out for sister!

Tom: What?

Amanda: For sister! To meet! Get acquainted!

Tom (stamping to door): Oh, my go-osh!

Amanda: Will you? (He opens door. Imploringly.) Will you? (He starts down.) Will you? Will you, dear?

Tom (calling back): Yes!

Amanda closes the door hesitantly and with a troubled but faintly hopeful expression.
(Screen Image: Glamor Magazine Cover.)
Spot Amanda at phone.
Amanda: Ella Cartwright? This is Amanda Wingfield! How are you, honey? How is that kidney condition? (Count five.) Horrors! (Count five.) You’re a Christian martyr, yes, honey, that’s what you are, a Christian martyr! Well, I just happened to notice in my little red book that your subscription to the Companion has just run out! I knew that you wouldn’t want to miss out on the wonderful serial starting in this new issue. It’s by Bessie Mae Hopper, the first thing she’s written since Honeymoon for Three. Wasn’t that a strange and interesting story? Well, this one is even lovelier, I believe. It has a sophisticated society background. It’s all about the horsey set on Long Island!

(Fade Out.)

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SCENE V

(Legend On Screen: “Annunciation.”) Fade with music.

It is early dusk of a spring evening. Supper has just been finished in the Wingfield apartment. Amanda and Laura in light colored dresses are removing dishes from the table, in the upstage area, which is shadowy, their movements formalized almost as a dance or ritual, their moving forms as pale and silent as moths.

Tom, in white shirt and trousers, rises from the table and crosses toward the fire-escape.

Amanda (as he passes her): Son, will you do me a favor?

Tom: What?

Amanda: Comb your hair! You look so pretty when your hair is combed! (Tom slouches on sofa with evening paper. Enormous caption “Franco Triumphs.’) There is only one respect in which I would like you to emulate your father.

Tom: What respect is that?

Amanda: The care he always took of his appearance. He never allowed himself to look untidy. (He throws down the paper and crosses to fire-escape.) Where are you going?

Tom: I’m going out to smoke.

Amanda: You smoke too much. A pack a day at fifteen cents a pack. How much would that amount to in a month? Thirty times fifteen is how much, Tom? Figure it out and you will be astounded at what you could save. Enough to give you a night-school course in accounting at Washington U! Just think what a wonderful thing that would be for you, son!
Amanda: In what way is she peculiar—may I ask?

Tom (gently): She lives in a world of her own—a world of—little glass ornaments, Mother. . . . (Gets up. Amanda remains holding brush, looking at him, troubled.) She plays old phonograph records and—that’s about all—(He glances at himself in the mirror and crosses to door.)

Amanda (sharply): Where are you going?

Tom: I’m going to the movies. (Out screen door.)

Amanda: Not to the movies, every night to the movies! (Follows quickly to screen door.) I don’t believe you always go to the movies! (He is gone. Amanda looks worriedly after him for a moment. Then vitality and optimism return and she turns from the door. Crossing to portieres.) Laura! Laura! (Laura answers from kitchenette.)

Laura: Yes, Mother.

Amanda: Let those dishes go and come in front! (Laura appears with dish towel. Gaily.) Laura, come here and make a wish on the moon!

Laura (entering): Moon—moon?

Amanda: A little silver slipper of a moon. Look over your left shoulder, Laura, and make a wish! (Laura looks faintly puzzled as if called out of sleep. Amanda seizes her shoulders and turns her at an angle by the door.) Now! Now, darling, wish!

Laura: What shall I wish for, Mother?

Amanda (her voice trembling and her eyes suddenly filling with tears): Happiness! Good fortune!

The violin rises and the stage dims out.

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SCENE VI

(Image: High-School Hero.)

Tom: And so the following evening I brought him home to dinner. I had known Jim slightly in high school. In high school Jim was a hero. He had tremendous Irish good nature and vitality with the scrubbed and polished look of white chinaware. He seemed to move in a continual spotlight. He was a star in basketball, captain of the debating club, president of the senior class and the glee club and he sang the male lead in the annual light operas. He was always running or bounding, never just walking. He seemed always at the point of defeating the law of gravity. He was shooting with such velocity through his adolescence that you would logically expect him to arrive at nothing short of the White House by the time he was thirty. But Jim apparently ran into more interference after his graduation from Soldán. His speed had definitely slowed. Six years after he left high school he was holding a job that wasn’t much better than mine.

(Image: Clerk.)

He was the only one at the warehouse with whom I was on friendly terms. I was valuable to him as someone who could remember his former glory, who had seen him win basketball games and the silver cup in debating. He knew of my secret practice of retiring to a cabinet of the washroom to work on my poems when business was slack in the warehouse. He called me Shakespeare. And while the other boys in the warehouse regarded me with suspicious hostility, Jim took a humorous attitude toward me. Gradually his attitude affected the others, their hostility wore off and they also began to smile at me as people smile at an oddly fashioned dog who trots across their path at some distance.

I knew that Jim and Laura had known each other at Soldán, and I had heard Laura speak admiringly of his voice. I didn’t know if Jim remembered her or not. In high school Laura had been as unobtrusive as Jim had been astonishing. If he did remember Laura, it was not as my sister, for when I asked him to dinner, he grinned and said, “You know, Shakespeare, I never thought of you as having folks!”

He was about to discover that I did. . . .

(Light Up Stage.)

(Legend On Screen: “The Accent Of A Coming Foot.”)

Friday evening. It is about five o’clock of a late spring evening which comes “scattering poems in the sky.”

A delicate lemony light is in the Wingfield apartment.

Amanda has worked like a Turk in preparation for the gentleman caller. The results are astonishing. The new floor lamp with its rose-silk shade is in place, a colored paper lantern conceals the broken light fixture in the ceiling, new billowing white curtains are at the windows, chintz covers are on chairs and sofa, a pair of new sofa pillows make their initial appearance.

Open boxes and tissue paper are scattered on the floor.

Laura stands in the middle with lifted arms while Amanda crouches before her, adjusting the hem of the new dress, devout and ritualistic. The dress is colored and designed by memory. The arrangement of Laura’s hair is changed; it is softer and more becoming. A fragile, unearthly prettiness has come out in Laura: she is like a piece of translucent glass touched by light, given a momentary radiance, not actual, not lasting.

Amanda (impatiently): Why are you trembling?

Laura: Mother, you’ve made me so nervous!

Amanda: How have I made you nervous?

Laura: By all this fuss! You make it seem so important!

Amanda: I don’t understand you, Laura. You couldn’t be satisfied with just sitting home, and yet whenever I try to arrange something for you, you seem to resist it. (She gets up.) Now take a look at yourself. No, wait! Wait just a moment—I have an idea!

Laura: What is it now?The back door is pushed weakly open and Laura comes in. She is obviously quite faint, her lips trembling, her eyes wide and staring. She moves unsteadily toward the table.
(Legend: “Terror!”)
Outside a summer storm is coming abruptly. The white curtains billow inward at the windows and there is a sorrowful murmur and deep blue dusk.
Laura suddenly stumbles—She catches at a chair with a faint moan.
Tom: Laura!

Amanda: Laura! (There is a clap of thunder.) (Legend: “Ah!”) (Despairingly.) Why, Laura, you are ill, darling! Tom, help your sister into the living room, dear! Sit in the living room, Laura—rest on the sofa. Well! (To Jim as Tom helps his sister to the sofa in the living room) Standing over the hot stove made her ill!—I told her that it was just too warm this evening, but—(Tom comes back in. Laura is on the sofa.) Is Laura all right now?

Tom: Yes.

Amanda: What is that? Rain? A nice cool rain has come up! (She gives the gentleman caller a frightened look.) I think we may—have grace—now . . . (Tom looks at her stupidly.) Tom, honey—you say grace!

Tom: Oh … “For these and all thy mercies—” (They bow their heads, Amanda stealing a nervous glance at Jim. In the living room Laura, stretched on the sofa, clenches her hand to her lips, to hold back a shuddering sob.) God’s Holy Name be praised—

(The Scene Dims Out.)

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SCENE VII

A Souvenir.

Half an hour later. Dinner is just being finished in the upstage area which is concealed by the drawn portieres.

As the curtain rises Laura is still huddled upon the sofa, her feet drawn under her, her head resting on a pale blue pillow, her eyes wide and mysteriously watchful. The new floor lamp with its shade of rose-colored silk gives a soft, becoming light to her face, bringing out the fragile, unearthly prettiness which usually escapes attention. There is a steady murmur of rain, but it is slackening and stops soon after the scene begins; the air outside becomes pale and luminous as the moon breaks out.

A moment after the curtain rises, the lights in both rooms flicker and go out.

Jim: Hey, there, Mr. Light Bulb! Amanda laughs nervously.
(Legend: “Suspension Of A Public Service.”)
Amanda: Where was Moses when the lights went out? Ha-ha. Do you know the answer to that one, Mr. O’Connor?

Jim: No, Ma’am, what’s the answer?

Amanda: In the dark! (Jim laughs appreciatively.) Everybody sit still. I’ll light the candles. Isn’t it lucky we have them on the table? Where’s a match? Which of you gentlemen can provide a match?

Jim: Here.

Amanda: Thank you, sir.

Jim: Not at all, Ma’am!

Amanda (as she lights the candles): I guess the fuse has burnt out. Mr. O’Connor, can you tell a burnt-out fuse? I know I can’t and Tom is a total loss when it comes to mechanics. (Sound: Getting Up: Voices Recede A Little To Kitchenette.) Oh, be careful you don’t bump into something. We don’t want our gentleman caller to break his neck. Now wouldn’t that be a fine howdy-do?

Jim: Ha-ha! Where is the fuse-box?

Amanda: Right here next to the stove. Can you see anything?

Jim: Just a minute.

Amanda: Isn’t electricity a mysterious thing? Wasn’t it Benjamin Franklin who tied a key to a kite? We live in such a mysterious universe, don’t we? Some people say that science clears up all the mysteries for us. In my opinion it only creates more! Have you found it yet?