The Glass Menagerie

“The play is a memory. Being a memory play, it is dimly lighted, it is sentimental, it is not realistic. In memory everything seems to happen to music. That explains the fiddle in the wings.”

Tom identifies mankind’s tendency to romanticize memory, which seems like a trap in the attempt to relay truth. Rather than fight the impetus to sentimentalize, Tom embraces it. His memory is embellished, and as a poet, he admits that he likes to symbolize. But the truth of the story doesn’t lie in faithful representation, but rather the meaning of his interpretations. It doesn’t matter if Amanda was truly as overbearing as she is represented. For the purpose of the truth Tom offers, she is that way.

“I am using this character as a symbol; he is the long delayed but always expected something that we live for.”

Jim is both a symbol and “an emissary from a world of reality that we were somehow set apart from” (753). The Wingfields have created a toxic family dynamic that is based on fantasy and yearning. Jim enters the apartment with a real-world perspective. Jim represents what the family has been waiting for. When Mr. Wingfield ran off, he left the family in a state of perpetual waiting. Amanda keeps his portrait in a place of honor over the fireplace as if he is still a member of the family who will return. They are waiting for him, or a man to take his place by marrying Laura. Tom is waiting for a man who can step in give him the freedom to leave. Their angst has built over a seemingly endless period of waiting, but they continue to persist day after day with the belief that someone or something will arrive and change their lives.

“This is our father who left us a long time ago. He was a telephone man who fell in love with long distances; he gave up his job with the telephone company and skipped the light fantastic out of town.”

Tom uses romanticized language to describe his father’s absence, possibly in preparation for justifying his own. There is poetry in a telephone man who falls in love with long distances. He is simply describing a man who decided that he preferred to be away from his family and decided to abandon them. If the father has a fantasy to chase, this makes him much more identifiable to Tom than simply leaving for the sake of escaping the family.

“What is there left but dependency all our lives? I know so well what becomes of unmarried women who aren’t prepared to occupy a position. I’ve seen such pitiful cases in the South–barely tolerated spinsters living upon the grudging patronage of sister’s husband or brother’s wife!–stuck away in some little mouse-trap of a room–encouraged by one in-law to visit another–little birdlike women without any nest–eating the crust of humility all their life! Is that the future we’ve mapped out for ourselves?”

Amanda paints a specific picture of hers and Laura’s future, which is clearly based in the traditional gender roles of her upbringing. Even as a woman who has behaved with strength, holding her family together in the absence of their father, she sees herself as utterly dependent. Amanda was raised to find a husband to care for her, and although her husband failed to do so, she has risen to the occasion through sheer determination. Although she relies on Tom’s help, Tom has only been out of high school for six years, which implies that she supported the family on her own.

“But the wonderfullest trick of all was the coffin trick. We nailed him into a coffin and he got out of the coffin without removing one nail. There is a trick that would come in handy for me–get me out of this 2 by 4 situation. […] You know it don’t take much intelligence to get yourself into a nailed-up coffin, Laura. But who in the hell ever got himself out of one without removing one nail?”

Drunk Tom describes the magician act he saw at the movies to Laura. He compares his life with his mother and sister to the nailed-shut coffin, noting that getting out of such a coffin without removing any nails is essentially impossible. In the metaphor, the removal of the nails represents the dismantling of the seams that are holding their live together. He knows that he cannot remove himself from the situation without taking it apart. Without him, Amanda and Laura will have to rebuild their lives.

“My devotion has made me a witch and so I make myself hateful to my children!”

Amanda’s self-aggrandizing apology excuses her actions as done in the name of love, despite the damage she causes. Although Tom readily disagrees in order to reassure her and make peace, her love for her children is destructive. She forces onto them her version of what she believes their lives should be. Although options for women are certainly limited in the late 1930s, Laura has more choices than business school or marriage. She hangs onto Tom desperately in fear that he will leave her like her husband, but this only ultimately drives him away.

“I know your ambitions do not lie in the warehouse, that like everybody in the whole wide world–you’ve had to–make sacrifices, but–Tom–Tom–life’s not easy, it calls for–Spartan endurance!”

Amanda’s assessment of life, especially life on the tail end of the Great Depression, is not false. The play comments on the middle class as the “largest and fundamentally enslaved section of American society” (752). As such, Tom has had to sacrifice to feed his family. But the play contends that this stifling of the middle class is akin to slow strangulation. Tom’s only hope of breaking away from that strangulation is to ruthlessly leave his family behind, just as his father faced the same choice.

“No. You say there’s so much in your heart that you can’t describe it to me. That’s true of me, too. There’s so much in my heart that I can’t describe to you!”

For Tom, the quiet suffering of a man who has been burdened with providing for a household, especially one that was not of his making, is something that Amanda cannot fully understand. Similarly, Tom cannot understand Amanda’s fervent desperation for her children to live better lives. Much of their conflict arises because Amanda is pushing for Tom to live one life, and Tom is fighting to live a different one. Both are sincere, but they cannot see eye to eye.

“Most young men find adventure in their careers.”

Beneath Amanda’s statement is the coded assertion that Tom should find what he is searching for while remaining at home. What she describes is what Jim is doing. Jim has developed a realistic path to advancement that fits his current situation. Tom, however, is uninspired by such a career. He is a poet, and finds a career in a shoe warehouse, even if he were to advance past his current menial job, to be stifling. He takes his cue on adventure from the movies he takes in like an addict. Movie adventure requires travel, drama, suspense, and danger. Whether he becomes ultimately fulfilled by leaving is questionable, but he is certain that there is no adventure where he is.

“Man is by instinct a lover, a hunter, a fighter, and none of those instincts are given much play at a warehouse!”

Tom locates his need for adventure within his male spirit. They are innate and essential to who he is, and therefore inescapable. Amanda, however responds with the claim that a civilized Christian man should be beyond instinct. This is yet another example in which the two cannot understand each other. Amanda has spent her life seeking a home, as is commensurate with the gender role imposed by her upbringing. Tom has spent his life trying to leave home in order to seek his fortune, a concept that is reinforced throughout popular culture, including the films he frequents.

“Couples would come outside, to the relative privacy of the alley. You could see them kissing behind ash-pits and telephone poles. This was the compensation for lives that passed like mine, without any change or adventure. Adventure and change were imminent in this year. They were waiting around the corner for all these kids.”

Now that he is older, Tom takes a new view on adventure. The couples who dance at the dance hall across the alley and then come outside to kiss are a cauldron of frustration, expressing their desires through unbridled lust because lust, unlike opportunity, is freely available. He points out that these young people will soon be offered all of the adventure they can handle in the form of World War II, but naturally, this is at a terrible cost.

“I’ll tell you what I wished for on the moon. Success and happiness for my precious children! I wish for that whenever there’s a moon, and when there isn’t a moon, I wish for it too.”

The image of the moon recurs throughout the play. In this instance, Amanda coaxes her son to make a wish on the moon. The moon represents that which is hopelessly far away. It is vaguely magical to Amanda, who believes that it can be wished upon. The moon is romantic, lovely, and impossible to attain. Although Amanda wishes repeatedly for her children to have “success and happiness,” the moon never seems to grant her wish. In the late 1930s, the world is decades away from setting foot on the moon, and it is therefore as real to Amanda as it is an illusion.

“You are the only young man that I know of who ignores the fact that the future becomes the present, the present the past, and the past turns into everlasting regret if you don’t plan for it!”

Amanda handles the lack of control she has over her life by scheming. She attempts to seize control, even over those things that are not hers to manage. Her accusation that Tom does not plan for the future is ironic, since the future is all that Tom thinks and talks about. Tom plans for the future by joining the Merchant Marines. However, he avoids taking part in planning a future for his mother and sister as he works to extricate himself from their lives. Amanda’s statement comments on the slipperiness of time, and the speed with which it disappears.

“That innocent look of your father’s had everyone fooled! He smiled–the world was enchanted! No girl can do worse than put herself at the mercy of a handsome appearance! I hope that Mr. O’Connor is not too good-looking!”

Amanda is constantly wary of men who share qualities with her estranged husband. For instance, she becomes extremely concerned about whether or not Jim drinks, since Mr. Wingfield enjoyed drinking. She tries to fight in Tom the impulses that she sees as inherited from his father, as if she can correct the mistakes she may have made that led to Mr. Wingfield’s departure by enacting new tactics on her son. She does not want someone who is too good-looking and can charm her daughter only to break her heart.

“All pretty girls are a trap, a pretty trap, and men expect them to be.”

While Amanda refuses to allow her daughter to be taken in by the trap of an attractive man, she describes the woman’s role as that of a trapper. For a woman whose husband left, Amanda has come to see a woman’s ability to keep a man from leaving as the ultimate necessity. If Laura is, as she was, entranced by a handsome man, she will be vulnerable—he will have all the power. Amanda dresses her daughter up to be a “pretty trap” so that she might manage to have the agency in the relationship of whether to go or stay.

“I’m sick too–of your nonsense! Why can’t you and your brother be normal people? Fantastic whims and behavior! Preposterous goings on!”

Amanda’s calling her children out for “fantastic whims” is laden with irony, for a woman who lives to dream about the past. She expresses her desire that her children be “normal,” but her definition of normalcy is skewed by her pride and her refusal to see her children for who they are rather than who she wishes they were.

“People go to the movies instead of moving! Hollywood characters are supposed to have all the adventures for everybody in America, while everybody in America sits in a dark room and watches them have them! Yes, until there’s a war. That’s when adventure becomes available to the masses!”

Tom points out that the middle classes are suppressed and denied adventure. The adventures on the movie screen have become a substitute, affordable for the workers who cannot scrape up enough money to better their situation. However, while the structure of capitalism demands that the workers waste their lives to remain at their posts, when the machine needs soldiers, it suddenly offers adventures to the masses. Tom speaks from hindsight as Tennessee Williams wrote the play at the end of the war. The adventure afforded the members of the middle class is fraught with risk and danger, and it often demands their lives.

“I’m starting to boil inside. I know I seem dreamy, but inside–well, I’m boiling!–Whenever I pick up a shoe, I shudder a little thinking how short life is and what I am doing!–Whatever that means. I know it doesn’t mean shoes–except as something to wear on a traveler’s feet!”

Tom describes his desperate frustration, and the shoes at the warehouse represent his own unfulfilled potential. Every day, he handles shoes that go out on the feet of customers, and those shoes are a vehicle of movement. The people who buy the shoes will tread on ground that Tom may never see. But ironically, shoes represent the dead-end job that holds Tom back.

“Isn’t electricity a mysterious thing? Wasn’t it Ben 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!”

Amanda lives in a fantasy world, preferring to fill her bleak present with the memories of her youth. She yearns for times that were simpler for her, when her charisma and beauty were enough. When the lights go out, Amanda attempts to charm her way around the fact that the lights were shut off for non-payment—information that betrays the very level of their poverty. Instead, she romanticizes the candles, dismissing the science of electricity as complicating her simple, romantic world.

“I might have known better than to trust him with it! There’s such a high price for negligence in this world!”

Amanda offers this dig at Tom pleasantly in the presence of Jim, but her sentiment is devastating. It demonstrates the delicate balance that determines the difference between happiness and despair. It is not good or bad deeds or intent that dictates how one lives. It is the tiny accidents, the negligence, that ruins lives. While negligence is often innocuous, and without malicious intent, it can lead to tragic disasters. Of course, Tom’s failure to pay the light bill is an act of willful negligence. He chose himself and his entry into the Merchant Marines over electricity for his family.

“Full steam–Knowledge–Zzzzzp! Money–Zzzzzzp!–Power! That’s the cycle democracy is built on!”

Jim, who has found himself disappointed in his life six years after high school, has bought into the idea of the American Dream. He places his faith in the promise that if he works hard and becomes educated, he can achieve money, power, and advancement in life. He presents democracy as a machine, which, when fed his youthful energy, enthusiasm, and hard work, will reliably produce a successful future. While the play does not follow up with Jim’s progress, his faith in the capitalist machine is naïve. He might potentially continue his upward momentum and achieve his goals. It is equally possible that any of an infinite number of obstacles will stop him in his tracks.

“It’s no tragedy, Freckles. Glass breaks so easily. No matter how careful you are. The traffic jars the shelves and things fall off them.”

Laura’s reassuring toward Jim after he breaks her glass figurine offers a glimpse into how self-confidence might manifest in Laura’s personality. She takes the liberty to give him a silly nickname. And while throughout the play, Laura has been as fragile and breakable as glass, her new attitude allows that fragile things like glass are meant to ultimately break. Considering Laura’s sensitive nature for the majority of the play, it seems likely that breaking a glass figurine, or breaking her heart, will simply shatter and kill her. But when Jim does break her heart, she takes a moment where she seems like she might faint, and then gathers her. Glass breaks easily, and it doesn’t need to be a tragedy.

“Go, then! Then go to the moon–you selfish dreamer!”

To Amanda, the moon is impossibly far away. For Tom to leave and travel the world or join the Merchant Marines, he might as well be headed to the moon. She calls him a selfish dreamer, and his dreams do require him to focus on himself and let his family go. Tom is a young man who dreams not so much of a better life but of a different life. He never claims to need money, only adventure and space to write poetry, but he cannot live this life if he is trapped by his family. He demonstrates his willingness to be selfish when he chooses not to pay the electric bill so that he can pay to join the Merchant Marines. If he were, as he expects, to be gone before the lights went out, he would be placing them in immediate and desperate need, without so much as a financial cushion.