The Glass Menagerie Research Paper

The Glass Menagerie Response

When reality becomes so bad that illusion is your only form of escape should be the real title of this play. This play by Tennessee Williams takes an interesting spin on genres of plays and uses this peculiar form of “memory play”. In this style of play, the narrator is basically telling us the story through his memories and also giving us background information on those memories. This play does an excellent job of portraying how when a person is ultimately dissatisfied with reality and can no longer take it, they tend to go off into a world of illusions that allows them to feel what they can’t feel in the real world. The play starts off with Tom, who is the narrator of the play and also part of the story,
However, it’s quite understandable why she keeps to herself. She had a childhood illness that left one of her legs crippled making it look shorter than the other. One can see how this might cause Laura to withhold from activities such as socializing or even going to college, for the fear that her leg might cause unwanted attention such as taunting or bullying. It’s Laura’s world of illusion that actually gives the name of the play, The Glass Menagerie, her world consists of little glass figurines of mystical creatures and regular animals. She kind of plays pretend with them and takes care of them very well because they are very fragile. Through the Menagerie, Tennessee uses this as a metaphor for how Laura’s character is, she’s very sensitive and fragile both emotionally and physically, which is shown through her various encounters with many childhood illnesses, and her nervous breakdown in her typing class. However, when Tom invites his old friend Jim O’Conner (who Tom tells us in the beginning of the play is the most realist) from high school for dinner one day, she realizes it’s her old crush. Yet, she doesn’t get queasy like she did with all her other social encounters. In the beginning she did, but when she gets to know him and talks to him, we find Laura starts to let go of her glass world and gets a taste of the real world in which she feels emotions such as happiness and love. Which can be seen in the scene when they break the unicorn by dancing and Laura states that it can finally be normal like all the regular horses, which can be interpreted as a metaphor for her. However, she finds that this world of reality can also be harsh, all in the same day when Jim tells her that he’s actually seeing someone and that he really loves her, and that there kiss (Laura and Jim’s) was a mistake. At this point her world is broken into a million