Transcript The Glass Menagerie

Memory, Dream and Family Relations
General Introduction & Scenes I-II
Outline
Tennessee Williams, Historical and
Social Background
 Starting Questions
 Act I

The Glass Menagerie: Themes,
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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his sister, Laura (crippled and withdrawn).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 Tom’s mind.
Issues:
 Self-Deception, Illusion, Dream vs. Reality;
 Agricultural and Aristocratic Old South vs. Industrial
Society
 Women’s Position in a Modern City
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.
 Amanda’s Past: The Old South Plantation
(where belles are courted by beaux and
served by “darkies”)
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 Williams’s 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.
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General Questions
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“Nobody, not even the rain, has such small
hands.” ~ e. e. cummings – Whose small
hands? Of women? Of fate?
Women’s 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?
Scenes 1-2: The Winfield Family
Dream and Frustration in St. Louis
Characters: Contrast between
Amanda and Laura, Jim and the Rest
The List of Characters = the
playwright’s interpretation of the
characters. Are there any common
points among (some of) them?
 How are Amanda and Laura set in
contrast with each other?

Amanda –Lives “Actively” in the
Past
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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)
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
mother’s 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.)
Laura’s “first fiasco”
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What do you think about Laura’s responses?
And the mother’s response?
Would you chicken out like Laura? (p. 1446)
Would you escape to the zoo, the movies, jewelbox 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”?
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
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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)
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.
Memory Play

Memory – How does the play present the stage as if it
were part of Tom’s memory?
(e.g. the use of lighting, the transparent wall, etc.)
signs of Tom’s 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" (胸膜炎 scene ii--1447), and “Image:
Screen" (1448)).

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)

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 audience’s imagination.
Which choice do you like better?