The Glass Menagerie — themes, the memory play form, and the Wingfield family

Tennessee Williams · 1944

Tennessee Williams's The Glass Menagerie (1944) is the play that established him as a major American dramatist. It is also his most personal — a "memory play," as Williams called it, based directly on his own family. The play opened in Chicago in December 1944, moved to Broadway in March 1945, and won the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award. Williams was thirty-four. The play introduced both the "plastic theatre" he would refine in A Streetcar Named Desire and the family-trauma material he would return to throughout his career.

The memory-play form

Williams calls the play a "memory play" in its opening stage directions. Tom Wingfield, the narrator, addresses the audience directly and announces the convention:

The play is memory. Being a memory play, it is dimly lighted, it is sentimental, it is not realistic. In memory everything seems to happen to music.

The convention does several things at once:

Tom is both inside the play (as a character in the family scenes) and outside it (as the narrator who frames them).
The play's events can be subjective — Tom is remembering them, possibly inaccurately, with the partiality of grief and guilt.
The staging can use lighting, music, and projected images more freely than a strict realist convention would permit. Williams's "plastic theatre" is explicitly authorised by the memory-play frame.
The play's emotional register is openly tinged by regret and longing in ways realist drama would struggle to justify.

The Wingfield family

The play has four characters:

Amanda Wingfield — the mother, a faded Southern belle who once received "seventeen gentleman callers" in one Sunday afternoon and now lives in a St. Louis tenement, working at a department store after the father abandoned the family. Her relationship to her own past is the play's deepest psychological subject.
Tom Wingfield — the son, a poet who works in a shoe warehouse to support the family. He narrates the play from the future, after he has done what his father did: abandoned them.
Laura Wingfield — the daughter, shy to the point of paralysis. Slightly disabled (a childhood illness left her with one leg shorter than the other). She collects little glass animals. She has dropped out of business school because she could not cope with the social pressure.
Jim O'Connor — the "gentleman caller," a coworker of Tom's whom Tom brings home for dinner at Amanda's insistence. The play's only character from outside the family.

The unicorn as symbol

The play's central symbol is one of Laura's glass animals — a small unicorn she shows Jim during their conversation in Scene 7. The unicorn is, she tells him, her favourite. It is unique among horses because of its horn.

During the conversation, Jim accidentally knocks the unicorn off the table; the horn breaks. The unicorn has become an ordinary horse. Laura's reaction — surprisingly calm — has been read as her recognising that the unicorn is now less unusual, more able to fit in. The breaking is ambiguous: damage or liberation. The symbol is doing characteristic Williams work — the small physical object carrying the emotional weight of the scene.

After Jim has revealed that he is already engaged and leaves, Laura quietly gives him the broken unicorn as a "souvenir." The gesture is the play's most heartbreaking moment. Laura is giving away the symbol of her own uniqueness, broken.

Tom as narrator and traitor

The play's framing device — Tom narrating from the future, after he has abandoned his mother and sister — gives the play its peculiar register. Tom's affection for Laura and his guilt about leaving her are the emotional substance of every narrating moment. The final speech is among the most quoted in twentieth-century American drama:

I didn't go to the moon, I went much further — for time is the longest distance between two places. … Oh, Laura, Laura, I tried to leave you behind me, but I am more faithful than I intended to be!

The speech makes explicit what the play has been performing throughout: Tom's narration is the form his guilt takes. The play exists because he cannot leave his sister behind even after he has physically left her.

Amanda and the lost South

Amanda is the first of Williams's great portraits of the displaced Southern woman. Her register — the floridity of her speech, her romantic memories of Blue Mountain and the gentleman callers, her insistence on her daughter's marriage prospects — is the South of legend transplanted into a St. Louis tenement, where it cannot survive. Like Blanche DuBois in Streetcar, Amanda is a woman whose conceptual universe no longer matches her economic reality.

The play does not present Amanda only sympathetically. Her demands on her children — her constant pressure on Laura to overcome her shyness, her constant demands on Tom to provide — are part of what is making the family unhappy. Williams gives her both the pathos of her displaced position and the weight of her demanding character.

The play's autobiographical core

The Wingfields are the Williamses. Tennessee Williams's mother Edwina was Amanda; Tennessee's older sister Rose was Laura; Tennessee himself was Tom. The "Mr. Wingfield" who abandoned the family was modelled on Cornelius Williams, who was actually still present in Tennessee's life but who the family largely could not bear.

The most painful autobiographical element: Rose Williams was lobotomised in 1943, the year Tennessee was working on the play. The play's gentleness toward Laura, its insistence on her preciousness, its grief over what happens to her, are Williams's working-out of his guilt about his sister, whom he had been unable to protect. The play's protective sentimentality is not random; it is targeted at a real person.

The plastic theatre devices

Williams uses lighting and music as expressive elements:

Music — "The Glass Menagerie" theme that recurs around Laura, like an aural leitmotif.
Lighting — soft, dim, often foregrounded. Williams asks for specific colours and effects rather than naturalistic light.
Projections — Williams's original script called for projected captions and images on a screen during scenes. Most productions omit these, but Williams considered them part of the design.

The plastic theatre is doing what realist staging cannot: making the play's memorial register continuously perceptible.

Themes worth tracking

Memory as form of love. Tom's narration is the form his abandonment-guilt takes. The play argues that to remember is to love, even when one could not stay.
The fragility of the protected. Laura's glass animals are the play's image of what cannot survive contact with the world.
Displacement. Each Wingfield is displaced — Amanda from her Southern past, Tom from his poetic vocation, Laura from any possible social role.
Escape and its costs. Tom's eventual escape is the play's tragic decision. He gets away; he carries them with him forever.

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