The Glass Managerie Play Analysis

Tom Wingfield, a character in the play “The Glass Menagerie” was a brother, son and a friend. In this play, tom was a playwriter himself who spend his teenage life in St. Louis. His mother was unstable, and father was absent most of the times. This play was based on Tom’s memory in which he shares his experience of great depression. He was living with his mother and sister. This play overall represents hard times in which events objectify as the mind, most often twist the facts of events.

He introduces himself, then proceeds and narrate the play. Similarly, he has a double role in such way that at once a character whose recollection the play documents and on the other hand a character who acts with those recollections. One can say that it was a character who plays tension between the distorted memory of truth and objectively dramatic truth. This essay will analyze the character, Tom Wingfield, in the play “The Glass Menagerie.

Tom, unlike the other characters sometimes address the audience of the play directly for a more separate explanation along with the assessment that was happening there onstage (Popkin, 1960).  His one side of character likes to read literature, doing adventurous things, writing poetry as well as escaping his dreams. Likewise, the other character seems to be bounded inextricably from the world. He likes to read D.H Lawerence in result to which he not only follows the politics of Europe but in context to his intellectual life is hard to be discussed.

The job he was doing at the shoe factory was like a dream to him to which he believes unreal, and after some time he would get over with. He tries to escape such life by watching movies, drinking alcohol and literature out of which some of these actions might seems to be disrespectful. Although he does not like his job he was punctual, dedicated as well as shows sense of responsibility towards his work. Most often he goes to movies to escape his arguments form Amanda (Crandell, 1998).

Tom do like watching movies because he thought that he was just like characters inside the Hollywood movies and he has all the adventures for everybody in America because they are were sitting around in their rooms and watching these movies with far fewer experiences.

There was a scene in which Tom starts a sarcastic conversation with Laura by shedding light on his feelings by using words like crumpled, suffocating, coffin-like situations in which he was confined. He quoted, “There is a trick that would come in handy for me—get me out of this two-by-four situation!” (Williams & Kushner, 2011). He also missed his father and believed that he was just like him. He supposed that just like a magician he pull himself out of the things to escape such problems and his father uses the similar technique in the earlier time.

Tom always alludes himself to failure to provide necessities to his family. In particular, scene, when the electricity cuts, Laura and Amanda start customizing the absence of Tom. He was angry and thought of fire escape of the apartment as the name implies to escape from fire, he thought. Similarly, this fire escape is my way of getting escape from this dysfunction rage and frustration in the Wingfield household. So he let himself out from the fire escape and starts smoking.

In the end, one might conclude that although he was a depressing character throughout the time, later on, he realizes that Amanda and Laura give meaning and sustenance to his life. Since he was such a complicated personality, so it is hard to point him in the direction of dynamic or static manner. This play describes many ways by which Tom tries to escape his surrounding difficulties along with a personal memory to manipulate the past. Similarly, is a memory play, it was faintly lighted, along with its nostalgic; it is not reasonable which demonstrates that it is unavoidable for inclination contemplations that cloud the natural occurrences that happened in the memory.
References

Crandell, G. W. (1998). The Cinematic Eye in Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie. Tennessee Williams Annual Review, 1, 1–11.

Popkin, H. (1960). The Plays of Tennessee Williams. The Tulane Drama Review, 4(3), 45–64.

Williams, T., & Kushner, T. (2011). The glass menagerie. New Directions Publishing.