Synopsis

The Glass Menagerie Synopsis

A General Synopsis: The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams is an autobiographical "memory play," , anchored by the aging southern belle Amanda Wingfield, who hopes for her son Tom to fulfill her dreams of finding the perfect “gentleman caller” for her shy and damaged daughter Laura.

Playwright Background Information

Playwright Tennessee Williams was born on March 26, 1911, in Columbus, Mississippi. After college, he moved to New Orleans, a city that would inspire much of his writing. On March 31, 1945, his play, The Glass Menagerie, debuted on Broadway. Williams described his childhood in Mississippi as pleasant and happy, but life changed for him when his family moved to St. Louis, Missouri. His new urban home forced him to leave his carefree boyhood, and as a result Williams turned inward and started to write. His parent’s marriage was often strained and his home, at times, was a tense place to live. This situation, however, did offer fuel for the playwright's art. His mother became the model for the foolish but strong Amanda Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie.

Primary characters:

• Amanda - The mother of the family, a southern belle with a bubbly personality. Amanda is paranoid and often lives in her past.
• Tom - Son of Amanda and narrator of the piece. Tom craves “adventure,” and goes to the movies every night. He wants to run away because he is fed up with his family’s oppressive dependence on him
• Laura - Daughter of Amanda. She has one leg shorter than the other (disability) and is painfully shy. She dropped out of high school and business college and is obsessive about playing her “victrola” and with her glass collection.
• Jim - The “gentleman caller” set up by Tom for Laura. A high school hero who is ambitious. However, he turns out to be engaged to “Betty.”
• The Father: Never actually appears, but is talked about. His portrait hangs in the apartment and he left the family years ago because he “fell in love with long distances”.

Setting

• The family currently lives in a cramped apartment in a lower-class part of St. Louis in the years 1930s, the time of Depression. Tom, from an indefinite point in the future, remembers the winter and spring of 1937.
• Fire Escape: Used as a way of escaping life in the apartment.

Key Plot Moments.

• Family resides in St. Louis with Tom working at a warehouse and Amanda, who never states where she works, involved in different organizations and activities such as DAR. Laura, who secretly dropped out of school, helps her mother around  the house and plays with glass figurines.
• Amanda confronts Tom about him being too much like his father. She confesses she is worried about him, while Tom states that he is out late at night at the movies because he craves adventure. Amanda then pleads Tom to find Laura a “gentleman caller” or future husband.
• Tom brings a “gentleman caller” named Jim for dinner one night. Jim went to high school with Laura and was her secret crush.
• Jim and Laura dance after dinner in the living room, but breaks Laura’s glass unicorn horn that was part of her figurine collection. Jim confesses to Laura that he is engaged, abruptly gets up and leaves.
• Amanda blames Tom for bringing Jim over to dinner despite Tom not knowing Jim was engaged. Tom becomes very upset and reaches his breaking point. He packs up his stuff and leaves the house to end the play.

Key Quotes

• "I'm going to the movies" - Tom (7.135)
• "Blow out your candles Laura - and so goodbye..." (7.137)
• “Poor little fellow, he must feel sort of lonesome.” (7.122)
• “Well, if he does, he doesn’t complain about it. He stays on a shelf with some horses that don’t have horns and all of them seem to get along nicely together.” (7.122)

Symbols/Motifs

• Abandonment; the words and images on the screen; music. Picture of the father.
• Laura’s Glass Menagerie-Laura’s collection of glass animal figurines represents her personality. Like the glass figures Laura is delicate, fanciful, and somehow old-fashioned.The menagerie also represents the imaginative world to which Laura devotes herself—a world that is colorful and enticing but based on fragile illusions.
• The Glass Unicorn-represents Laura’s peculiarity. The fate of the unicon’s fate foreshadows Laura’s fate in Scene Seven. Laura cannot become normal without somehow shattering.
• “Blue Roses”- Jim’s high school nickname for Laura, symbolizes Laura’s unusualness yet allure. Associated with Laura’s attraction to Jim and the memory of their unusual acquaintan. Also, recalls Tennessee Williams’s sister, Rose, on whom the character of Laura is based.
• The Fire Escape- an escape from the frustration and dysfunction in the Wingfield household. Laura slips on the fire escape in Scene Four which highlights her inability to escape from her situation. Tom, on the other hand, frequently steps out,foreshadowing his eventual getaway.

Themes

• The difficulty of accepting reality
• The impossibility of true escape
• The unrelenting power of memory

Stylistic Devices

• Williams found realism to be a flat, outdated, and insufficient way of approaching emotional experience.
• The Glass Menagerie is fundamentally a non realistic play.
• Distortion, illusion, dream, symbol, and myth are the tools by which the action onstage is unraveled.
• A screen displays words and images relevant to the action for example “[Screen Image: Blue Roses.]” (2.44)
• Music intrudes with melodramatic timing
• The lights rise or dim according to the mood onstage, not the time of day
• The play’s style is expressionistic—underlying meaning is emphasized at the expense of realism.
• The play’s lack of stylistic realism—Tom’s memory, yet it still has some elements of reality to make it relatable.
• Emotions like Tom’s boredom, Amanda’s nostalgia,Laura’s terror, the tension between Tom and Amanda and the quiet love between Tom and Laura are conveyed realistically.
• Similarly, the lower-middle-class life of the Wingfield family is portrayed with a great deal of truth to historical and social realities.