Write an essay of explication on the drama `THE GLASS MENAGERIE` by TENNESSEE WILLIAMS.

Explication on the drama `The Glass Menagerie

by Tennessee Williams

2005

The nature of memory , and how it works , has been one of the abiding subjects and structuring devices of twentieth-century literature . As a deeply autobiographical memory ' play that is confessional in nature The Glass Menagerie belongs in that tradition . How much of the past which no longer exists except in one 's lasting impressions of it , can be recovered ? Tennessee Williams considers this question in his play

The play is built upon the plot of illusion and frustration in the

lives of little people . It opens with grinning photograph of the father , who left family , on the background . This scenery contains the central motif of The Glass Menagerie : escape - from a too-possessive love from responsibility (personal , familial , and social from reality from time and even from an indifferent universe

The means which Williams has used to give form to this vision are symbolic rather than literal . His play about the man who came to dinner and failed to satisfy the expectations of two neurotic women depends not so much upon plot or characterization as upon an ulterior allusion , the range of secondary associations which , instead of being in the foreground of dramatic action , serve as a background of ironic interpretation of this play . So escape is not literally spatial it may be into interiority : the world of illusion or art

Williams titles his play after a physical object that carries heavy symbolic loading . The collection of miniature animals symbolizes the fragility of family , and , most particularly , Laura 's fragility . On the other hand Laura 's private world of the miniature animals connects with a retreat from reality which appears to be imperfect . The play contains another occurrence of symbolic meaning of glass as it appears literally in the wall mirror and metaphorically in the father 's photograph that becomes a mirror ' for Tom in to suggest the way in which to break glass is to repudiate the self-image that mirrors are designed to sustain . Williams is almost too insistent on the parallel between Laura and her Menagerie , between the glass unicorn 's losing its horn and Jim 's impotence when he tries to bring Laura into the real world . The glass and miniature animals are the eloquent but not the only symbols in The Glass Menagerie

The structure of the play helped Williams to move away from realistic drama and dependence upon only the literal significance of word or action . His development of The Glass Menagerie as a memory play organized around Tom 's remembrances of things past , gave Williams the freedom to develop the form of play . Lighting , music , and the device of the narrator who is both a commentator on and a part of the series of pictures which he presents in his search for the meaning of the past all contribute to the play 's fluidity , a quality and metaphor which is as central to Williams 's art

Works Cited List

Williams , Tennessee , The Glass...