THE GLASS MENAGERIE: Examining How An Individual's Personal Identity and Dreams are Cultivated

People will often choose avocations that help them identify their perceived place in the world, influence how they cope with it, or even reflect an inner desire for an alternate lifestyle than the one they are living. Some enjoy leisurely pastimes, such as origami or knitting. Others may be drawn to more challenging activities, like sudoku. A particular high achiever may take up learning to fly an airplane, not with the intention of flying commercially, but for recreational purposes and even for the satisfaction of completing an elusive lifelong goal. In general aviation, it is not uncommon to meet physicians or engineers who have earned pilot’s licenses. These are people who consistently operate in high pressure settings and then will learn to fly an airplane, which requires sharp mental acuity and focus at all times. In Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie, there are statements and symbolic examples to be found that show how Tom, Amanda, and the enigmatic Laura could be living their lives vicariously through their hobbies or intense personal interests.

To begin with, there’s Tom, who frequently goes to the movies to stay removed from a world of reality that his family was "somehow set apart from” (121). Tom works daily at a warehouse in order to be the primary provider for the Wingfield apartment in this “dissolving economy” (121). However, he craves travel and adventure, which he does not “have much of at work” (136). He goes to the movies often to escape his dreary reality but becomes restless when he considers “those glamorous people - having adventures - hogging it all” (149). He makes a proclamation that he is “tired of the movies”, and is “about to move”, which he proves when he pulls out a paper showing his membership as part of “The Union of Merchant Seamen” (150).

Amanda’s primary interest is to dominate and control her children so that she can vicariously live the life she felt she was cheated out of when her husband, Tom and Laura’s father, abandoned their family. She desperately worries that Tom will “jeopardize the security” of them all, if he were to lose his job (131). She obsesses about Laura either finishing business school or getting married so that neither of them will become “little birdlike women without any nest - eating the crust of humility all their life” (127).

Lastly, Laura’s preoccupation is her glass menagerie, a very passive hobby, which she polishes and when faced with uncomfortable facts of reality, will reach “for a piece of glass” (128). Perhaps Laura sees herself as part of a menagerie in this city community that is described as “one of those vast hive-like conglomerations” in one of the “overcrowded centers of lower middle-class population” (120). She is comfortable with animals and the “art museum and the bird houses” and pretty things, like the “glass house where they raise the tropical flowers” (127). She hides from reality behind glass, which is fragile and delicately pretty, very reflective of her own existence. Interestingly, her favorite animal in the collection is a unicorn, a creature that in mythical folklore is considered to be symbolic of purity, grace and love, characteristics that Laura herself possesses and desires to have. She likely sees herself as a unicorn in a “world full of common people”, as her love interest Jim puts it, or perhaps she even imagines Jim as the elusive unicorn who will be drawn to her purity and become her true love (159). When Jim dances with her and bumps into the menagerie, causing the horn to break off of the unicorn, Laura comforts herself by the idea that the unicorn “will feel more at home with the other horses, the ones that don’t have horns” (162). The horn breaking off is symbolic also of Laura’s impending loss of innocence and hope, similar to a unicorn being trapped by a dishonest virgin in order to lure it in for hunters who want it for its horn.

Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie is rich with examples and symbolism of how Laura, Amanda and Tom used their hobbies and pastimes as means of escape from reality and as extensions of the dreams they have of the life they want and of how they wish to be perceived by the world around them.

Works Cited

Williams, Tennessee. “The Glass Menagerie.” Literature: Reading to write. Ed. Elizabeth Howells. New York: Pearson, 2010. 117. Print.