The Glass Menagerie

1
The Glass Menagerie

• Memory, Dream and Family Relations
• General Introduction Scenes I-II

2
Outline

• Tennessee Williams, Historical and Social
  Background
• Starting Questions
• Act I

3
The Glass Menagerie Themes,

• Plot Tom recollects the family past, when the
  mother tries to get a gentleman caller to visit
  his sister, Laura (crippled and withdrawn). (See
  p. 1440)
• A Memory Play, uses a lot of screen devices to
  suggest the working of Toms mind.
• Issues
• Self-Deception, Illusion, Dream vs. Reality
• Agricultural and Aristocratic Old South vs.
  Industrial Society
• Womens Position in a Modern City

4
The Glass Menagerie Background and Setting

• Setting
• Present a cramped apartment in a lower-class
  part of St. Louis in the year 1937, the time of
  Depression.
• Amandas Past The Old South Plantation (where
  belles are courted by beaux and served by
  darkies)

5
Tennessee Williams (1914-83)

• His Plays Expressionist in style (e.g. A
  Streetcar Named Desire ) use of symbols and
  symbolic setting
• Common Themes the degradation of the Old South,
  modern life in an industrial city, sympathy for
  and criticism of the Southern tradition.
• Similarities between GM and Williamss Life
• Williams' father, a traveling salesman, was
  transferred to the home office in St. Louis
• Williams also work in a shoe factory before going
  to a university and starting to write
• Mother -- lives in the old glory of Southern
  belle
• Sister suffers from mental problems
• Differences
• The father does not leave them behind.
• William takes care of his sister off and on
• There are two brothers the family situation is
  not that bad.

6
General Questions

• Nobody, not even the rain, has such small
  hands. e. e. cummings Whose small hands?
  Of women? Of fate?
• Womens Positions The long traditions
• Courting the ladies
• Angel in the House vs. Men on the road
• Are no longer prevalent today. How are we to
  understand and sympathize with women who are
  constrained in such traditions?
• To what extent is our dream a motivating force,
  but not a means of self-deception or constraint
  on the others?

7
Scenes 1-2 The Winfield Family

• Dream and Frustration in St. Louis

8
Characters Contrast between Amanda and Laura,
Jim and the Rest

• The List of Characters the playwrights
  interpretation of the characters. Are there any
  common points among (some of) them?
• How are Amanda and Laura set in contrast with
  each other?

9
Amanda Lives Actively in the Past

• Description of Amanda filled with paradoxes (e.g.
  not paranoiac, but in paranoia)
• Her Manners Gestures
• the way she is dressed (scene 2 p. 1445),
• the elegiac voice, or martyr look she takes on
  (1445)
• Talkative (her talk about food -- 'Honey, don't
  push with your fingers ... And chew -- chew!')
• Active No, sister, no, sister - you be the lady
  this time and I'll be the darky (1443)

10
Amanda vs. Laura

• Amanda
• Lives in the past of being pursued by a lot of
  gentlemen (e.g. pp. 1443-44)
• ? Laura 1) clerical work 2) her insistence that
  there must be a flood of gentlemen callers to
  visit her daughter

• Laura
• Delicate and fragile (e.g Scene 2.
• Does not share the mothers dream of having
  gentlemen callers (Not expecting gentlemen
  callers.)
• ? Both Live in their glass menageries.
• ? sympathetic to both her mother and her brother.
  (pp. 1443, 44, cried for her brother.)

11
Lauras first fiasco

• What do you think about Lauras responses? And
  the mothers response?
• Would you chicken out like Laura? (p. 1446)
• Would you escape to the zoo, the movies,
  jewel-box with tropical flowers, roaming around
  all day? (1446-1447)
• Do you agree that, without a business career,
  women can only be dependent, as a spinster or as
  a wife? (1447) And that a spinster has to eat
  the crust of humility all their life?

12
Amanda vs. Husband and Tom

• Contradictory
• Her views that the husband has charms and that
  her daughter should get married
• Offensive
• Her criticism of Tom and insistence on Southern
  aristocratic manners

• Father He is gallantly smiling, ineluctably
  smiling, as if to say 'I will be smiling
  forever'. (1441)
• Falls in loe with long distances skip the light
  fantastic dance out of town (ref)
• Tom A self-conscious artist dressed as a
  merchant sailor
• Both fall in love with distance.
• Cannot stand his mother, but tolerates her.
  (1443)

13
Symbolic Setting

• Setting suggests the difficulties of the general
  situation.
• A this largest and fundamentally enslaved
  section of American society to avoid fluidity and
  differentiation and to exist and function as one
  interfused mass of automatism. (1440)? an
  impoverished and stagnant area in an
  industrialized modern city.
• Tom In Spain there was Guernica Nazi German
  bombing. Here there were disturbances of labour,
  sometimes pretty violent, in otherwise peaceful
  cities such as Chicago, Cleveland, Saint Louis. .
  . (1441)
• the fire-escape dark alleys family as a
  constraint, but no way out.

14
Memory Play

• Memory How does the play present the stage as
  if it were part of Toms memory? (e.g. the use
  of lighting, the transparent wall, etc.)
• signs of Toms being an author
• e.g. where he directs the music and lighting p.
  1443 Tom motions for music and a spot of light
  on AMANDA. Her eyes lift, her face glows, her
  voice becomes rich and elegiac,
• on p. 1448, Tom motions to the fiddle in the
  wings.
• Screen device stage directions giving images
  and legends
• e.g. "Où sont les Neiges d'antan" (scene i)
• "Blue Roses" (??? scene ii--1447), and Image
  Screen" (1448)).

15
Notes

• Ou sont les neiges . . . is the title of a poem
  in praise of beautiful women by the
  fifteenth-century French poet François Villon
  (the poem)

16

• Williams own explanation is that "The legend or
  image upon the screen will strengthen the effect
  of what is merely allusion sic in the writing
  and allow the primary point to be made more
  simply and lightly than if the entire
  responsibility were on the spoken lines" (New
  Directions edition, 1949, p. x). Do you agree?
  Later in the Acting version he dropped this
  device, depending more on the actors
  performances and the audiences imagination.
  Which choice do you like better?